'Circle the Wagons', says McKinsey

I like Mckinsey because they don't have any original game plans - they simple do what you ask them to do and they will pretend, for a fee, that it was their idea. Hired hachet-men who will take the blame .... for bucks.

I was reading the FT and came across this article;

High-level media and advertising executives are to meet for a brainstorming session aimed at capitalising on the surging popularity of social networking websites.

McKinsey, the management consultancy, is understood to have asked senior executives from old and new media groups alike – from Yahoo to YouTube – to a session with advertising agencies to discuss ways of turning the hugely popular internet sites containing photos, videos, blogs and other user-generated content into viable media businesses.

The meeting, which could take place in New York within the next month but no date has been finalised.

Plans for the meeting reflect the rapid shifts felt by the media industry as people, particularly younger internet users, spend increasing amounts of time on social networking sites such as MySpace and sharing photos, videos and blogs created by themselves rather than professionally produced content.

... read more here.

So the media big boys are getting scared and are using Mckinsey as the bait. Web 2.0 will end here like the North American Indians did - free thinking, social conscience and entrepreneurs will be herded into a reservation and put on welfare. Our language will be taken over and we will become dependant on the powers that be.

Military-industrial-complex? You know it baby!

If you thought that consultant-baiting was a peculiarly one of my favorite pastime, spare a thought for the Brits and the Germans - both famous for not wanting to move on.

Germany - currently promoting itself as the 'Land of Ideas' in the run up to the World Cup - is rapidly becoming one of the most consultant-unfriendly countries in the world. Whatever stereotypes I hold, this is a country which is deeply resistant to change and highly suspicious of modern capitalism.

Consequently consultants get it in the neck twice over, as meddlers with cherished ways and stormtroopers for the Anglo-American world order.

The latest assault on the consultancy industry comes from Thomas Leif, with the grandly titled 'Advised and sold: McKinsey & Co, the big bluff of the management consultants' which claims that consultancy culture is undermining the less capatalist lives.

Consultants have restructure thousands of jobs away but that's not a bad thing. It's the kowtowing to whomever is paying their bill that's more of an issue. These guys are simple middle men with great marketing prowness. By selling themselves - they sell the work of the hand that feeds them.

Their function is obscure, their success disputed. With their PowerPoint presentations consultancies offer extremely simplified solutions for complex processes. They destroy enormous public and private means and undermine the work of administrations.

This is called hype. It seems that 'information' is becoming a field of permeable boundaries dominated by cross-disciplinary carpetbaggers. Business is talking over the hybrid expressions like 'cultural rights', 'corporate responsibility' and 'social media' which epitomize this normative drift – toward where remains to be seen.

They are perfect for Web 2.0.