Beware Management Consultants
about.iceland.co.uk197 points by KolmogorovComp 2 hours ago
197 points by KolmogorovComp 2 hours ago
Not gonna lie, the website of a remarkably ordinary frozen food supermarket found on most UK high streets is not where I'd expect to find this kind of content :)
Never thought I'd see them posted on here, but I honestly have a lot more respect for them after seeing this.
I wish I new of more gems like this. Company sites that go into detail where they went wrong and how they turned things around make for both amazing reading and great educational material.
and here I thought it was from the Nation of Iceland and was very impressed by the volume of their anti-management consultant stance.
The entire section of the website about 'The Dark Ages' is priceless. They don't pull any punches: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/
Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
I smirk and laugh this little slideshow and then remember that my own work involves internal tools to promote governance and productivity while formalizing requirements to two outsourced developers.
I don't think I'm one of the red team's 7 captains, but I don't exactly have my hands on the paddle every single day. After all, I can find the time to lollygag on HN between 9-5.
I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...
I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.
Am I misreading something, or was it not in fact the corporate leaders who torpedoed the reorg suggestions they knew were coming, who were at fault?
This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.
My interpretation of the parable is really just that management consultants are paid to tell you what you already know and give you the conclusions you want to hear - hence why their "solution" is non-specific and the retrospective analysis vindicates what upper management already wanted.
It's also a criticism of management-heavy offices who have lost touch with reality, but consultants are a byword for such things, so I guess the title is succinct at the cost of accuracy.
"What would you say you do here?" - The Bobs
That's why mums go to Iceland.
Isn’t this the same company that had the trademark dispute with Iceland the country?
The antique illustrations on this are fantastic.
They’re a set of clip art provided with Microsoft PowerPoint called ‘Screen Beans’.
That last line: "...to demonstrate fiscal and HR dexterity for stockholders..."
I think I'm missing a _lot_ of context here. Obviously management consultants are sycophantic but why post this now?
Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.
Interestingly the "dark ages" subpage is not linked from the parent page: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/
someone saw this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350677
and thought it was interesting enough to submit on its own
I mean, the movie "Office space" could have taught you that lesson almost 30 years ago.
PE turning a beloved brand into a soulless skin suit exhibit no. 63631
Class
This is nice big fat fuck you to the mercenaries that come and destroy companies. Well done Iceland.
Thats a good point of view of the traditional Managment consultants, now for the "AI era", this type of interventions will not exist Maybe now the Big coorp will finally get closer to real life solutions to the problems companies face
I wish.
My company is "AI native" in the sense that even though we are not a tech company we are using it heavily to build a bunch of tech that makes us more efficient.
Think building better SaaS products around our actual process rather than whatever bespoke niche SaaS product provides. this has yielded real savings in both software costs and efficiency. Compared to our peers, we are light years ahead. Even the supposed "leading AI readiness consultants" hired by the group board agreed.
our board have still hired kpmg[1] or some other vague merchant to come and help us deliver "efficiencies"
[1] its not them, but I want to keep some level of mystique about where I work
I'm curious to know what they have been providing in suggestions up to now, can you tell us?
Maybe GMPK should do a protection racket of sorts. Pay us 1% of revenue and we wont send the consultants j/k
Nope. Everyone has their strengths and should avoid some types of work. AI doesn't change this.
Many consultants and entrepreneurs are too shameless to do that. AI only amplifies their dysfunction.
What most businesses are doing instead is squeezing their middle management to do more with less. No consultants. AI is cheaper. This squeeze happens every time the economy stagnates, and adding AI as "help" is irrelevant.