I'm Sorry I Broke Your Company: When Management Consultants Are the Problem, Not the Solution [Paperback]

Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.

Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company, but she’s eager to make amends.Preface
Introduction
Why I Blame Management Consultants
About this book

Chapter 1. Strategic Planning can't Predict the Future: Strategy Development is a Vision Quest
The downside of having a strategy is missed opportunities
Managing by the numbers only manages the numbers
Predicting the future is risky business
Planning for the future and predicting the future are not the same thing

Chapter 2. Make Sure You Reengineer the People, too: Optimized Processes only Look Good on Paper
Having people to rely on for improvements is all you really need
People should manage the methods and not the methods manage the people
In a human-created world, most of the problems are created by humans
It’s hard to optimize a person 36

Chapter 3. Metrics Are the Means, not the Ends: Numerical Targets are Measure-mental
Everything gets measured al#æ