I've just ordered a copy of The Big Con following Will Lloyd's review and a fascinating interview with Mariana Mazzucato - both in New Stateman. I will add it to David Craig's Plundering the Public Sector (2006) and similarly themed works, along with my 30 or so years watching the serial failure of consultancy firms to improve NHS IT.
This includes working on the Blair era National Programme for IT (largely run by consultancies), the (largely failed) outsourcing of primary care support services to Capita and more recently the attempts to 'digitally transform' NHS screening programmes (still in the process of failing).
I might have plenty of time to read it. I'm under threat of redundancy following the Laura Wade-Gery review (outsourced to McKinsey) recommended the merger of NHS Digital and NHS England, and the subsequent organisational re-design (outsourced to McKinsey) resulting in a 30-40% cut in staffing.
No matter: I'll be perfectly positioned to make use of the government's network of 50+ Champions to help me back into the workforce, and possibly the Restart scheme (outsourced to Serco, G4S and Maximus).
I'm not sure how much I'll learn from The Big Con or whether it will just provide some intellectual and theoretical flesh to the bones of experience. Books like Craig's Plundering are essentially journalistic descriptions of what went wrong. Anthony King and Ivor Crewe's The Blunders of Our Government is about more than the specific failures of management consultancy, but also provides rather more analysis of why governments fail so spectacularly in their policy aims, covering things like operational disconnect as well as the lack of internal expertise.
So I will read The Big Con with interest, and hopefully provide a review in due course.
