While Oliver Wyman is good company, I fear it is going to collapse under the weight of wokeness, out-of-touch leadership, or both.
Wokeness – As I suspect most big companies do, OW takes every opportunity to virtue signal throughout the course of a year, although I’m told by others who work in big corporations that what I’ve described is “next level.” For example, the company celebrated International Women’s Day for a whole week, kicked off by a “Menopause Awareness” training. There was also a session on “Fertility & Infertility in the Workplace.” The week was capped off by the head of the Americas blasting an email to the entire staff warning them of their “unconscious bias.” In particular, it encouraged all staff that even when they think they “get it” (where bias is concerned), they probably don’t and are just living in an “unconscious reality.” During what OW calls “Inclusion Week” last fall, there were 30+ 1-hour sessions open to staff, all with varying degrees of offense. The best example was “Stale, Male, and Pale: The white man monolith myth,” during which a handful of white guys got on a zoom call to describe how they came to understand their white oppressive privilege and how it negatively impacted everyone around them.
Out-of-Touch Leadership – If the above isn’t bad enough, OW leadership is particularly poor at addressing business challenges throughout the company. OW has been very acquisitive in recent years, bringing together extremely diverse cultures and business models. The challenge with integrating all of this is exacerbated by the fact that as soon as a deal closes, leadership claims victory and moves on to the next acquisition, leaving the newly acquired business to navigate OW largely on its own. Any time you ask a question of the people supposedly in charge of an integration, you get different answers depending on who you talk to. When you present problems, often times the answer is some version of, “yeah, that’s a tough one.” But then there is rarely follow-through.
OW strives to compete with Bain, McK, and BCG, but in reality, it’s not like those companies. And honestly, that’s more than ok! OW has incredible capability across the board. But leadership is so intensely focused on trying to attain MBB status that it sometimes loses sight of the customer-first mindset.
