Imagine all the money our SVPs and exec staff make and Bain still runs the company. A substantial number of decisions are all based off Bain recommendations. We could save millions upon millions of dollars if we got rid of most of our SVP layer kept some of our VPs and kept our Sr and Director layers and just used Bain.
Otherwise why do we need SVPs who are totally incapable of making decisions without Bain?
Rule#1 in consulting - Never sc--w your sponsor. All results must make sponsor look good.
@cb and our SVPs aren’t playing politics? That’s all they do. Come on.
@a3 Sometimes I think the consultants are the only ones the upper management can trust to tell them the truth because everyone below them is playing backstabbing politics and inflating their own numbers to look good.
@a9 They’re not interested in AI to help their employees. That costs money and presumes they want their employees doing things like writing software. They just want to sell more “ai” boxes to put Jensen’s gpus in. And they’re willing to pay oodles of money for AI they believe will replace most of us. The math is easy. Sell the same or more boxes at increased prices, but with a fraction of the head count and you make more in shareholders’ pockets. It’s unlikely to pay off and it’s downright evil how they’re dragging out the pain of layoffs. So make them pay through the nose when they hire you back later.
@as Thats all MD -- he's selling a story, but if you've noticed the stock has dropped significantly and continues on it's way down. That's because the story was made up by Bain, MD sold it and his SVP's can't deliver. Besides what we already sell, what new AI magical thing has been created or even embedded into our products? The closest we've come is embedded nvidia gpus into servers. Outside of that...? We just bought a new company to train AI models, which I'm sure our SVP's will destroy. So, again, what is their real purpose?
@a9 most just repackage and explain -- some don't even do that, they let the consultants do the talking -- they're just politicans. All the real work and the direction is set by the majority of the directors, senior managers and IC's.
The two simple goals of a for-profit corporation are to make money for its shareholders and stay within the laws of the countries in which it operates.
By these measurements, Dell is doing very well indeed.
Everything else beyond those two goals is window dressing.
@OP Having someone else, a consultant, make the hard decisions gives you the VP/SVP some one to point the finger at when things turn to cr-p, thereby hopefully keeping your cushy job and fat bonus.
Starbucks learned it the hard way. CEO from McKinsey cost them 30 billion.
if JR would let someone buy a grok license for $20 a month (or openai, Google, etc) to use at work instead of this copilot / ask stuff, then the SVPs could get far better advice than external shops. AI exists, and Dell sells servers that can run it, they just don't like the dramatic competitive advantage it brings internally, let the competition have at it first I guess, we'll catch up, right? right?
it is a great point that we're paying this SVPs truckloads of money because they are the 'apparent experts' to lead from all their experience... but they only just use outside consultants?? then why not pay the svp an admin salary, as this is what they're doing, they're just repackaging and documenting, no original thought.. or get rid of them entirely.
You can't just get rid of all upper level management during a reorganization. Upper level management are interested in saving their own skins. You use companies like Bain to structure the new organization. Rest assured, upper level management will get affected. The only difference between upper level management and the rest of the organization is that upper level management will most likely get a healthy separation package.
This may be the most insightful thing I’ve ever seen in this site. Why pay all of these C level mo--ns and SVPs if they still need to hire consultants to do their job? WTF do they actually do? Read consultant reports seems about it.