The greatest differentiator in today’s world is connection, context, judgment and empathy –not data, models or analysis.
If you’re a founder or leader facing strategic headwinds, you have choices about whether to engage with a consultant, and if so, what kind. The options are changing fast. This isn’t just a story about consulting—it’s about what makes humans irreplaceable, and whether those qualities are worth purchasing.
The Argument
This entire article grew out of a frustrating LinkedIn thread I witnessed. Several strategy consultants were passionately arguing about which model was superior. The comments included heated defenses of strategy maps versus three-horizons framework, Porter’s Five Forces versus emergent strategy, long-term planning and even the idea that strategy is pointless.
It struck me as bizarre. I tried to visualize artists casting aspersions at acrylic paint versus watercolors.
Imagine hiring an architect. Would you quiz him about his drafting tools? Of course not. You’d share your vision for a future house and watch how he listens, what possibilities he creates from your wish list.
The tools would be irrelevant; only the outcome would matter.
When consultants argue about their models, they commit the gravest professional fallacy: they’re talking to themselves.
Models Miss What Matters
In 1980, AT&T commissioned McKinsey to project the growth of mobile phone use. After significant research, McKinsey’s analysis forecast very meager growth, and suggested as few as 900,000 people would subscribe.
They were off by orders of magnitude. In the year 2000 there were 109 million mobile phone subscribers.
AT&T had paid significantly for the research and analysis that led to that projection, and they assumed it was a reliable prognostication. So, they crafted their own strategy assuming that mobile phones would remain a fundamentally niche “toy” with “not much future”. They stayed out of the market entirely.
A decade later, when AT&T finally realized their mistake, they had to pay $12.6 billion to acquire McCaw Cellular just to rejoin the market they had abandoned.
This wasn’t a failure of analytical rigor—McKinsey’s models were probably technically sound. It was a failure of human insight.
Early mobile phones were big, bulky, ugly and expensive. Landlines were ubiquitous and cost-effective. There was no frame of reference for communicating “on the go”, and no way to model it in their data. So, despite their rigorous analysis, they failed to imagine the way in which constant communication would transform the world.
No amount of data or framework sophistication could substitute for the rich possibility that individuals instantly understood at an emotional level. Mobile telephony opened the world to deep and sustained connectivity for everyone.
An Inconvenient Truth
You could be excused for thinking that I am cherry-picking examples and that McKinsey, Bain, BCG and their like (MBB) generally create massive lasting value for their clients.
They certainly claim to do so, positioning themselves as producers of “transformative, lasting change,”.
But I was curious whether it was true. Does MBB strategy consulting produce outsized ROI for their clients?
I researched this extensively. Moreover, I had two research LLMs do the same. My goal was to find independent research findings that would shed light on the question.
The result? Outside of self-reported marketing statements, there’s scant independent data supporting MBB claims about strategy ROI.
What clients do gain from hiring MBB are two intangibles: market credibility (the halo effect of associating with prestigious firms) and psychological “self-efficacy”—they feel more capable after receiving expert advice.
But measurable business results remain largely undocumented through independent research, appearing mainly in the firms’ own, cherry-picked case studies.
It isn’t that these firms never produce significant ROI. But when they do so it is usually in areas other than strategy consulting; for example, in their implementation and digital transformation engagements.
More Inconvenience
The bread and butter for these firms has been their strategy consulting—and specifically, a simple premise: Utilize armies of prestigious MBAs to gather terabytes of data and extract insights. Client companies pay as much as $500,000 per month for this service, when delivered by MBB.
But high-quality research and analysis are no longer unfair advantages. Anyone can do the same research in-house with a $200-per-month LLM subscription.
Recognizing this vulnerability, MBB firms have begun reducing headcount and building in-house LLMs.
And perhaps most tellingly, they’re diversifying away from pure strategy toward more of the work they can prove delivers: cost reduction, reengineering, and digital transformation.
Types of Strategy Consultants
But the huge firms are far from the only purveyors of strategy consulting. And theirs is also not the only model. Here is a very broad taxonomy of strategy consulting.
MBB: Research-heavy firms that deliver reports and recommendations.
Mini-MBB: Smaller versions doing similar work at lower cost, often also assisting to create execution metrics and dashboards to measure progress.
Sherpa Hybrid: This last group covers a variety of consulting styles. But most are some combination of coach, sherpa, and thought partner. Instead of selling clients research, they facilitate challenging conversations between stakeholders, pushing teams to imagine bigger futures and more disruptive strategies to achieve them.
These categories describe broad themes. Many consulting firms fall between or straddle two categories, or are some other variation, like a facilitator calling themselves strategy consultants. But it’s worth making these distinctions considering the encroaching obsolescence of the MBB model.
What matters is the difference between those consultants that are distinguished by the model they use, versus who and how they use more than models.
Human Touch
In the early 1990s, Swissair hired McKinsey. The once highly profitable airline had new headwinds (pun intended) as voters had recently rejected joining the European Union. That irrevocably altered their competitive environment.
McKinsey created an aggressive acquisition strategy called “The Hunter Strategy”. The initial design was to make moderate, minority investments in European airlines and to build alliances leveraging Zurich as a hub.
But the implementation evolved into an buying spree of distressed airlines. It overshot the budget and Swissair lacked the core competence to fix those struggling acquisitions. In 2001 Swissair precipitously grounded all its planes, unable to buy fuel on credit due to the massive debt its buying spree had created.
The gap between theory and practice is rarely as clear as in this debacle. But it beautifully illustrates the problem with believing that data, analysis, or any analytical framework can capture the reality of a human-run enterprise.
It would have taken a far deeper understanding of the people leading Swissair and the nuances of their individual beliefs and intentions to see how fraught the plan would be. Swissair’s failure wasn’t borne of McKinsey having a flawed model. There wasn’t some missing datum that would have improved the analysis.
Unfortunately, people don’t behave as models predict they will.
And that’s where the architect analogy becomes most relevant.
Communication Beyond the Chat Box
An AI image model might approximate an architectural plan based on our constraints and desires. But it takes a human to listen to subtext—to intuit from a pregnant woman’s words her dream of rocking a baby on a sun-drenched porch adjoining the nursery, or to connect someone’s mention of arches with their recollection of Christmas dinner where the whole family fits around one table.
A thoughtful architect sees possibilities in these snippets and creates something both novel and as familiar as the client’s own daydreams.
Strategy consulting, viewed through this humanistic rather than mechanistic lens, reveals a different reality.
Those who act as partners rather than information vendors cannot be easily replaced. They offer what AI cannot: empathy and judgment to expand imagination while grounding it in reality; the ability to galvanize unaligned teams through shared vision. (Click to tweet)
The greatest irony? Strategy consultants pave their way to obsolescence when they fetishize analytical tools rather than client results. In today’s world, the greatest differentiator is connection, context, judgment, and empathy—not analysis.
