Why bankers will always beat consultants
By far, the YouTube video I watched the most last year was the hilarious Wall Street showdown between bankers and consultants starring Amit Chatwani of Leveraged Sell-Out and produced by Portal A. Like most satires, it works because it has some truth to it: most overwhelmingly that bankers beat consultants, always. Always.
Banking and consulting are probably the two most common industries that MBAs enter upon graduation. However, people treat them quite differently. To get at the core of this argument, I’ll use an analogy. Bankers are like Barry Bonds and consultants are like Alex Rodriguez. Yes, that’s right, the $250 million player is a consultant. The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend about those players and we both agreed that we liked Bonds and can’t stand Rodriguez. And the reason is that Bonds is consistent. He won’t talk to the press, he’s not going to be nice to you, and he doesn’t apologize for it or try to mollify the fans or the press in any way. It’s his intense focus on being the best hitter in the game that drove him to spurn everyone else. The man needs to focus, damnit. He presents himself fully, he is who he is and if you don’t like that, well then, piss off.
Rodriguez, the heir to Bonds as the game’s greatest player, is the complete opposite. He wanted so desperately to be liked, to live up to his contract that he took performance enhancing drugs. And then again, he wanted so much to be liked that he scripted his apologies when a Sports Illustrated reporter found him out. Rodriguez is insincere. Bonds, while you may not like him, is entirely sincere and consistent. You think he’s a liar? That’s fine, he’ll go on being a liar.
And so, A-Rod is a consultant. He’s the guy who says that he’s going to do good, that he really wants to make businesses run better. That he wants to learn from the brightest. That he wants to help people.
Consultants know how many post offices there are in the United States. Or, rather, they know how to come up with the answer to the question, “How many post offices are there in the United States?” Well, there were three post offices in my hometown, which had a population of 80,000 people. That means there’s one post office for every 26,666 people in the country. There are 300 million people living in the United States. So, there are 11,250 post offices in the country. The only problem here is that the answer is wrong. Consultants know how to get wrong answers. That’s what they know.
And then what happens? You pay some McKinsey or BCG guy $250 million because you think he’s going to fix your business and bring in a championship, and he completely messes up your chemistry, leaves you out of the post season, and, oh yeah, did I mention that you’re paying him millions for this. For what? For some PowerPoint slides and Excel charts and some re-branding and re-organization and frameworks. But, you know, he really tried to help the team; he’s just not a member of it. Louis Menand recently called the management consultant “the personification of the sellout” in the New Yorker.
Bankers, on the other hand, have nothing to sell out. They make no pretenses about saving the world. Their whole business is about making money—there’s no way around that fact. They’ll go down with an economic crisis (or a steroid scandal). And they don’t try to hide it between superficial business speak because bankers are Barry Bonds.
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