A detailed and disturbing look at the consulting industry and its negative impacts on companies and governments.
Two respected researchers draw back the curtain to probe the consulting industry, and what they find is worrying.
Mazzucato and Collington, academics connected to the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at the University College London, ask an interesting, important question: What is it that consultant firms are really selling? The answer seems to be confidence—the image that they know what they are doing, with a level of expertise and knowledge higher than that of the client. Or maybe it’s more of a “confidence trick,” a sleight of hand that provides huge profits for little actual assistance. The authors deeply examine the activities of the giant consulting companies, particularly McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, and the “Big Four” accounting firms. These corporations expanded massively in the 1980s and 1990s on the back of a neoliberal wave of privatization, outsourcing, and reorganization. While they present themselves as objective advisers, their proposals usually involve cuts to staff numbers and a focus on short-term gains. Mazzucato and Collington look at several cases where their advice turned out to be spectacularly, painfully wrong—although the consultants still walked away with fattened pockets. The authors point out that the expertise of consultants is often exaggerated and tends to be generalist rather than specialized. The use of consultants undercuts the development of intellectual capital within the client organization, resulting in problems that require more consultants to fix. In the concluding section, the authors give advice to anyone considering engaging consultants, such as first examining your own organization to see if the needed expertise is already available. Clear metrics to gauge success or failure should be incorporated into a contract, and research into the record of the consulting firm is invaluable. As the authors demonstrate, these are simple steps that could save a great deal of money, time and difficulty.
A detailed and disturbing look at the consulting industry and its negative impacts on companies and governments.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593492673
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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