Consulting Ourselves to Death

The Big Con shares its title with David Maurer’s classic 1940 sociological study of confidence tricksters (the inspiration for the classic film The Sting). It’s a bold allegation, but Mazzucato and Collington articulate their j’accuse with precision. The basic modus operandi of consultancies is not “ownership of scarce valuable knowledge assets” but rather “the possession of the means to create an impression of value.” Put simply, consultancies subsist not by actually making demonstrable positive contributions to the functioning of organizations but by conjuring up the appearance they are doing so. The implication here is not simply that executives have somehow become gullible, they clarify. Rather, “the practices of the consulting industry … combine with the broader structures of our political economy to extract rents from clients” — “rents” here referring to the “difference between the value they create and the wealth they take.”