Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232612 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
Who are management consultants? What power do they have? How can they charge so many millions for their services? Do they really deliver any value? Why do organisations use them? * Every single working day, British companies and the government pay over GBP30million for management consultants' advice * Each year Management Consultancy creates more millionaires than the National Lottery * A leading consultancy recently repaid USD54million to a client after allegedly defrauding that client * Confidential surveys show consultants believe that about half the work they do is of little value to clients and a further 20 per cent is "junk" At last, an insider takes the lid off Management Consulting and reveals how too often this vast and secretive business has become a licence to siphon off almost unlimited quantities of clients' money. In Rip-Off! the author shows that there can sometimes be truly great management consultancy. However, he also reveals how most of the world's major management consultancies have become vast and incredibly profitable factories churning out thousands of almost identical "warm bodies", whose time must be sold to clients, whether clients have problems to be solved or not.

Customer Reviews

Financial Times recommendation
"Buyers of consultancy are spending shareholders' and taxpayers' money, not their own. They have a duty to make sure that they are getting value from it. Often, they are not. No company or government department should let a management consultant through the door until they have read this book from cover to cover. Twice." Financial Times 11/05/05

Good stories, dreadful writing - a struggle to read.
The author has some good stories to tell, and as a consultant myself I recognise the ring of truth in the sharp practices which he describes, and the many self-fulfiing prophecies, ego games, and related practices.

Unfortunately his writing style is so bad that the book makes for very jerky reading. He uses commas like the grammatical equivalent of crowd control barriers; he also has a strange habit of writing - for example - h-ll when he means hell. I gather that he self-published the book; a good copy editor would have stopped his unfortunate style from interfering with a good story.

It had to be said
Wish I'd had this a few years back. Press officers need to be as cynical as the journalists they work with, and working in this role with blue-chip companies there's plenty to be cynical about. I witnessed first hand some of the tactics in Mr Craig's book, particularly the management fads, first hand. I watched as companies' people were faced with, and confused and demotivated by, complete tosh whilst customers were left floundering. I hid, literally, from consultants who said that a company's PR people were its 'most important' and that they would be 'spending lots of time with me' (they say that to all the girls). I was angered most by the management that soaked up this rubbish (the MBAs being the biggest culprits, a subject also covered in 'Rip-off') and accused freethinkers of being negative whilst we tried to keep their businesses going. Where were you when we needed you most Mr Craig?