The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by Mariana MazzucatoMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The book "The Big Con" by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington contains an interesting critique of the consulting industry for weakening companies, weakening the public sector and distorting economies. Although the book focuses on Britain, the issues also apply globally. The authors believe that politicians should strengthen the public sector, improve procurement and evaluation of outsourced services, and that consultants should report conflicts of interest.
The criticism in the book is directed at the fact that politicians have handed over too much responsibility to consultants, which has led to ineffective solutions and waste of tax money. The authors believe that the consulting firms, especially the big ones like Bain, BCG and McKinsey, as well as the big accounting firms EY, PwC, KPMG and Deloitte, often contribute to failure rather than creating value. Mazzucato and Collington recommend that some functions, especially those that are difficult to monitor, should be handled internally by the state. Otherwise, the boundary between public and private loosens up and it becomes more difficult to ensure quality and accountability.
The criticism from "The Big Con" has valid points, although it sometimes relies a little too much on anecdotes, and would have gained by more statistical insights. At the same time, it is difficult for the public sector to procure and not bring in stakeholders. It needs competence, often rather specialized, that would be unfeasible to keep in house. A dilemma for modern administration.
The older school of state enterprises and administration were not given such complex and changing tasks as today. It is precisely their attempt to obtain information, knowledge and implementation capacity that leads to the contemporary complex structure of procurement, grant systems and collaboration between the state, academia, large companies and the flora of NGOs, QUANGOs and GONGOs. A group of influential actors who move between different roles within the public and private sector may emerge from this, and that particularly in the wake of the "entrepreneurial state" advocated by Mariana Mazzucato herself. To be able to use consultants better on behalf of taxpayers, it seems that more transparency and less complex tasks are needed.
"The Big Con" asks some important questions for the future, and provides the reader with some interesting insights on the topic, but could have provided more depth.
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