Talk:Bain & Company/Archives/2017

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Introduction

Hi. I am affiliated with Bain & Company and would like to help improve this article in a manner compliant with WP:COI.

A few things that jump out at me about the current article:

A dedicated section for Awards and Rankings
A dedicated section for Controversies
Some controversies are based entirely on press releases and law firm websites
No section on what it is they do to make money

I would like to get the article up to the GA quality level. I've prepared a draft here I think would bring it there, but I'm also happy to discuss improvements to the page in smaller bites. Thank you in advance to anyone that pitches in. CorporateM (Talk) 22:21, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Draft review process - preliminary comments

I'm taking a look at the draft, and will have more to say about it soon. However, I'll start with a process comment. It's my opinion that editing an article organically (in other words the usual way, making relatively modest changes in each edit) can be done without fanfare. In contrast, an alternative approach, wholesale replacement of the existing article by a revised draft, is a bigger deal and not not to be done cavalierly. There are definite advantages to this alternative, but there are some potential downsides, and I wanted to mitigate them.

The first way to mitigate them is to announce the plan in advance and carefully consider any comments on the plan. I see that this announcement was made 12 days ago, and not a single comment has ensued. That might be justification for going ahead, but I decided upon another option. It occurred to me that some of the contributors to this article may have dropped it from their watchlist, or perhaps their watchlist, (like mine) is bloated, and they missed it. I looked at the top 10 contributors to this article to reach out to them to make sure they have seen the plan.

Researching the top 10 contributors resulted in some troubling observations, which may go a long way to explaining the lack of reaction to the plan.

The fourth and fifth place contributors are IP editors.(Nothing wrong with that per se except to note that pings do not work for IP's) Neither have contributed since 2011 (and neither have contributed to any article other than this one). Given their six-year absence it's unlikely that reaching out to them would be fruitful
The eighth place contributor is also an IP, and has a message on the talk page noting that the address is registered to Bain & Company. They have not contributed since 2015.
The top three contributors are all blocked. The first two are blocked as sock puppets
The ninth place contributor has not edited since 2008 (and has made only one edit other than to this article)
The 10th Place contributor has not edited since 2007 (and is made no edits other than to this article)
The only two active editors in the list are hereby pinged: @Carlstak:, @DMCer:.

Before commenting in general on the draft can I ask @CorporateM: to resolve the dabs to National Steel and Big Three?--S Philbrick (Talk) 15:12, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for pitching in Sphilbrick. Happy to move forward whichever way is most sensible/convenient. I also fixed the dab issues mentioned above. CorporateM (Talk) 18:08, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Making a draft is a good idea. Though my time is too limited to be of much help, I would observe that some of the Guinness controversy is quite entertaining. Ref. 12 of the current article, which is a 1987 article by Nancy J. Perry, got dropped out in CorporateM's new draft. It was Nancy J. Perry (April 27, 1987). "A consulting firm too hot to handle? Bain & Co. gets its hands deep in the trousers of client companies, says an executive who knows it well. Maybe too deep, the Guinness scandal suggests". CNN. Retrieved 2012-01-30. I'd like it if you could explore how to keep that. It also may give the reader some insight as to both the good and bad sides of the Bain approach to consulting. You may have a valid point that not all the court cases are notable enough for inclusion. EdJohnston (talk) 19:07, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Progress report.

My interest is to read through all of the text in the draft. While I did a first pass skim, I'm now going through sentence by sentence confirming the text is supported by the sources. So far so good. I have identified a couple wordsmithing edits and I briefly considered whether I should make them to the draft or wait until the draft is moved over but I'm leaning toward the latter.

For those who may be reading, the key challenge is not to "simply" confirm that everything in the article is supportable by reliable sources but to ensure to the extent possible that the resulting article is a neutral presentation of the company. An obvious potential concern is that an editor with a COI may emphasize the positive and downplay the negative, but so far I'm pleased to see that the article is incorporating discussion of some of the less positive aspects of the history. While I haven't read the reference mentioned by EdJohnston, that's a perfect example of the issues we have to consider. My preliminary thoughts are that we do not have to insist that CorporateM incorporates those aspects, although the thoughts as requested would be welcome, but that we might end up replacing the existing article with the proposed draft and then making some additional edits.--S Philbrick (Talk) 19:49, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

@EdJohnston: Am I missing something? The Perry article, which is fascinating, seems to be footnote 11 of the proposed draft, used multiple times as a ref.--S Philbrick (Talk) 20:22, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for overlooking. I searched for the name 'Perry' in the draft and didn't find it. It shouldn't be a problem to restore the author's name to the citation. EdJohnston (talk) 20:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

I bolded a few words written by CorporateM above, 'a draft here', to make the draft easier to notice. EdJohnston (talk) 20:54, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks to CorporateM for making the lead longer and more informative. However, this sentence skips over a lot of interesting stuff quickly: "Bain experienced several setbacks and financial troubles from 1987 to the early 1990s". If time permits I'll try to sketch out some details that might be added. I do remember some political campaigns involving Mitt Romney where he struggled to explain what it was the Bain company did that was of a positive nature. (People had been accusing him of destroying jobs). Trying to explain this stuff better could be worthwhile. EdJohnston (talk) 21:01, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

No problem. I agree that the Perry article is fascinating, and wanted to make sure you knew that it hadn't disappeared. --S Philbrick (Talk) 21:07, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

It looks like I cited that article more than 15 times, but missed the author information in the citation template. I've fixed it. CorporateM (Talk) 11:51, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Progress report 2

First, a comment on my expected course of action. The proposed draft, on balance, is a significant improvement and my expectation is that when I complete my review, I will replace the existing article with the proposed draft. I've identified a couple small edits that I intend to make myself after that replacement. However, I've identified a few things that could either be changed before the move (to avoid the need for a COI request for each one) and a couple of the questions that I think will be easy to answer which will help facilitate my review.

The article states, In 2012, Bob Bechek was appointed CEO and was later ranked as the most-liked CEO in Glassdoor employee surveys. That is souced to this site, which I cannot directly access. While I suspect I could go to our resources page and arrange for access, I think a simpler approach would be for you to quote the sentence that supports the statement here.
Similarly, I don't doubt that Like the other big consulting firms, it began working more with governments., but I have an access issue so a supporting quote would satisfy me. (If you want to be anal, the cite news template does have a quote parameter, which may help other readers. Obviously the quote has to be short enough to avoid copyright issues but I suspect a single sentence will be sufficient.
One section includes the phrase: "...by introducing specialized departments focused on areas like the supply chain...", while another says "Bain introduced service packages for specific areas of expertise, such as the supply chain". I don't bring this up because there in conflict but because they are duplicate. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for making a point in more than one section but this doesn't seem to be the case here.
When I read the establishment section and ran across "Bain & Company was incorporated in 1985", I was momentarily surprised as my recollection is that the decision to incorporate was a fairly big deal and deserved more than this bland statement. I do see that the issue is explored in more depth further down, and perhaps that's enough but it felt a bit awkward to see the simple statement without any recognition of the fact that it was a big deal.
I was looking up bainlab, and stumbled across this which is possibly useful (see page 82):
- F. Czerniawska (13 January 2016). Management Consultancy: What Next?. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 81–. ISBN 978-1-4039-0718-9.
There's some issue with footnote 31 --S Philbrick (Talk) 21:24, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Very busy now, just saw after ping. No time to read through, but at a glance draft looks like a whitewash of corporate misdeeds. "The Guinness situation" is a weaselly term to discuss the Guinness share-trading fraud; not encyclopedic in tone. Carlstak (talk)

Thanks @Sphilbrick:. I have made edits corresponding to your feedback in the draft and provided quotes from the cited material where requested (see notes below). Except for the item on incorporation; I'll have to research that later to see if I can find sources regarding its significance. CorporateM (Talk) 12:16, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Responses to Sphilbrick's comments

The article states, In 2012, Bob Bechek was appointed CEO and was later ranked as the most-liked CEO in Glassdoor employee surveys. That is souced to this site, which I cannot directly access. While I suspect I could go to our resources page and arrange for access, I think a simpler approach would be for you to quote the sentence that supports the statement here.

"For the past three years, these well-known Silicon Valley CEOs topped Glassdoor's annual list of the chief executives with the highest anonymous approval ratings from employees on the career web site. . . Bob Bechek, the worldwide managing director of Bain & Company, the management consulting firm, was ranked highest on this year's list." I can also plug in a different source if you prefer: CNBC TIME

Similarly, I don't doubt that Like the other big consulting firms, it began working more with governments., but I have an access issue so a supporting quote would satisfy me. (If you want to be anal, the cite news template does have a quote parameter, which may help other readers. Obviously the quote has to be short enough to avoid copyright issues but I suspect a single sentence will be sufficient.

Done Added quote to citation parameter: [1]

One section includes the phrase: "...by introducing specialized departments focused on areas like the supply chain...", while another says "Bain introduced service packages for specific areas of expertise, such as the supply chain". I don't bring this up because there in conflict but because they are duplicate. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for making a point in more than one section but this doesn't seem to be the case here.

Done[2]

When I read the establishment section and ran across "Bain & Company was incorporated in 1985", I was momentarily surprised as my recollection is that the decision to incorporate was a fairly big deal and deserved more than this bland statement. I do see that the issue is explored in more depth further down, and perhaps that's enough but it felt a bit awkward to see the simple statement without any recognition of the fact that it was a big deal.

I'll have to dig into this later to see if there are any sources I missed. CorporateM (Talk) 12:09, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

I was looking up bainlab, and stumbled across this which is possibly useful (see page 82):
- F. Czerniawska (13 January 2016). Management Consultancy: What Next?. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 81–. ISBN 978-1-4039-0718-9.

Done CorporateM (Talk) 12:13, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

There's some issue with footnote 31

Done

Replacement

I have replaced the current article with the improve draft. Theraft did not have the navigation templates or categories so I left those intact.

There are two other issues that should be addressed:

The earlier version had an image which may be appropriate to use in the article File:Orit_Gadiesh.jpg
The earlier version had a logo which I will track down and restore Done--S Philbrick (Talk) 13:22, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Introduction

Hi. I am affiliated with Bain & Company and would like to help improve this article in a manner compliant with WP:COI.

A few things that jump out at me about the current article:

A dedicated section for Awards and Rankings
A dedicated section for Controversies
Some controversies are based entirely on press releases and law firm websites
No section on what it is they do to make money

I would like to get the article up to the GA quality level. I've prepared a draft here I think would bring it there, but I'm also happy to discuss improvements to the page in smaller bites. Thank you in advance to anyone that pitches in. CorporateM (Talk) 22:21, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Draft review process - preliminary comments

I'm taking a look at the draft, and will have more to say about it soon. However, I'll start with a process comment. It's my opinion that editing an article organically (in other words the usual way, making relatively modest changes in each edit) can be done without fanfare. In contrast, an alternative approach, wholesale replacement of the existing article by a revised draft, is a bigger deal and not not to be done cavalierly. There are definite advantages to this alternative, but there are some potential downsides, and I wanted to mitigate them.

The first way to mitigate them is to announce the plan in advance and carefully consider any comments on the plan. I see that this announcement was made 12 days ago, and not a single comment has ensued. That might be justification for going ahead, but I decided upon another option. It occurred to me that some of the contributors to this article may have dropped it from their watchlist, or perhaps their watchlist, (like mine) is bloated, and they missed it. I looked at the top 10 contributors to this article to reach out to them to make sure they have seen the plan.

Researching the top 10 contributors resulted in some troubling observations, which may go a long way to explaining the lack of reaction to the plan.

The fourth and fifth place contributors are IP editors.(Nothing wrong with that per se except to note that pings do not work for IP's) Neither have contributed since 2011 (and neither have contributed to any article other than this one). Given their six-year absence it's unlikely that reaching out to them would be fruitful
The eighth place contributor is also an IP, and has a message on the talk page noting that the address is registered to Bain & Company. They have not contributed since 2015.
The top three contributors are all blocked. The first two are blocked as sock puppets
The ninth place contributor has not edited since 2008 (and has made only one edit other than to this article)
The 10th Place contributor has not edited since 2007 (and is made no edits other than to this article)
The only two active editors in the list are hereby pinged: @Carlstak:, @DMCer:.