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Dangerous Company: Management Consultants and the Businesses They Save and Ruin
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Product Description
Behind nearly every corporate merger and every downsizing or “re-engineering” effort of the last decade lurked a highly paid management consultant. Consultants promise results, but what kind of practices do they employ to achieve them? Written by two award-winning journalists, Dangerous Company tells the harrowing tale of a Fortune 500 company that spent $75 million on consulting contracts, only to see sales plummet from $1.3 billion to $319 million; explains how AT&T could spend half a billion dollars in consulting fees without any sign of progress; and exposes a consultant who provided government officials with information that helped send a former client to jail. You’ll learn how Sears got turned around thanks to CEO Arthur Martinez’s sophisticated and limited use of consultants, and how small, highly focused consulting firms are providing cost-effective, targeted advice and mounting a challenge to their larger competitors. Both a serious practical guide for any corporate citizen and a cautionary tale as exciting as a corporate thriller, Dangerous Company is certain to make the reader ask the critical question: What is the true price of advice, and who pays?Amazon.com Review
As the millennium approaches, management consultants have become ubiquitous–and extremely powerful. Often using secretive methods and usually drawing huge fees, they regularly make decisions that might affect thousands of people and cost billions of dollars. But are they ultimately worth the upheaval they can cause? In the first detailed examination of this incredibly influential industry, Dangerous Company: The Inside Story of the Great Consulting Companies, journalists James O’Shea and Charles Madigan offer a cautionary tale.Dangerous Company: Management Consultants and the Businesses They Save and Ruin
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December 11, 2009 am31 1:12 pm
A must read for those intending to become a Management Consultant and those who want to hire them.
Rating: 5 / 5
December 11, 2009 am31 3:51 pm
James O’Shea and Charles Madigan have written an exceptionally informative text. Not only is it packed with well researched material, it is very exciting to read as well.
This book contains material that should be regarded as essential reading for all serious-minded professional managers. It is the ultimate thinking manager’s book, filled with compelling case evidence of managerial indecision (and how to avoid it). It is without a doubt, probably the best business book to be published between 1980 and 1999.
Rating: 5 / 5
December 11, 2009 am31 6:00 pm
The book is written in such perjorative language that the authors bias is clear from the start. They hold consultants responsible for all of the “bad” that has ever happened in corporate America for the last 50 years, but none of the good.
This is clearly an Outsiders view through a very warped window of the profession, coloured by the opinions of some disgruntled clients who have sued their consultants. Hardly balanced, investigative reporting.
Rating: 1 / 5
December 11, 2009 am31 6:02 pm
O’Shea and Madigan have tried to take a few “war stories”, court documents, and interviews with consulting PR-types to generalize about how clients should deal with consultants. It’s a 50,000 foot view that may be interesting to someone who’s never heard the word “consulting” before. Revealingly, in their litany of consulting horror stories, they somehow missed the biggest consulting disaster of the century: IBM at the FAA. Worse, their simplistic advice for clients considering consulting help is misleading and more dangerous than the company of consultants. Consider: “If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it.” Goodbye competitive advantage! “Insist on tailor-made consulting engagements.” Hello high cost and uncertainty! If you are looking for an “insider” view of big-time consulting, this is not it. Hopefully, we’ll someday get a definitive analysis of the multi-billion dollar consulting industry, but it probabaly won’t be written by a couple of newspaper guys
Rating: 1 / 5
December 11, 2009 am31 6:15 pm
As an insider for one of the firms highlighted in the book, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the authors spin their stories to provide the highest possible shock value. Of course selling more books is their goal. Unfortunately, presenting a fair and balanced report often falls short of that goal…so just leave out the contradictory evidence and go to press. In all my years in the industry, I have never seen consultants independently “destroy” a company. However, I have seen many, many poor business decisions that were made by corporate management and blamed on others.
Rating: 2 / 5