Hiring management consultants is often just a back-covering exercise

The consultancy will, quite possibly, recommend exactly what a company wants and it’s easy to blame it when things go wrong, says Chris Blackhurst

McKinsey’s power and influence has been highlighted in a new book (Getty/iStock)

The team from McKinsey wanted to go back in time. “Let’s look at 1964 when the newspaper had record sales and see what has changed,” said their leader. I wanted to scream, are you serious? But their faces said they were.

So we journeyed to a period when there was barely any TV, no 24-hour news, no internet, no computers, mobile phones or tablets, when parents were happy for their teenage sons to deliver newspapers on their bikes, often in the dark, and there were lots of newsagents.

Quite what we were hoping to achieve was difficult to discern. Presumably my searing contribution – I’d been dispatched by the editor to meet them and answer their questions – would help form the preamble to their report, making a case for swingeing job cuts as the newspaper’s future was limited (unlike some it had not invested heavily online and was now forced to play catch-up).