In the 60s and 70s there's was this commonly expressed idea that the Capitalist West and Communist East were both essentially converging towards the same thing. Namely a corporatist system where enterprises, be they multinational conglomerates or state owned enterprises, were so complex and had such diffused ownership that management of the economy would default into the hands of professional managers and faceless technocrats.
Of course, this was never true*, but it wasn't entirely wrong either. It's not inaccurate to say that in practical terms there was plenty of overlap in terms of things like logistics, internal administration, and general management. Moreover, there was plenty of direct business dealings between western companies and state enterprises. So I'm a little curious if things got to the point where the Soviets did things like send people out to participate in corporate workshops or hired consultants to come in to get things up to snuff.
^(*Please, unless you have something) ^(really) ^(interesting to say, please don't make your response a litany of all the failings of the Soviet system, I'm already well aware of all that)
Where there the equivalent of corporate workshops and outside consultants? Sort of.
Soviet enterprises had a special type of employee who was basically a "fixer", literally called a "pusher". From an earlier answer of mine:
"While the USSR was theoretically a planned, centralized command economy, with GOSPLAN acting as the state body setting prices and production targets for state-owned enterprises across the country, the realities were that the system never really functioned according to this ideal. State enterprises often held on to resources for use by directors or employees, or for informal trade with other state enterprises. Likewise, enterprises employed “pushers” (tolkati), who engaged in this informal trade, and also negotiated with state planners to determine what final, acceptable production figures would be. There was a lot of wastage, inefficiency, and negotiation that would undermine planned production quotas, and on top of this distribution networks in the USSR were notoriously bad."
Another aspect for an enterprise would be that, even if it had pushers working on production quotas, if an enterprise didn't meet quotas, it could face extra attention from economic planners and bosses in whatever industrial ministry the enterprise was part of. But in this case it would be less a matter of bringing outside consultants (ie, paying another enterprise for consulting services) and more a matter of transferring over management personnel from another enterprise to look into matters.