The agency business has a polite fiction at its center. Most agencies keep difficult clients long past the point they should — and pay a price in staff morale, work quality, and opportunity cost that never appears on the P&L.

The consulting industry is very good at producing deliverables. It is much less reliably good at producing change. We're part of that industry — and here's our honest take on the gap between what we produce and what actually changes.

We applaud effort over outcomes. We reward longevity over impact. And we've built a culture designed to avoid the conversation that would actually change things. It's time to have it.