Beware Management Consultants

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KKolmogorovComp about 2 hours ago 23 commentsRead Article on about.iceland.co.uk

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

notahacker•about 2 hours ago

Not gonna lie, the website of a remarkably ordinary frozen food supermarket found on most UK high streets is not where I'd expect to find this kind of content :)

codeulike•34 minutes ago

Malcolm Walker, the founder and his son Richard Walker the current chairman are (for such an ordinary seeming supermarket) surprisingly progressive and have often spearheaded sustainability and corporate responsibility campaigns. Malcolm Walker was an active member of Greenpeace and Iceland worked with Greenpeace on several campaigns over the years.

timthorn•23 minutes ago

Richard Walker tried to become a Conservative MP, but when no constituency party selected him as their candidate defected to Labour, who put him in the House of Lords.

outofpaper•about 1 hour ago

I wish I new of more gems like this. Company sites that go into detail where they went wrong and how they turned things around make for both amazing reading and great educational material.

RobotToaster•about 1 hour ago

Never thought I'd see them posted on here, but I honestly have a lot more respect for them after seeing this.

zaphod12•about 2 hours ago

and here I thought it was from the Nation of Iceland and was very impressed by the volume of their anti-management consultant stance.

Taikhoom10•about 1 hour ago

I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...

I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.

smt88•6 minutes ago

Generalizations can be bad, yes. Everyone knows about management consultants ruining companies and governments, contributing to the opioid crisis, etc. But what else do they do?

Let’s crowdsource examples of management consultants delivering a huge amount of value to a company or society in a way that the company couldn’t have accomplished without them.

I’ll start:

hadrien01•about 2 hours ago

The entire section of the website about 'The Dark Ages' is priceless. They don't pull any punches: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/

afavour•about 1 hour ago

The operating profit chart too, oof:

https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-performance/

monocasa•17 minutes ago

At the possible expense of just linking every page of their dark ages saga, The Chief Executive's handbook is somehow even more mask off 'but really, just absolutely fuck that guy'.

https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/the-chie...

Like, it's the only page with the 'we're in the UK and I don't want to be sued for libel at the drop of a hat' disclaimer at the bottom.

chiph•about 1 hour ago

That's pretty shocking.

Taikhoom10•40 minutes ago

Yeah, except profits are down from the peak. I do not know enough about the market, but my suspicion is that they basically benefited by focusing on a specific market, "Focus," and will basically see this erode over time as more companies in the high end move into their market.

alexwebb2•7 minutes ago

I can't get that to load at all. Hug of death, maybe?

gadiyar•about 1 hour ago

Isn’t this the same company that had the trademark dispute with Iceland the country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_v_Iceland_Foods_Ltd

justeoghan•about 1 hour ago

This is a great read thank you.

arjie•about 2 hours ago

Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.

Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.

rwmj•36 minutes ago

Weird story ... Dr Bronner also appeared in the greatest unreleased movie ever made. With Bill Murray and Dan Ackyroyd and Liz Taylor's ex husband. And it was the only movie Dr Bronner appeared in according to imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0111462/

ang_cire•about 1 hour ago

Am I misreading something, or was it not in fact the corporate leaders who torpedoed the reorg suggestions they knew were coming, who were at fault?

This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.

ivanbakel•about 1 hour ago

My interpretation of the parable is really just that management consultants are paid to tell you what you already know and give you the conclusions you want to hear - hence why their "solution" is non-specific and the retrospective analysis vindicates what upper management already wanted.

It's also a criticism of management-heavy offices who have lost touch with reality, but consultants are a byword for such things, so I guess the title is succinct at the cost of accuracy.

bigmattystyles•about 1 hour ago

"What would you say you do here?" - The Bobs

sillywabbit•about 2 hours ago

The antique illustrations on this are fantastic.

cjs_ac•about 1 hour ago

They’re a set of clip art provided with Microsoft PowerPoint called ‘Screen Beans’.

unfunco•about 2 hours ago

That's why mums go to Iceland.

jldugger•about 2 hours ago

I think I'm missing a _lot_ of context here. Obviously management consultants are sycophantic but why post this now?

kristianc•about 1 hour ago

Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.

Doctor_Fegg•27 minutes ago

I worked for a public sector organisation around then that had the same chairman (not CEO) as Iceland, sorry, “the Big Food Group”. He was genuinely one of the most obnoxious, bullying people I’ve ever encountered - known internally as the Poison Dwarf. So none of this greatly surprises me.

mikepurvis•about 1 hour ago

Interestingly the "dark ages" subpage is not linked from the parent page: https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/

kristianc•43 minutes ago

Reading between the lines, you kind of get the picture...

2006 A spectacular turnaround sees a 10% sales decline turned into growth of 20% year-on-year by March 2006, making Iceland the UK’s fastest-growing food retailer.

2005 The Big Food Group is taken private and Iceland returned to the management of Malcolm Walker and other senior executives who had been ejected in 2001.

2004 The Big Food Group is nearing bankruptcy as provisions made in 2001 come close to exhaustion.

2002 Iceland-Booker is renamed The Big Food Group and launches a grandiose recovery plan (Click here to read the saga of ‘The one, two, three, four, five year recovery plan’) but customer numbers and sales remain in steady decline while costs escalate.

2001 New Iceland chief executive Bill Grimsey issues a massive profit warning, and Malcolm Walker and other senior managers are forced to leave the company

john_strinlai•about 1 hour ago

someone saw this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350677

and thought it was interesting enough to submit on its own

ferngodfather•about 2 hours ago

They saw it commented on another thread.

bmiekre•about 1 hour ago

Class

mkoubaa•about 2 hours ago

PE turning a beloved brand into a soulless skin suit exhibit no. 63631

sscaryterry•about 2 hours ago

This is nice big fat fuck you to the mercenaries that come and destroy companies. Well done Iceland.

dvaplima•about 2 hours ago

Thats a good point of view of the traditional Managment consultants, now for the "AI era", this type of interventions will not exist Maybe now the Big coorp will finally get closer to real life solutions to the problems companies face

KaiserPro•about 1 hour ago

I wish.

My company is "AI native" in the sense that even though we are not a tech company we are using it heavily to build a bunch of tech that makes us more efficient.

Think building better SaaS products around our actual process rather than whatever bespoke niche SaaS product provides. this has yielded real savings in both software costs and efficiency. Compared to our peers, we are light years ahead. Even the supposed "leading AI readiness consultants" hired by the group board agreed.

our board have still hired kpmg[1] or some other vague merchant to come and help us deliver "efficiencies"

[1] its not them, but I want to keep some level of mystique about where I work

hahahaa•about 1 hour ago

Maybe GMPK should do a protection racket of sorts. Pay us 1% of revenue and we wont send the consultants j/k

amarcheschi•about 1 hour ago

I'm curious to know what they have been providing in suggestions up to now, can you tell us?

sublinear•about 1 hour ago

Nope. Everyone has their strengths and should avoid some types of work. AI doesn't change this.

Many consultants and entrepreneurs are too shameless to do that. AI only amplifies their dysfunction.

What most businesses are doing instead is squeezing their middle management to do more with less. No consultants. AI is cheaper. This squeeze happens every time the economy stagnates, and adding AI as "help" is irrelevant.