I'm not sure what he means here - the higher up you get, the better the ratio. For partners it gets inverted - they are making more than their billing rates because they're getting a cut of everyone below them's billing too.
When you buy consulting, you're buying a commodity. The premium is meant to insure you against natural variation, key people quitting, and so forth. Joe Accenture is meant to be interchangeable with any other Accenture consultant. A lot of the overhead is the extremely rigid, prescriptive methodologies that are supposed to make this possible. For multi-year projects, enough budget-holders believe that this is worthwhile for the entire Big Consulting industry to exist.
When you buy consulting, you're buying a commodity. The premium is meant to insure you against natural variation, key people quitting, and so forth. Joe Accenture is meant to be interchangeable with any other Accenture consultant. A lot of the overhead is the extremely rigid, prescriptive methodologies that are supposed to make this possible. For multi-year projects, enough budget-holders believe that this is worthwhile for the entire Big Consulting industry to exist.