This is a tell you haven't interfaced with consulting firms much before.
When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:
"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."
There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.
It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.
Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.
What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.
When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:
"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."
There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.
It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.
Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.
What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.