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excellent article about the flaws of mckinsey as an establishment. it's true that their grift is inexcusable, amoral, and a burden to humanity -- but the OP cov

excellent article about the flaws of mckinsey as an establishment. it's true that their grift is inexcusable, amoral, and a burden to humanity -- but the OP covered that. the biggest myth surrounding mckinsey is that they're competent. my favorite part about people from mckinsey has been that they're stunningly incapable. need some quick research done? after a lot of hand-holding, you'll be given an uninsightful and dubiously comprehensive summary of the mainstream view on the topic of your choice and a pivot table you didn't want or need, roughly 10 days after you needed it. you won't need to proofread the report, of course. but that isn't what you cared about anyway. need something obscure and complex deeply analyzed and fully understood in an insightful way? again, you'll get some flashy combination of excel and powerpoint shit you don't need or ask for, maybe even ahead of schedule, but you'll also get an irrelevant speech about whatever tangentially topical prestigious person/institution the mckinsey person recently bumped elbows with. you'll also realize that the person working on the thing you wanted doesn't really have any understanding of the thing you wanted them to understand at all -- they're just regurgitating whatever they could find without analysis. however, they've all been imminently presentable people who can articulate themselves clearly and appear to be very serious. this has been my experience with no fewer than 4 former employees -- all of whom were hired to perform tasks exactly like one would expect a business management consultant to be capable of -- but take it with a grain of salt anyway.

smacktoward 7y ago
Never underestimate the market for some credentialed person who will tell you what you already wanted to hear.
- cryoshon 7y ago
  ah yeah, i'm glad you mentioned this because that's the one thing i forgot to include in my original comment: former mckinsey people seem to only tell you what they think you want to hear. they're the ultimate sycophants -- and my experience is that they're the best that money can buy for the task of telling you that you're right, especially when you're completely wrong. it's a real pain, especially when you don't have enough information on an issue to form an opinion yet. you'll get all kinds of probing questions trying to sneakily suss out exactly what you're expecting to see or which way you want them to affirm your opinion on the subject at hand. it seems like their target customer is always someone who wants to add legitimacy to their bad ideas, and they will treat you as such even if you don't want to fit that bill. they're incapable of being objective regarding facts of reality because their mental model for truth is that something that is "right" or "true" only per the opinion of whichever authority figure is the most salient at the moment. it explains a lot about why they're so amoral. it also explains a lot about why they fit in so well to the world of the elites: they're not ever going to have the moral gumption to speak truth to power... or even to the disempowered.
g_sch 7y ago
I think the article makes a pretty persuasive case why competence isn't a core selling point of McKinsey (or many other management consultancies) anyway. What many companies want is for an external party to tell them to do what they've already decided to do anyway, but would rather not take personal accountability for. They're paying for the amorality - if the suggestion comes from someone else, it's not _you_ being amoral, it's a consultancy with a prestigious brand that everyone else listens to, even if this unspecified "everyone else" is hiring McKinsey for the same reason you are: to defer blame for doing something abhorrent.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Yes, just so. Criticizing McKinsey-type outfits for being amoral misses the point. For them, amorality is the product.
Maven911 7y ago
My gosh this is incredibly accurate and my experience as well, though I could never clearly articulate it on why until now. Can you give some more stories on specific instances?
- cryoshon 7y ago
  sure. while working on a project intended for a government institution, a team at mckinsey hired a digital illustrator to create a handful of beautiful scenes from a high middle ages fantasy world. i have to say, the illustrations weren't relevant to the project, but they really made the powerpoint deck look utterly gorgeous. the content of the powerpoint, intended to be highly insightful and fuel for decisionmakers, had about three paragraphs of written content across ~50 slides. the rationale for this very light amount of information was that the intended audience of the presentation would have their eyes glaze over if they saw anything with more than one sentence's worth of exposition. the audience -- government decisionmakers -- needed to be drip-fed the content they'd paid for, or else they wouldn't understand it. at the time, i thought it was incredibly limiting for the client, even if the mckinseyites were correct about the client's poor ability to digest material -- which was no sure bet. of course, in retrospect this entire rationale was just a cover for the utter lack of insightfulness/knowledge/competency brough to the table by the mckinsey team. the project was light on information and heavy on illustration because the team hadn't ever had a clue about the substance of what they were trying to do. the lesson here -- and there are other anecdotes in this vein too -- is that the mckinseyites are adept at gaslighting both themselves and their clients such that the innumerable shortcomings of their output are slickly presented as features.
  - Maven911 7y ago
    Thank you!

smacktoward 7y ago

Never underestimate the market for some credentialed person who will tell you what you already wanted to hear.

cryoshon 7y ago
ah yeah, i'm glad you mentioned this because that's the one thing i forgot to include in my original comment: former mckinsey people seem to only tell you what they think you want to hear. they're the ultimate sycophants -- and my experience is that they're the best that money can buy for the task of telling you that you're right, especially when you're completely wrong. it's a real pain, especially when you don't have enough information on an issue to form an opinion yet. you'll get all kinds of probing questions trying to sneakily suss out exactly what you're expecting to see or which way you want them to affirm your opinion on the subject at hand. it seems like their target customer is always someone who wants to add legitimacy to their bad ideas, and they will treat you as such even if you don't want to fit that bill. they're incapable of being objective regarding facts of reality because their mental model for truth is that something that is "right" or "true" only per the opinion of whichever authority figure is the most salient at the moment. it explains a lot about why they're so amoral. it also explains a lot about why they fit in so well to the world of the elites: they're not ever going to have the moral gumption to speak truth to power... or even to the disempowered.

g_sch 7y ago

I think the article makes a pretty persuasive case why competence isn't a core selling point of McKinsey (or many other management consultancies) anyway. What many companies want is for an external party to tell them to do what they've already decided to do anyway, but would rather not take personal accountability for. They're paying for the amorality - if the suggestion comes from someone else, it's not _you_ being amoral, it's a consultancy with a prestigious brand that everyone else listens to, even if this unspecified "everyone else" is hiring McKinsey for the same reason you are: to defer blame for doing something abhorrent.

smacktoward 7y ago
Yes, just so. Criticizing McKinsey-type outfits for being amoral misses the point. For them, amorality is the product.

Maven911 7y ago

My gosh this is incredibly accurate and my experience as well, though I could never clearly articulate it on why until now. Can you give some more stories on specific instances?

cryoshon 7y ago
sure. while working on a project intended for a government institution, a team at mckinsey hired a digital illustrator to create a handful of beautiful scenes from a high middle ages fantasy world. i have to say, the illustrations weren't relevant to the project, but they really made the powerpoint deck look utterly gorgeous. the content of the powerpoint, intended to be highly insightful and fuel for decisionmakers, had about three paragraphs of written content across ~50 slides. the rationale for this very light amount of information was that the intended audience of the presentation would have their eyes glaze over if they saw anything with more than one sentence's worth of exposition. the audience -- government decisionmakers -- needed to be drip-fed the content they'd paid for, or else they wouldn't understand it. at the time, i thought it was incredibly limiting for the client, even if the mckinseyites were correct about the client's poor ability to digest material -- which was no sure bet. of course, in retrospect this entire rationale was just a cover for the utter lack of insightfulness/knowledge/competency brough to the table by the mckinsey team. the project was light on information and heavy on illustration because the team hadn't ever had a clue about the substance of what they were trying to do. the lesson here -- and there are other anecdotes in this vein too -- is that the mckinseyites are adept at gaslighting both themselves and their clients such that the innumerable shortcomings of their output are slickly presented as features.
- Maven911 7y ago
  Thank you!