THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX?

Sociologist Dustin Stoltz assesses the levels of creative thinking expressed in the work of elite consulting firms

CHRIS QUIRK

Corporate mantras like Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” and concepts like disruptive innovation have become so ingrained in the public discourse that it is almost accepted wisdom that leading companies must constantly reinvent themselves to survive. Elite consulting firms like McKinsey & Company, BCG, and Bain & Company are paid handsomely to provide the fresh and pioneering thinking that will give their clients a competitive edge in turbulent conditions.

But are these eminent consulting firms— who can largely hire whom they please—in fact recruiting the candidates best prepared to deliver the innovative counsel they advertise?

Dustin Stoltz, assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, grew up in Florence, Mont., elevation 3,264 ft., a small town by the Idaho border. He is a first-generation college student, and his interest in management consulting sprang from a conversation with a mentor at Montana State University. Stoltz had never heard about this kind of consulting as a profession.

“I was kind of floored by it,” he says. “I had thought that you would first get expertise in something specific, and then people would bring you in to advise on that, but management consulting flipped things around. Their idea is to find very smart people who would give general advice about what a client should do, in a space where they may have no experience whatsoever.” The mentor recommended that Stoltz consider consulting as a career, and set up a meeting for Stoltz with the CEO of a boutique consulting firm who was in Montana on vacation, and they grabbed a coffee at a local cafe. “I still have the notes from that meeting,” says Stoltz.

Only the Best Corporate consulting is a profitable sector and was valued at around $140 billion in 2017. Client lists are guarded like the nuclear codes, but news reports occasionally surface tying Fortune 500 companies or organizations like the CIA and the government of Saudi Arabia to the mediashy firms. A major allure of these consultancies is their stated prowess at inculcating a change mentality across the corporate structures to improve results. McKinsey’s website recently devoted an entire section to the theme of transformation. Bain states, “We work with clients who do not hide from the future but want to define it.”

Top consulting firms focus their hiring efforts on Ivy League schools along with Stanford and the University of Chicago (Ivy+), and the so-called Magnificent Seven, as the highest ranked MBA programs are dubbed. McKinsey’s website has customized pages with dedicated URLs crafted for students from the Harvard or Princeton undergraduate programs, each with numerous recruiters to contact directly, some of them alumni. On the other hand, a search for information for students from Lehigh, Penn State, or Colgate undergraduate programs leads to a generalized webpage with no recruiter information and the headline, “We’re glad you’re interested.”

Stoltz says that to land lucrative contracts, firms need to project eminence and gravitas to their client base. “These situations rely a lot on signals. When a person is coming into your company and giving their high-level model of what needs to be done, these signals, generally speaking, come from some kind of third party that gives a stamp of approval. So, in their recruiting the big consulting firms are really drawn to brand names like Harvard or Rhodes scholarships. They’re not looking as much for skills or credentials.”

Given the importance of innovation in the field, Stoltz decided to use computational analysis to assess the levels of creative thinking evident in the work of elite consultants, by analyzing the text of their publicly available research papers. Content analysis, as this research technique is called, uses the frequency and relationships of key terms to draw inferences about a text. In this case, Stoltz scrutinized 1,806 research papers by 1,594 different authors, looking for how often key terms occur, and in what contexts, to quantify similarities among the papers.

“The first thing I did was to represent the meanings of words in terms the computer could understand, and then I could compare co-occurrence of words between papers, and the distance between key terms,” Stoltz explains. “From there, by comparing each article to the corpus of all the articles, I could see how each article stands out from the whole.”

For the second part of the analysis, Stoltz constructed what he calls a pseudo-paper, stuffed with concepts and buzzwords common to a particular topic. The pseudo-paper served as a conventional, plain vanilla benchmark, and the research papers were contrasted against it to quantify originality.

“My argument is, if a paper is, for example, bringing together two disconnected silos of concepts in a way that differ from the corpus of the articles, it’s doing something unique.”

Stoltz found, after assessing the originality scores on the papers and looking at the profiles of the authors, that the work of consultants who attended Ivy+ schools as undergraduates was the least original.

“These authors had statistically significant lower innovation scores, despite being most likely to talk about things like disruption or creative destruction,” Stoltz says. By contrast, this was not the case for authors who instead attended top MBA programs, nor for those who earned their degrees abroad.

A New Schema Content analysis has its critics, some of whom say it misses nuance, but Stoltz feels he is on solid ground in this case. “One critique is whether my measure of innovation is a proper measure of it, and another is the question of whether innovation is truly valued here,” Stoltz says. “The first can be a valid type of critique, but for this work I’m drawing on supporting literature about innovation that goes back to classical sources in the field. In the second case, I’ve read a third of the articles I analyzed computationally, and interviewed 50 management consultants at these firms, so I feel confident concluding that these organizations do value innovation in the way I measure it.”

Stoltz’s research raises a conundrum: If creative thinking should yield a competitive advantage in upper echelons of the consulting field, why don’t the top firms work harder to cast their net more broadly? Further, Stoltz asks, what do these recruiting practices mean for the ideas that are circulating within the field?

“If organizations are really looking for outsidethe-box thinking, it’s valuable to have people in the room with drastically different social origins and backgrounds,” says Stoltz. “It’s a lot harder to jump through the hoops that get those credentials for a lot of people. It may not be the only thing that matters but social class is certainly very important in this regard.” ●

“If organizations are really looking for outside-the-box thinking, it’s valuable to have people in the room with drastically different social origins and backgrounds.”