Dangerous Company: The Consulting Powerhouses and the Businesses They Save and Ruin

Dangerous Company is the never-before-told story of the powerful and secretive consulting elite, firms such as McKinsey & Company, Bain, the Boston Consulting Group, Andersen Consulting, Deloitte Touche, Gemini, and many others. Based on sources within the firms themselves, interviews with key clients, and access to now-sealed court records, the book provides the inside story that consultants would prefer you not know. James O'Shea and Charles Madigan tell you about conspiracies at the top, boneheaded assumptions, as well as brilliant performances. While Dangerous Company reveals the underside of consulting, it also looks at many success stories: how a consulting firm helped a pharmaceutical company develop a strategy for marketing instruments that enable diabetics to manage their disease. Not only has the product been profitable, it has greatly improved that lives of millions of people; how Sears got turned around. Arthur Martinez's sophisticated and limited use of consultants is a model for how companies should work with consultants in the future; and how small, highly focused consulting firms are providing cost-effective, targeted advice to companies and mounting a significant challenge to the big consulting powerhouses.
Tough, fair, and thoroughly researched, Dangerous Company is for anyone who wants to understand how the world of business really works. It will also force a rethinking by management about the implications of a decision to bring in consultants. Nothing less than the jobs of thousands of employees, millions of dollars of shareholder investment, and long-term relationships with customers are at stake.