The Big Con – Ignorance by PowerPoint

#nonfiction #books #hegemony

Ronald Reagan infamously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, but Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington would counter that what should really frighten you is: “I’m a consultant and I’m here to advise.” Mazzucato and Collington are the joint authors of The Big Con: How the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies, which as the title suggests is a full-on critique of the consulting industry and its malignant effects on society.

The Big Con builds on previously published research by Collington and Mazzucato, as well as Mazzucato’s earlier book The Entrepreneurial State. The central argument is as clear as it is intuitive: if you consistently rely on someone else to do something for you, you will not get any better at it yourself. Or as the wise sage Bruce Lee had it: “Growth requires involvement.” The increased use of consultancies creates, to borrow a favourite right-wing phrase, a ‘dependency culture’ among public sector organisations and businesses. And as with any dependency, your dealer usually has little interest in weaning you off what they sell.

Mazzucato and Collington present their argument in three parts across a concise 250 pages. The opening section sets the scene with a history of the consultancy sector and its evolution from roughly 1920 to the present day. With the context in place, The Big Con presents its core argument on how persistent and prevalent use of consultancies harms businesses and governments alike. The book closes on four recommendations for how both the public and private sector can wean themselves off their addiction to consultancy services and rebuild their own capacity and expertise.

In the first part, which corresponds roughly to the first half of the book, Mazzucato and Collington take us from the origins of consulting in optimising manufacturing processes via the birth of IT and computing to the current universal advisory and outsourcing services. It is a lot of history and variety to unpack, and hence this part occasionally feels like a string of disconnected facts and namechecks. While it gives a good sense of the gradual infiltration of consultancies into every facet of society and every layer of government, the detail is either excessive or could have been organised more coherently to enhance the overall effect. Even something as simple as a graph with global consultancy spend over time in inflation-corrected terms, pulling the evidence from different subsections together, would have made a big difference.

Once the history is established, The Big Con sets out the ways by which consultancies impair rather than strengthen the capabilities of their clients. Issues range from failure to actually impart knowledge on a sustained basis, consultancy value being difficult to measure, inability of clients to properly evaluate or control services they have outsourced, and systemic conflicts of interests. At the root of all these issues is a severe principal-agent problem, where consultancies have both strongly divergent interests from their clients and hold a significant information advantage over them. As Collington and Mazzucato show, consultancies are essentially parasites on the productive economy, and like all parasites must weaken their host organism, but not kill it.

Elaborating on the disease metaphor a bit, the question The Big Con implicitly elicits is whether consultancies are the cause of our predicament, or merely a symptom of it. The Big Con connects the rise of consultancies particularly with the neoliberal revolution, although it points out they do predate the 1970s. What is less clear is whether Collington and Mazzucato see consultancies as enabling factors, or merely opportunists. This is in part because both the history and analytical section lack strong aggregate data to ground the argument. There are facts and illustrative anecdotes in the narrative, and to a sympathetic reader these are not unconvincing, but they do not establish a coherent and compelling causality.

This matters, because whether consultancies mostly exploit weaknesses in an impaired system, or are in fact a key cause of those weaknesses, determines what a viable strategy to counter them would be. If consultancies are a symptom but not a cause, then our treatment plan should not focus primarily on them. This ambiguity surfaces in the solutions proposed by The Big Con, which include increasing the capability and learning potential of public institutions, leading to both reduced dependency on consultancies and increased control where they are used. Mazzucato and Collington also propose greater transparency about conflicts of interest and mandatory transfer of learning at the end of contracts.

The common theme connecting all this is, as Collington and Mazzucato set out themselves, “A new vision, remit and narrative for the civil service”. In other words, a reconfiguration of the role of the state in society. But as they themselves have noted throughout the book, the role of the state as a proactive force for good in society has been under sustained assault at least since Reagan’s one-liner about government, and overturning this would require an effort that feels disproportionate to the problem posed by consultancies, harmful though they may be.

All this put me in mind of Donella Meadows’ hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. Viewed through Meadows’ framework, consultancies act as positive feedback loops for the neoliberal project: they are both enabled by neoliberal reforms, and in turn further neoliberal policies. Unchecked, positive feedback loops can drive a system to radically new configurations or even destructive instability. Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is therefore a way for the system to remain more stable, and for other forces to exercise more control.

Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is the 7th most powerful intervention in Meadows’ hierarchy, but ‘changing the paradigm’ comes in at number 2. It is both more powerful, but also far more difficult to do. Altering the consensus on the role of the state in society is evidently a paradigm shift, and would undoubtedly change our use of consultancies. But undoing decades of neoliberal hegemony will also be extremely difficult to achieve.

In a way, The Big Con is thinking both too big and too small. Too big, because of the enormity of the political and ideological struggle required to make Mazzucato and Collington’s solutions possible. Too small, because if we did manage to radically reinvent the purpose of the state, we could do so much more than merely diminish our use of consultancies. Compared to ‘solving housing insecurity’ and ‘providing healthcare for all’, reducing our use of McKinsey feels like rather small fry. The more technical solutions that The Big Con suggests, such as moderately increasing state capacity or enforcing greater transparency, are more commensurate to the scale of the problem they are meant to address, though will be more difficult to attain while they go against the neoliberal grain. Nonetheless, they are a more realistic place to start, and the last chapter would have been stronger if it had considered how to implement them under the adversarial conditions imposed by neoliberal hegemony.

In fairness to The Big Con, it does not at any point suggest that consultancies somehow caused the neoliberal revolution, only that they were complicit in it and greatly benefited from it. But neither does it explicitly argue why, of all possible battles to pick to overturn neoliberal hegemony, consultancies should be a primary target. Referring back to Meadow’s leverage points, my own contention would be that reducing the impact of consultancies and their reinforcement of neoliberal dogma is a worthwhile battleground precisely because progress might be made without overturning the existing order of things first, rather than the the other way around as Mazzucato and Collington propose. The Big Con does after all provide ample evidence that consultancies fail to deliver even on their own terms, so reducing our dependency based on the merits of cutting costs and increasing state resilience in an increasingly uncertain world seems, if not straightforward, at least plausible.

To paraphrase Laotzu, being ignorant of your ignorance is a disease, and recognising your ignorance is the first step to being cured. The great service of The Big Con is to expose the harmful effects of the consultancy industry and the way it weakens state capacity. Although its tremendous reach in terms of the history and typology of consultancies comes with a resultant sacrifice of further depth, it convincingly conveys the pervasiveness of consultancies across governments and industries, as well as the unavoidable conflicts of interest that arise from their multifarious entanglements. The book should be required reading for public sector workers and business leaders alike. Having prepared the ground, Mazzucato and Collington could do worse than come out with a sequel: The Big Counter: How to kick out consultancies and learn to become self-reliant again. Such advice would be worth paying for.

Notes & Suggestions

______________________________

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic