The frameworks are different. The labels are different. The slides are identical. A Field Report from a former partner who has been on both sides of the table.
I think that's why operator experience is important when looking for a consultant. It avoids the problem you described by offering lived experience beyond the decks.
Interestingly, a former colleague described a difference in approach when MBB and Big 4 pitched work with a client. The MBB firm took a Porter's Five Forces view to looking at growth while the Big 4 took a Capability-Based view. Ideally both approaches should be used in tandem.
Vince, good point on operator experience. That is precisely what buyers on the advisory selection side (and we now spend more time advising that side of the table) are hoping for: consultants who have actually managed a P&L, run an integration, or restructured a supply chain, rather than people who have analysed those things from a conference room.
The problem is that the firms' staffing models do not select for this. They select for availability and utilisation rate. An engagement manager with deep sector experience and one with none bill at the same rate, and the one with none is more likely to be on the bench and therefore more likely to get staffed.
The irony is that the firms spent decades building the opposite model. The codification strategy was explicit: capture every partner's judgment in a framework, store it in a knowledge library, make it reusable by anyone. Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney wrote the foundational HBR paper on this in 1999. Ernst & Young was the paradigm case: knowledge extracted from individuals and made independent of the person who developed it. The stated goal was fungibility. If any consultant could apply the framework, the firm no longer depended on specific experienced people to deliver. That was a valid scaling strategy for a decade.
And that's how firms sell the framework over consultants' experience - frameworks "codify the whole institutional knowledge of the firm, which is much better than a single experienced consultant".
Then the knowledge bases became too large. Anyone who has worked inside one of these firms knows the pain: thousands of frameworks, methodologies, accelerators, templates, and past deliverables, filed in systems that made it faster to rebuild the analysis from scratch than to find the relevant precedent. A senior manager recreating a market-entry framework from memory because searching the internal system would take longer is a scene every contributor to this publication has lived.
So the firms did the rational thing: they simplified. They generalized the frameworks, made them applicable across more situations, reduced the number of distinct methodologies a consultant needed to learn. The problem is that "more general" and "more similar to everyone else's" are the same thing. The Porter's Five Forces versus Capability-Based distinction your colleague observed is real and historically grounded (outside-in versus inside-out analysis), but it is exactly the kind of analytical tradition that the generalization trend eroded. As frameworks were stripped down to their most portable, reusable form, the firm-specific flavour that made a Deloitte approach recognisably different from a PwC approach disappeared.
Then came the final move: rather than improving the frameworks, the firms improved the marketing. Proprietary names. Branded visualisations. Trademarked terminology. The substance converged while the packaging diverged. By the time AI arrived and every team started feeding the same generalized frameworks through the same language models, the convergence was already essentially complete. AI did not cause it. AI made it impossible to ignore.
Your colleague's observation may be one of the last sightings of a genuinely distinct analytical tradition surviving inside a large firm. Those teams still exist. They are increasingly the exception.
(This is probably a topic that deserves its own post. Consider this a preview.)
I think the nature of consulting firms makes it hard for operators to transition smoothly into consultants. Teaching an experienced operator/manager how to do BD/sell work is an entirely new skill set. I've seen my previous firm try that by recruiting senior leaders from industry but they end up leaving after 2-3 years. Some of the turnaround firms like Alix and Alvarez & Marsal seem to do that better.
Did this buying experience give you any pricing advantage? Since the three offer basically the same thing, you should have some leverage to negotiate down their fee!
You are right about the struggle to integrate operators. It's a systemic problem, not just your anecdotal observation. Majority of partners are aware of it. But it's easier to pretend like the problem doesn't exist (because then it deserves to be solved). And we know this well because some of us were direct-admit partners that lived exactly that.
You see, the partnership model selects for one skill above all others: origination. The ability to sell work and bring in revenue is what makes partner. Everything else, delivery quality, sector knowledge, technical depth, is secondary in the economics. An operator who has spent twenty years running manufacturing plants or restructuring supply chains is worth more to the client than any framework, but if that person cannot generate a pipeline of new engagements within 18 months of joining, the partnership economics classify them as a cost centre.
The result is predictable: the firm recruits the industry veteran with great fanfare, assigns them to pitches where their credibility wins work, and then expects them to sell the next ten engagements themselves. They cannot, because selling consulting is a specific skill that has almost nothing to do with operational expertise. And it's often counter-indicated - best operators are often the people with the lowest tolerance for BS. 2-3 years later, they leave. The firm writes it off as "cultural fit" rather than admitting that the model is designed to reject the very people who would improve the product.
You are right that A&M and AlixPartners have cracked this, and the reason is instructive: their compensation is origination-linked and their partner groups are small enough that an operator with a strong network can generate revenue through relationships rather than through the traditional BD machine. We are planning a longer piece on A&M specifically, because the rate at which they are hiring departing Big 4 senior talent tells you something about what those people think the future looks like.
On pricing: yes, absolutely. When the buyer knows all three firms are selling the same analysis, the negotiation shifts entirely. You stop comparing proposals on methodology (identical) and start comparing on price, team composition, and contractual terms. Sophisticated procurement teams have been doing this for years. What has changed recently, and it has nothing to do with our advice, is that buyers can now point to their own internal AI-generated analysis and say: "Your team will spend six weeks producing something my four-person team has already drafted. Justify the delta." That conversation compresses fees fast. We are seeing it on nearly every advisory selection we advise on. The firms know it is happening. They have not yet figured out how to respond, because the honest answer ("you are paying for our brand on the cover, not for the analysis") is not something a partner can say in a pitch.
I think it's unfortunate there aren't more varied career paths for partners. Some partners are great at origination while others are true delivery specialists. You need both for the firm to succeed but then that increases the size of the partner cohort you need to split profits with.
I imagine you'll discover what the firms' walk away prices are pretty quickly as they need a certain level of fee to support their ever rising MBA Grad salaries!
The A&M model is very interesting - looking forward to reading your analysis.
I think that's why operator experience is important when looking for a consultant. It avoids the problem you described by offering lived experience beyond the decks.
Interestingly, a former colleague described a difference in approach when MBB and Big 4 pitched work with a client. The MBB firm took a Porter's Five Forces view to looking at growth while the Big 4 took a Capability-Based view. Ideally both approaches should be used in tandem.
Vince, good point on operator experience. That is precisely what buyers on the advisory selection side (and we now spend more time advising that side of the table) are hoping for: consultants who have actually managed a P&L, run an integration, or restructured a supply chain, rather than people who have analysed those things from a conference room.
The problem is that the firms' staffing models do not select for this. They select for availability and utilisation rate. An engagement manager with deep sector experience and one with none bill at the same rate, and the one with none is more likely to be on the bench and therefore more likely to get staffed.
The irony is that the firms spent decades building the opposite model. The codification strategy was explicit: capture every partner's judgment in a framework, store it in a knowledge library, make it reusable by anyone. Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney wrote the foundational HBR paper on this in 1999. Ernst & Young was the paradigm case: knowledge extracted from individuals and made independent of the person who developed it. The stated goal was fungibility. If any consultant could apply the framework, the firm no longer depended on specific experienced people to deliver. That was a valid scaling strategy for a decade.
And that's how firms sell the framework over consultants' experience - frameworks "codify the whole institutional knowledge of the firm, which is much better than a single experienced consultant".
Then the knowledge bases became too large. Anyone who has worked inside one of these firms knows the pain: thousands of frameworks, methodologies, accelerators, templates, and past deliverables, filed in systems that made it faster to rebuild the analysis from scratch than to find the relevant precedent. A senior manager recreating a market-entry framework from memory because searching the internal system would take longer is a scene every contributor to this publication has lived.
So the firms did the rational thing: they simplified. They generalized the frameworks, made them applicable across more situations, reduced the number of distinct methodologies a consultant needed to learn. The problem is that "more general" and "more similar to everyone else's" are the same thing. The Porter's Five Forces versus Capability-Based distinction your colleague observed is real and historically grounded (outside-in versus inside-out analysis), but it is exactly the kind of analytical tradition that the generalization trend eroded. As frameworks were stripped down to their most portable, reusable form, the firm-specific flavour that made a Deloitte approach recognisably different from a PwC approach disappeared.
Then came the final move: rather than improving the frameworks, the firms improved the marketing. Proprietary names. Branded visualisations. Trademarked terminology. The substance converged while the packaging diverged. By the time AI arrived and every team started feeding the same generalized frameworks through the same language models, the convergence was already essentially complete. AI did not cause it. AI made it impossible to ignore.
Your colleague's observation may be one of the last sightings of a genuinely distinct analytical tradition surviving inside a large firm. Those teams still exist. They are increasingly the exception.
(This is probably a topic that deserves its own post. Consider this a preview.)
I think the nature of consulting firms makes it hard for operators to transition smoothly into consultants. Teaching an experienced operator/manager how to do BD/sell work is an entirely new skill set. I've seen my previous firm try that by recruiting senior leaders from industry but they end up leaving after 2-3 years. Some of the turnaround firms like Alix and Alvarez & Marsal seem to do that better.
Did this buying experience give you any pricing advantage? Since the three offer basically the same thing, you should have some leverage to negotiate down their fee!
Again, a great multilayered comment! We love it.
You are right about the struggle to integrate operators. It's a systemic problem, not just your anecdotal observation. Majority of partners are aware of it. But it's easier to pretend like the problem doesn't exist (because then it deserves to be solved). And we know this well because some of us were direct-admit partners that lived exactly that.
You see, the partnership model selects for one skill above all others: origination. The ability to sell work and bring in revenue is what makes partner. Everything else, delivery quality, sector knowledge, technical depth, is secondary in the economics. An operator who has spent twenty years running manufacturing plants or restructuring supply chains is worth more to the client than any framework, but if that person cannot generate a pipeline of new engagements within 18 months of joining, the partnership economics classify them as a cost centre.
The result is predictable: the firm recruits the industry veteran with great fanfare, assigns them to pitches where their credibility wins work, and then expects them to sell the next ten engagements themselves. They cannot, because selling consulting is a specific skill that has almost nothing to do with operational expertise. And it's often counter-indicated - best operators are often the people with the lowest tolerance for BS. 2-3 years later, they leave. The firm writes it off as "cultural fit" rather than admitting that the model is designed to reject the very people who would improve the product.
You are right that A&M and AlixPartners have cracked this, and the reason is instructive: their compensation is origination-linked and their partner groups are small enough that an operator with a strong network can generate revenue through relationships rather than through the traditional BD machine. We are planning a longer piece on A&M specifically, because the rate at which they are hiring departing Big 4 senior talent tells you something about what those people think the future looks like.
On pricing: yes, absolutely. When the buyer knows all three firms are selling the same analysis, the negotiation shifts entirely. You stop comparing proposals on methodology (identical) and start comparing on price, team composition, and contractual terms. Sophisticated procurement teams have been doing this for years. What has changed recently, and it has nothing to do with our advice, is that buyers can now point to their own internal AI-generated analysis and say: "Your team will spend six weeks producing something my four-person team has already drafted. Justify the delta." That conversation compresses fees fast. We are seeing it on nearly every advisory selection we advise on. The firms know it is happening. They have not yet figured out how to respond, because the honest answer ("you are paying for our brand on the cover, not for the analysis") is not something a partner can say in a pitch.
I think it's unfortunate there aren't more varied career paths for partners. Some partners are great at origination while others are true delivery specialists. You need both for the firm to succeed but then that increases the size of the partner cohort you need to split profits with.
I imagine you'll discover what the firms' walk away prices are pretty quickly as they need a certain level of fee to support their ever rising MBA Grad salaries!
The A&M model is very interesting - looking forward to reading your analysis.