Mike Rea (IDEA Pharma CEO) wrote this interesting rant about traditional consultancy firms such as McKinsey who he says ignore experience and focus instead on a rigid process that hurts innovation. He uses McKinsey as just one example of this.
http://ideapharma.com/junkie/why-i-hate-mckinseyQuote:Instead, I hate the idea of McKinsey: specifically the idea that flooding clients with people who are ‘simply’ really, really smart ignores the simple, headsmackingly obvious truth that experience counts... these people are whipcrack smart, hope-my-kids-grow-up-like-that smart. And young. Smart and young... [But] I hate the way that that idea has infected, infested Pharma, strangling it of innovation and smartness. Which other industry could boast such a collection of really highly educated experts and then proceed to strangle it with really dumb process?
The McKinsey way (not perhaps the way that they describe it in the book) suggests that every problem is like another one, and that its solution lies in process. Oh, they love process. The kind of process that anyone who’s smart enough can run. The kind of process that will suck in the experience that already exists in a company, mangle it until it looks less recognisable, throw a lot of time and energy into market research and, one large bill later, some really smart people will give you ‘the answer’.
So what? I hear you wonder… Well, the ‘so what’ is that while the processes are great at giving an answer, it is rarely the answer. But by then, you’re several months in and several big numbers of dollars later, and, well, it may be your fault if you disagree with ‘the answer’ so better to go with the flow... This is not the fault of the smart people. It is the fault of an organisation that believes that process is something that you, like some observer of a 1960s mainframe computer, should sit back and wait on, while permutable really smart people tend to the machine. Just… don’t… touch… the… machine…
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