Exactly. So I would modify your process outline (based on my own experience in a Fortune 100 company trying to actually excute the happy horse s*$t that consultants spew out) as follows:

1) find out what senior management wants to do
2) research the problem
3) figure out that two months is far too short a time to come up to speed on a complex subject
4) pump experienced company staff for knowledge
5) write a doorstop-sized report by repackaging staff knowledge
6) ignore the staff knowledge when making the recommendations so that the information in the body of the report says one thing to the creaful reader while the written recommendations actually correspond to #1 above (in rare instances the two agree, but not often)
7) don’t credit any of the internal sources used in the document
8) let the staff whose ideas they plagiarized implement the recommendations

Can you tell I really hate consultants? All you have to do to raise my blood pressure is mention the words “McKinsey” or “Boston Consuting Group”.

MERRIMACK, N.H. — To get a feel for why Mitt Romney took a drubbing in Iowa Thursday night, consider the reception he got from a little girl in the next battleground state, New Hampshire.

At a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” night here, a nine-year-old girl asked the Republican candidate what is the first thing he will do as president. “I will build the right team,” Mr. Romney replied matter-of-factly. “I tend to be a person driven by data and analysis, not just what’s political.”

The girl looked at him blankly.

The response was vintage Romney — the 60-year-old über-management consultant who achieved front-runner status by planning and plotting details of his presidential bid, from PowerPoint presentations to performance benchmarks. Now, as he tries to close the biggest sale of his life, Mr. Romney’s carefully-crafted “operating plan” is under siege.

In his novel That Hideous Strength, C S Lewis described his protagonist, a sociologist, as follows:

“..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”"

This kind of abstractification (if that’s a word) is by no means limited to academia, although it may be worst there. It is also increasingly effecting business.

See my posts on Management Mentalities and The Dictatorship of Theory, here.

I would make a wild-ass guess that MOST of the value in most firms consists of precisely this web. It is the difference between a real, living, human marketplace or organization and the Soviet Union. Hayek would tell us that this is the only way to take advantage of local knowledge. Ronald Coase would tell us this is the reason you have rules in the first place. Peter Drucker would probably also agree.

We have replicated many mini-me USSRs within our supposedly private economy. This seems to occur when someone with a goal other than profitability tries to actually enforce the cookie-cutter model in place of the informality that allows actual work to be accomplished. These non-profit-related goals are typically things like ideological conformity, promotion of minorities or avoidance of regulatory or litigation problems as a predominant concern. Law firms are among the worst offenders, from what I have seen.

On the main point, that Romney is a technocrat, that is certainly true. It is also true that most voters do not like or trust such people. Huckabee’s quip that voters prefer someone who looks like the guy you work with rather than the guy who laid you off is funny and astute.

The idea that Dukakis and Romney are two flavors of the same product is interesting and accurate, too.

All that said, I like Romney at least as much as anyone else in the race.

I have long wondered if the use of oracles in many different cultures arose to solve just this sort of political problem. When faced with logjam in the decision process where one party or the other does not want to give ground or accept responsibility, blaming the ultimate decision on a the random utterances of an oracle lets everyone save face.

Consultants let us do the same thing in modern world. One management faction or level can’t concede that another faction or level has a good idea without losing face so they bring in the consultant to provide the idea from the outside.