Today's Wall Street Journal contains a book review about Matthew Stewart's new book, "The Management Myth." It's a hard-hitting indictment against the management consulting profession.
Stewart makes some very critical points about his tenure as a management consultant, one of which hits directly on my observations about internal silos in "The Integration Imperative." In particular, take a look at the following quote from the Wall Street Journal's book review:
"The consultant co-workers he describes are a collection of intelligent nut-jobs devoted to corporate in-fighting . . . he implies that their conduct is symptomatic of the profession."
It's the "corporate in-fighting" comment that caught my eye.
As an alumna of the management consulting profession, and a consultant to a broad spectrum of PSFs, I too observed the tendency toward cliquishness among firms' insiders. Stewart's book paints the world of management consulting firms quite negatively; I'm not willing to go that far.
But he and I would probably agree that there's too much internal jockeying and political competition with one's peers. And especially in private firms, with their "up or out" cultures, internal competition can create -- or exacerbate -- the internal functional silos that significantly impede the achievement of marketplace gains or value-delivery to the client.
Whether one agrees or not with Stewart's bigger point -- that the field of "management" needs a course-correction back to higher-minded principles -- it's definitely time for PSF executive managers to look at the structural and cultural silos within their professional service firms, and to reconfigure their processes, skills, and support functions toward the achievement of optimal outcomes for all.
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