I think almost the opposite is going on often. What's often happening is you have 1 manager building his fiefdom, and other managers trying to build theirs and there's only so much money to go around and only so many directions a company can go. So manager 1 hires in BCG so that he can use BCG's reputation to get his pet project funded by the executive team. BCG doesn't cut through the bureacracy, it's a tool of the bureaucrat to beat the other bureaucrats- which is why the conclusions match what the manager wants, not what is best. It's about the bureacracy, not about getting anything particular done.
Don't buy this anectode. BCG is too expensive to be hired by managers to convince executives. There are cheaper ways to do that.
Most common scenario is that the executives want to prioritize between 100s of managers' pet-projects, then they hire us to swift through.
End result is that a company (correctly) focus on a few high impact projects and a bunch of middle managers get hurt because their pet project get underfunded.
Yeah I don't mean manager as in "has a team of 5 people" I mean someone responsible for big teams, I'm just using manager as the generic, it could be a "head of" or "General Manager" or "Director" etc. Looking at teams that are a 2%+ of the size of the company.
You can spend 3 years getting a bunch of disinterested people to agree or spend $3M and get it done. The ability to get the $3M is exec endorsement of the alpha bureaucrat.
