An expose of bad businesses and their unethical practices

OK, I confess, it was me. That's right, I did used to work as a management consultant pushing toy plastic building bricks to the tune of thousands of dollars.  You see, after a stint at a respectable job, I took on the dubious career of big-six type management consultant, where part of my job was turning pennies worth of LEGO bricks into thousands of dollars of revenue.

But let me explain. To begin, you should read the recent post from the adhurl blog.  It seems George Parker takes exception to the popular "Aggie Boat" exercise. Essentially, Aggie Boats were little toy boats assembled from a few carefully assembled LEGO bricks, all in the name of teaching (mostly manufacturing) companies the importance of communicating information throughout a supply chain. Management consultants and corporate trainers often use these kinds of hands on manipulatives to drive home a learning point.

Now, Aggie Boats, like a lot of specially developed training toys, didn't come cheap. In fact, they probably sold for about 20 times more than the actual LEGO pieces would cost at a Toys R US store. I was just run-of-the-mill consultant and while I often led the exercise, I can't tell you that I could justify the price. In fact, it seemed a bit pricey to me too. Here's what I was told:

-The Aggie Boat Exercise was developed at Texas A&M University -AKA, "The Aggies," - hence the name.

-The exercise was constructed so that there was only one way to build the boats correctly. To do this, some of the LEGOs had been custom made.

I never knew for certain if any of this was true, but at the time (around 1993), consultants were billing clients $2500 per day and up. If a client had a few consultants working for a number of weeks, the bill could easily top half a million. In the scheme of things, the charge for the Aggie Boats didn't seem excessive.

I do remember questioning some more senior colleagues about  the value of consulting services vs. the extraordinary fees. After all, many management consultants,are pretty young. How can anyone justify charging $2500 per day for advice from some kid with a newly minted MBA and little work experience? How can anyone justify charging thousands of dollars for silly "hands-on" exercises using toys?  I was always told the same thing: "Jocelyn, If you believe our work is valuable, the client will too."

We never had any trouble selling the work, or the Aggie Boats, but the truth is, I also never felt the value was there. So I guess I'm with you, George.  Scam.