Have come across a few examples of companies cancelling all consultancy projects in response to the downturn. Now while this may be unavoidable in real crisis cases, it’s not a universally good idea. It’s a common sport to bash consulting firms, but they clearly can serve valuable purposes. They have access to knowledge that few individual firms could justify building and genuinely know stuff from other cases that can be useful to you. So … if there was a good purpose in having them help last year, chances are it’s still a good purpose now. Chucking them out looks like another example of ‘gesture management’ that some companies seem to think they need to do, but don’t.