Are Consultants Killing Creativity? Controlling Costs Could Be Stifling Innovation in Organizations

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Overreliance on management consultants to keep costs down and efficiency high could be reducing creativity in organizations. Companies might become more innovative if they were less efficient, suggests Stuart Macdonald, a professor of information and organization at the University of Sheffield.

Examining the last 40 years of management experience at the British Broadcasting Company, Macdonald observes that the organization's increasing use of management consultants in order to stem excessive spending and inefficiency has coincided with growing criticism over the BBC's diminished creativity. He believes the reason for the diminished creativity may be that authority in the …