‘The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell’

I’ve just been reading the musings of Keith Yost, a disillusioned former Boston Consulting Group insider.

In a series of four articles published by MIT’s The Tech, Yost lifts the lid on the management consultancy profession, revealing that leading consultancy groups to be over-charging massively for pretty poor advice.

Even though he had no commercial experience, Yost was hired by Boston Consulting Group as a UAE-based management consultant, on a $200,000-a-year package, in June 2009.

He was supposed to be advising UAE-based clients on improving their business performance. However, the whole seems to have been a charade. The articles give the impression that the primary focus of the western consultants operating in the Gulf is to hoodwink unwary and unneedy Emiratis — not help them run their businesses better. .

A classic sentence from Yost’s articles (which appears mid-way through the last of the four, “Dispatches from the collapse” is this:-

“[The Emiratis] run their businesses much in the same way a teenager would buy clothes with a swoosh on them — they aren’t trying to generate profits so much as they are adopting a lifestyle brand.” (I think by “swoosh” he is referring to Nike’s logo.)

If the practices described here are true, then it’s not surprising that Dubai’s bold economic experiment has hit the buffers. I take my hat off to Yost for resisting BCG’s attempts to buy his silence with a $16,000 bribe and would be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge of whether McKinsey is any better.

Here is one of the four articles written by Keith Yost about his experiences with Boston Consulting Group in the United Arab Emirates. “The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell: The city was strange and the society unnerving, but what disturbed me the most about my experience was my job as a business consultant. ”

This blog was published on 14 April 2010