Thinking of hiring a management consultant to examine your business? Read this book first: it's an insider's view of the scams, greed and general mismanagement that's rife in this field.

Rip-Off! is the story of the 1980s and 1990s, when the consultancy business in Britain escalated to £60 billion a year. Largely, according to Craig, it is a story of greed, a time when you could pull someone off the street, teach them a few sales tricks, and send them off to tack a large sheet of brown paper on a wall. Once a company's staff have posted red Post-It notes saying what's going badly and green ones saying what's going well, said consultant has all he needs to shock the management into coughing up large sums of money. Then he can go back to his expensive hotel room, dine luxuriously and visit the local brothel -- all at the client's expense, of course.

Rip-Off! is also the story of Craig's consultancy career, beginning with his first job, with a firm he calls 'The Butchers'. This outfit specialised in cutting 30 percent of staff from every company it worked for. From there, he worked for a succession of good and bad companies. Scams were everywhere. On the consultancies' side there were kickbacks, small projects designed to beget large ones, and demands that clients pay fees and overheads and expenses. On the clients' side there was dishonest management, poor decision-making and enslavement to whatever was the latest fashion in management-think -- be it business process re-engineering or e-business.

Curiously enough, e-business was a pot of gold too far. The combination of the bursting Internet bubble, the increasing numbers of MBAs in management, and the fact that many consultancies themselves were unable to learn enough about e-business in time to keep pace dealt the industry one blow. Disasters like Enron, Worldcom and Railtrack dealt it another. The consultancy Craig last worked for got merged, mismanaged, disorganised and finally desperate enough to cut costs to pay him and a few thousand others to leave.

The really striking thing is that so many of these consultants on the take claimed they chose their line of work because they wanted to make a difference. 'If one really wanted to make a difference to the world…a missionary, teacher or garbage collector might be more appropriate career paths', Craig muses, along the way to estimating that about two-thirds of consultancy is a waste of time and money. Some of the most interesting material covers how consultancies make their sales -- a process akin to those 'personality tests' that cults use to convince you that you're in desperate need of their help. For that reason, this book is required reading for anyone who is thinking of hiring a consultant -- any consultant. Buyer beware.

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