21 ms·

McKinsey, technocratic management, and structural inequality

255 points by cushychicken 7y ago

adaisadais 7y ago
“...foment a stratification within companies and society” by concentrating the management function in elite executives, aided (of course) by advisers from consultants’ own ranks...” Good ole boys club. Lords, Dukes, and Earls, Senatores and Equitares. It’s the same old story just repackaged slightly. “Meet the new Boss / Same as the old Boss” -The Who
matchbok 7y ago
Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. These anti-Pete articles are so shallow and ignorant. Any parent would have been proud to have their son get a job there at his age. I guess in 4 years the only acceptable prior job to being president is a lemonade salesperson. Most people, including middle class folks, don't have the luxury of only choosing non-profit jobs or volunteering.
- tempsy 7y ago
  I think there’s a perfectly valid question as to whether the best and brightest going into prestige shops for the sake of building prestige is the best use of talent in our society.
  - matchbok 7y ago
    That's up to them, and the market. It is not their fault those industries pay more.
    - tempsy 7y ago
      No one is saying it isn’t. It’s just a critique. Calm down.
      - matchbok 7y ago
        I'm pretty calm, actually, thanks. Seems like you are the one who needs to calm down by assuming as such.
    - _jal 7y ago
      So which is it - not Pete's fault, or something to be proud of? For the record, I grew up very poor. Lower-middle class was an unattainable aspiration for my parents. I'm doing very well for myself, and have never compromised my morals to do so. I turned down good paying jobs when it hurt to do so because the work was slimy. You don't have to sell yourself out to make money. If you do, that's a choice. (To be clear, I'm not saying Mayo Pete is a sell out - I don't really care enough to look, but from what I've seen he seems like a true believer in the notion that his job is to tell the proles why they can't have nice things while cutting deals in wine caves. It is easy to understand why the Democrats produce so many of these people; what is inexplicable to me is why anyone except Republicans like them.)
      - remarkEon 7y ago
        >...what is inexplicable to me is why anyone except Republicans like them Might be my own bubble, or perhaps things are changing, but I haven't met a Republican that likes these people. They are usual quite hostile to them.
        _jal 7y ago
        Because they cause internecine conflict on the other side, not as someone to vote for.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        > "You don't have to sell yourself out to make money. If you do, that's a choice." You'll find that the many people today (like the author) will consider you to be very privileged for having the opportunity to do so.
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      Okay, then perhaps it's our fault that those industries pay more. There might be policy options that could change this. "Let the market decide" is unfortunately, at least in my view, becoming an almost religious creed.
  - suvir_c 7y ago
    to be fair, he entered local gov after mckinsey
  - manigandham 7y ago
    The answer to the question is no. It's not hard to imagine utopia where everyone's efforts are maximized to drive humanity forward. But in reality it's up to the individual to decide what they want to do. Discussions about choosing the "best" use of talent often devolve into a subjective moral hierarchy and predeterminism.
  - cubecul 7y ago
    If they go in for 2 years and come out to do other things, like many of us did/do, seems like there's not much loss. Reference point: my McK class had 40 people start about 5 years ago, and today only 2 are still there.
    - majos 7y ago
      What do people usually do afterward?
      - cubecul 7y ago
        I have seen (these are from a broader pool of a couple hundred people +/- 1 year from me): business school, other/real graduate school (e.g., math), private equity, political campaigns (e.g., Buttigieg's), startup founder, startup early employee, tech companies of all roles (commonly biz ops and PM), software engineer, restaurant line cook, large corporations (e.g., McDonald's). Essentially, the same stuff high-achieving new grads do, but I would say my peers come out a little sharper on communication, operating independently, driving work efficiently, etc.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. What corrections would you suggest for the article?
- linksnapzz 7y ago
  Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. "Beware of the 'real world'; a speaker's appeal to it is always an invitation to not challenge his tacit assumptions." My suspicion is that Edsger Dijkstra wouldn't have found management consultants to be terribly useful.
- appleiigs 7y ago
  > Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. LOL. I'll tell you how it would go if you brought in a consultant for a library. The consultant would produce the most beautiful wire-frame UI you ever seen, with lots of arrows, buttons and stuff. It would organize all books in a neat table by title, author, publishing date, etc. Then at go-live, you'll realize the table is all funked up because "JK Rowling", "J.K. Rowling" and "J. K. Rowling" are all listed as different authors. Let the behind schedule and over-budget fun begin. Whereas, if you asked the nice old lady who's been a librarian for 30 years, she would have told you to start with a table of authors first and then build up to the UI from there, not in reverse.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    To be fair, the CEO is generating more market value by creating a bunch of mistakes, hiring people to fix the mistakes and then offloading those costs onto the consumers. Why make something good when you can make something bad and force people to pay in order to make it decent?
- jariel 7y ago
  "Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works." Anyone who thinks that McKinsey is above criticism definitely has no idea how consulting, or the real world works.
  - matchbok 7y ago
    Not talking about McKinsey, talking about someone working there. Big difference.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  > no idea how consulting [...] works I don't know, does it work? Our government hired them once. Was a bit of a scandal and didn't produce results. But I should thank them for trying to get help at least. I think the criticism in the article is on point here.
jayparth 7y ago
I think it's interesting how this article painted middle management as the good guys. In my experience, "intricate layers" of middle management is not a good thing- most of these "layers" do not add value and it's why companies chase a flat org chart. Arguing that management takes the lion share of pay, and McKinsey has captured this value away from the middle class, is also a silly argument. McKinsey's revenue is small on an absolute scale- $10B last year. Companies in the Fortune 100, which they mention, generate trillions in revenue. They haven't really captured this value at all. Here are some things that are true: - A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago. - The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down. The rest of the article feels like fluff.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago. The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down. Don't trivialize these points. This has been the econo-political trend for decades, and only now is the general public starting to become aware of it (thanks in no small part to Andrew Yang). It's also the dark secret of the idealistic neoliberalism taught in undergrad economics classes, where they like to emphasize that "the pie has grown" with little regard to how said pie is distributed. Economists understand the subtlety here, but it doesn't end up in the lesson plans and kids come away with some pretty warped ideas about what economic policy.
  - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    Most importantly, it’s not consultants causing this, it’s tech making organizing large groups easier. The consultants are mostly just helping slow changing orgs inch towards better business models. Not crazy cutting edge tech either. We still haven’t seen the business world fully meet the low hanging fruit potential of excel, email, and messaging.
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bduerst 7y ago
This article is a little light on the data. Yes, the premise of trends showing union busting and falling middle class wealth levels are established, but the author seems to want to show they were caused, not correlated, by the management consulting industry. This seems to be in an effort to incriminate Buttigieg by proxy (whom I do not care about either way). The argument seems to be willfully ignoring other factors that have contributed to the trends, the most obvious being political. As a counter: I remember protesting the breakup of the public sector unions in my state, which was lead by a Governor with a very specific anti-union agenda, not a management consultancy.
dvt 7y ago
Oh boy, another Yale, LSE, and Oxford graduate lecturing us on "structural inequalities" -- yawn. He's also decided to double-dip and is now back at Yale Law teaching after clerking for a federal judge. Excuse me while I roll my eyes a full 720 degrees. How exactly, sir, are you better than Pete Buttigieg? This is the pot calling the kettle black to the n-th degree. My main problems with the article, apart from the above: 1. The connection between consulting firms like McKinsey and dwindling union memberships is tenuous at best. I'm not sure that there's any causal link, and the article just kind of shoehorns it in. 2. Wait, why are we talking about CEO salaries? What does this have to do with anything? Oh, I get it -- it's going to get The Atlantic a bunch of "controversy clicks" on Facebook and Twitter. 3. "Whereas a century ago, fewer than one in five of America’s business leaders had completed college, top executives today typically have elite degrees" -- a century ago, we also didn't have little boxes that could access the entirety of human knowledge in about 30 milliseconds. A millennia ago, most of us were illiterate. Times change. I'm genuinely not sure what the point is here. 4. "This is a dangerous belief. Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind the structural inequalities that are dismantling the American middle class.." -- but Yale & Oxford educated lawyers can. Got it.
- trentdk 7y ago
  This reply seems overly aggressive; am I missing something?
  - dvt 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm allergic to bullshit and click-bait. And this article has plenty of both.
- rohitb91 7y ago
  ...Do you work for McKinsey?
- samcal 7y ago
  I don't expect to change your mind, but I had a very different reading of this article than you did and here are my thoughts on the 4 points that you raised: 1. I don't think it's a big secret that stamping out unions is a key part of modern management. If McKinsey and other consulting firms were management consultants, they should be even more aware of that strategy and would have been in a key position to effect that change over a large number of companies. 2. CEO salaries are certainly relevant to the working middle class, since they are commonly seen as tremendously too high and the extra money could contribute to the middle class' wage. 3. I think the point of that sentence is more like "the amount of effort it takes to become successful is significantly greater than it was when the system worked better." 4. He's not trying to be the technocratic management, he's literally arguing against its existence.
Legogris 7y ago
The article brings up very interesting correlations and it'd be interesting to see someone dive deeper in this, but I find the subtitle "Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities." very opinionated, fatalistic and not backed up by the article.
jshaqaw 7y ago
American democracy, the left believes, cannot be rejuvenated by persuading elites to deploy their excessive power somehow more benevolently. Instead, it requires breaking the stranglehold that elites have on our economics and politics, and reempowering everyone else. ... says the Guido Calibresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Change the time and place and you’d pretty much have a Marx quote.
- lordlic 7y ago
  By analogy... I'm a well-off technocrat and I think the big tech monopolies should be broken up and taxed more (and I think I should be taxed more also). That doesn't make me a hypocrite, it makes my position stronger because it eliminates resentment toward successful tech elites as a possible motive. I think it speaks well of this guy that he's not some bitter barista ranting about elites - he's talking about knocking his own class down a peg.
  - throwaway17_17 7y ago
    It may speak well of him, but it is the bitter barista, ready to enforce that knocking down a peg, who ends of in control. Just because you are willing to accept a tax increase of some percentage does not align your motives and position with the hypothetical barista. I think that is the actual substance, of not the intent of the parent comment. After all, that bitter barista and his friends have no problem spray painting ‘liberals get the bullet too’ on things as they attempt to prove there point.
    - lordlic 7y ago
      I'm not just willing to accept some small tax increase, I'm willing to accept (and actively advocating/voting for) radical socialist transformation of our economy to a point that would be far beyond anything that would be in my own interest. I vehemently disagree that I'm not "really" on the same side as the barista because our interests don't align. There are some of us out there who will fight for what's right even if it's against our own selfish interests. Obviously we don't share the same struggles as, say, the struggling barista on a day-to-day basis so sometimes the appropriate urgency isn't there but in the end we are 100% on the same side. > it is the bitter barista, ready to enforce that knocking down a peg, who ends of in control This is not really the goal in my experience moving in leftist circles. There's a lot of talk about bringing the wealthy down to the same level as everyone else to eliminate various forms of inequality, but not much talk about inverting the system so that the formerly rich are now under the heel of the formerly poor. The ones "in control" would be everyone, including the former elites.
travisoneill1 7y ago
It should also be noted that McKinsey makes a substantial part of its income from ripping off the government. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-ice-buttigieg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-ic...
- pcurve 7y ago
  And clueless management at large corporations. My opinion or them is very low after a few engagement in technology implementation. Maybe they are better at general consulting so your mileage may vary.
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supernova87a 7y ago
Yawn. Popular as it is to falsely attribute blame for all of the corporate world's ills on consultants, it's inaccurate and lazy. When you've worked for a consulting company, you learn that none of them are centers of innovation. They didn't create these trends. That's not what their strength is. They're not (and weren't) the ones inventing offshoring, telecommuting, barcodes, bluetooth, etc. They only greased the wheels to help existing trends in business to happen. How could they be the leaders of important business trends? The average tenure of people in consulting is about 3 years. They get in, help do some work a company wanted to do anyway, and get out. Maybe make a few 2x2 charts while they're there to point out the obvious to the oblivious. Don't blame the consultants for getting companies or governments to become the soulless entities they are today. Blame lazy (or malicious or incompetent) thinking at companies and governments, fueled by the desires of everyone to have things at lower price, faster, and smaller, and to not pay for it now but shirk it off as debt to be paid by the future responsible people who can't vote right now. We're all responsible for the trends in business, every one of us in our daily civic and commercial behavior. Consultants were just some of the messengers.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Not just the world's consultants, on one particular consultant who kept getting called out, and who is presently running for office. Not that I have any particular support for the 2020 candidates, but what does this author have against that particular individual? It's like the whole thing is written to get at the candidate by convincing people that McKinsey consultants are evil and then mentioning that he used to be one of them.
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spyckie2 7y ago
What a disingenuous article. To put the entire blame on management consultants for wealth inequality and then to say, btw, Pete is one of them - it reeks of agenda politics and a hit piece. Let's talk about the actual substance of the article, which there is surprisingly little. First, the author claims that managers used to come from the working class before 1955, and that the managerial consultant class made it so that working class people could never become managers. A more plausible explanation is that in the older days, planning capacity was more evenly distributed among the working class and as the education system in the US matured, smarter people with the capability for planning and strategy were less likely to start off as a clerk or factory worker. Second, the author claims that the managerial consultant class is responsible for wealth inequality by systematically reducing middle management and pushing the "profits to shareholders" maxim that has dominated corporate America. He implies that America would be just as wealthy and much more evenly distributed if they didn't exist. As much as I would love to pull out a torch and ascribe blame the way the author does (blissfully), it's just not what is happening. No one wants to hear this, but middle managers were cut out not because of an agenda but because they were over payed and inefficient, as measured by the economic system. It's popular but unfair to say that companies benefit the shareholders at the cost of society. Companies benefit the consumer the most through better products and lower costs, which is a tenant of globalism and largely true, as we've experienced a consumption boom that we've never experienced in the history of mankind. Standard of living is incredibly high as consumers. However, consumers are also the employees of companies, and wages have been stagnant for a long time. But it's not that smart, rich, capable people steal from poor, middle class, working people, but rather the systemic properties of capitalism make wealth unequally distributed as a byproduct of producing value efficiently. If you must scratch the itch to blame something, blame the system, not the people in the system. This problem of growing inequality existed for a long time but the lack of visibility and ultra cheap consumption by companies exploiting global opportunities to temporarily reduce cost of goods placated most Americans. Employees (consumers) still get gains from the economy by benefitting from stuff being either cheaper or continually better quality. As long as we can continue to reduce costs or improve quality at same cost, then stagnant wages is not an issue because standard of living is still rising. (Yes, I know standard of living as a metric has been constant or falling since forever, but you can't compare telegraphs to iPhones). Well, after employing cheap labor from 3rd world countries and making possibly the cheapest produced goods in history from China, we've mined out all the global opportunities. Going even cheaper is no longer an option (although there is no lack of trying) - that bandaid is no more, and now people want a stronger fix - this has been the conversation topic of the election and for most America for about 5-10 years. To do what the author does - imply that people, not systems, are to blame - is a step back in terms of discourse. It indicates to me that the author puts blame and agenda politics over a desire to understand and solve issues, and cleverly masks it by sounding intelligent.
tacitusarc 7y ago
I really despise McKinsey but this just feels like a strange hit piece on Pete Buttigieg.
throwawaysea 7y ago
This just seems like an article written to attack a viable moderate Democrat (Pete Buttigieg). The narrow characterization of management consulting companies seems disconnected from reality. And of course, there’s the author’s biased worldview, as he authored “The Meritocracy Trap”.
lambdasquirrel 7y ago
How is it that there's no mentioning that the pipeline to get into McKinsey is hardly technocratic – and that there's little reason to believe that its management is technocratic too? The values of that world are not exactly aligned with "Hackers and Painters." Say what you will about one value system versus the other, if you will. We don't have to judge their culture versus ours. But, cmon...
kriro 7y ago
My first lesson in the real world after I graduated was that the big name consulting companies are in many instances just well managed brand names. They are often used by management to "objectify" decisions tat are already made. Specifically decisions that are not easy to sell to everyone like layoffs. It basically goes like this: 1) We think X people need to go 2) Hire BCG/McKinsey (the more recognized, the better so usually one of the two) 3) After an "independent" audit they recommend X people need to go (sorry we can't really do anything about it, after all this famous consulting company recommended it) Had the same experience with technology consultants when management wanted to switch the tech stack to something they thought they needed. At a smaller company I worked for, we basically needed to add a tech consultant to all bigger projects as insurance for big companies that were our customers and that was a hot mess because they knew it and sent the most junior/inexperienced people who were usually a net negative on productivity. I also had two cases of very lackluster big name consulting companies. One had done some of the calculations in the wrong currency which lead to interesting results and one had the classic slides with names/logo of another client on them. Back at university I strongly considered putting in some years at a big name consulting company to boost my CV, make some money and get insights into some interesting projects. It seemed like genuinely interesting work, too. Pretty glad I didn't go that route. I'm curious if someone here has more positive experiences working with (or maybe for) consulting companies. My current mindset is...avoid at all costs.
- throwaway_bcg 7y ago
  Hi, I have worked at a top tier consulting firm to improve a companies technology offering. From my experience, there are two stories consultants of these companies tell themselves. One of them is the one you just told right now. The other is where they can genuinely help with the problem at hand. Some consultants really provide objective value to the current working of a companies system and provide well needed direction to a companies strategy. Our firm has helped change operation fundamentals for these firms at crucial points in their lifetime.
  - majos 7y ago
    What do you think is the split between these stories? How many gigs/how much revenue fall into bucket one vs bucket two, if you had to guess?
myspy 7y ago
As a non-americas, I view these companies with wariness. They are at the center of a change that is outsourcing what wouldn't have needed to be outsourced. Of people overworking themselves and pushing that behaviour down on others. On young people having no life experience and inflicting massive damage on other people. Maybe there are some that do good work, but there are so many consultancies, that we forgot somehow to structure businesses without making profit the one and only goal. The sentence about profit in that article best describes the problem. Businesses should be about humans and not profit first. At least when trying to increase profit think about the consequences on society and the people.
- apexalpha 7y ago
  McKinsey came into my company with a new, foreign CEO. They wrote some report that (obviously) agreed with what the CEO was planning to do. Then it turned out all their numbers about Churn, employee engagement, profit, revenue. All turned out wrong. Quarter after quarter all their prediction are turning out to be complete bullshit, even though there was no economic downturn or any big change that happened. They left with millions in fees, taking no credit or blame. The CEO left as well. The rest of the company is trying to fix their mess.
ausbah 7y ago
Regardless of whether or not major consulting groups are actually ever worth the money or as good as their reputation makes them out to be, they're still morally bankrupt organizations that have no issue helping authoritarian regimes, rich people rip off governments, or the like.
sjg007 7y ago
This reminds me of the adage that if a small town has one lawyer then that lawyer is broke due to a lack of business. But if the town has two lawyers then they will have more business then they know what to do with. I want to say it is a Mark Twain quote but I can't find the reference.

255 points by cushychicken 7y ago

“...foment a stratification within companies and society” by concentrating the management function in elite executives, aided (of course) by advisers from consultants’ own ranks...” Good ole boys club. Lords, Dukes, and Earls, Senatores and Equitares. It’s the same old story just repackaged slightly. “Meet the new Boss / Same as the old Boss” -The Who

matchbok 7y ago

Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. These anti-Pete articles are so shallow and ignorant. Any parent would have been proud to have their son get a job there at his age. I guess in 4 years the only acceptable prior job to being president is a lemonade salesperson. Most people, including middle class folks, don't have the luxury of only choosing non-profit jobs or volunteering.

tempsy 7y ago
I think there’s a perfectly valid question as to whether the best and brightest going into prestige shops for the sake of building prestige is the best use of talent in our society.
- matchbok 7y ago
  That's up to them, and the market. It is not their fault those industries pay more.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    No one is saying it isn’t. It’s just a critique. Calm down.
    - matchbok 7y ago
      I'm pretty calm, actually, thanks. Seems like you are the one who needs to calm down by assuming as such.
  - _jal 7y ago
    So which is it - not Pete's fault, or something to be proud of? For the record, I grew up very poor. Lower-middle class was an unattainable aspiration for my parents. I'm doing very well for myself, and have never compromised my morals to do so. I turned down good paying jobs when it hurt to do so because the work was slimy. You don't have to sell yourself out to make money. If you do, that's a choice. (To be clear, I'm not saying Mayo Pete is a sell out - I don't really care enough to look, but from what I've seen he seems like a true believer in the notion that his job is to tell the proles why they can't have nice things while cutting deals in wine caves. It is easy to understand why the Democrats produce so many of these people; what is inexplicable to me is why anyone except Republicans like them.)
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      >...what is inexplicable to me is why anyone except Republicans like them Might be my own bubble, or perhaps things are changing, but I haven't met a Republican that likes these people. They are usual quite hostile to them.
      - _jal 7y ago
        Because they cause internecine conflict on the other side, not as someone to vote for.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      > "You don't have to sell yourself out to make money. If you do, that's a choice." You'll find that the many people today (like the author) will consider you to be very privileged for having the opportunity to do so.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    Okay, then perhaps it's our fault that those industries pay more. There might be policy options that could change this. "Let the market decide" is unfortunately, at least in my view, becoming an almost religious creed.
- suvir_c 7y ago
  to be fair, he entered local gov after mckinsey
- manigandham 7y ago
  The answer to the question is no. It's not hard to imagine utopia where everyone's efforts are maximized to drive humanity forward. But in reality it's up to the individual to decide what they want to do. Discussions about choosing the "best" use of talent often devolve into a subjective moral hierarchy and predeterminism.
- cubecul 7y ago
  If they go in for 2 years and come out to do other things, like many of us did/do, seems like there's not much loss. Reference point: my McK class had 40 people start about 5 years ago, and today only 2 are still there.
  - majos 7y ago
    What do people usually do afterward?
    - cubecul 7y ago
      I have seen (these are from a broader pool of a couple hundred people +/- 1 year from me): business school, other/real graduate school (e.g., math), private equity, political campaigns (e.g., Buttigieg's), startup founder, startup early employee, tech companies of all roles (commonly biz ops and PM), software engineer, restaurant line cook, large corporations (e.g., McDonald's). Essentially, the same stuff high-achieving new grads do, but I would say my peers come out a little sharper on communication, operating independently, driving work efficiently, etc.
DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
> Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. What corrections would you suggest for the article?
linksnapzz 7y ago
Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. "Beware of the 'real world'; a speaker's appeal to it is always an invitation to not challenge his tacit assumptions." My suspicion is that Edsger Dijkstra wouldn't have found management consultants to be terribly useful.
appleiigs 7y ago
> Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works. LOL. I'll tell you how it would go if you brought in a consultant for a library. The consultant would produce the most beautiful wire-frame UI you ever seen, with lots of arrows, buttons and stuff. It would organize all books in a neat table by title, author, publishing date, etc. Then at go-live, you'll realize the table is all funked up because "JK Rowling", "J.K. Rowling" and "J. K. Rowling" are all listed as different authors. Let the behind schedule and over-budget fun begin. Whereas, if you asked the nice old lady who's been a librarian for 30 years, she would have told you to start with a table of authors first and then build up to the UI from there, not in reverse.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  To be fair, the CEO is generating more market value by creating a bunch of mistakes, hiring people to fix the mistakes and then offloading those costs onto the consumers. Why make something good when you can make something bad and force people to pay in order to make it decent?
jariel 7y ago
"Anyone who criticizes McKinsey has no idea how consulting, or real companies, or the real world, works." Anyone who thinks that McKinsey is above criticism definitely has no idea how consulting, or the real world works.
- matchbok 7y ago
  Not talking about McKinsey, talking about someone working there. Big difference.
raxxorrax 7y ago
> no idea how consulting [...] works I don't know, does it work? Our government hired them once. Was a bit of a scandal and didn't produce results. But I should thank them for trying to get help at least. I think the criticism in the article is on point here.

jayparth 7y ago

I think it's interesting how this article painted middle management as the good guys. In my experience, "intricate layers" of middle management is not a good thing- most of these "layers" do not add value and it's why companies chase a flat org chart. Arguing that management takes the lion share of pay, and McKinsey has captured this value away from the middle class, is also a silly argument. McKinsey's revenue is small on an absolute scale- $10B last year. Companies in the Fortune 100, which they mention, generate trillions in revenue. They haven't really captured this value at all. Here are some things that are true: - A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago. - The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down. The rest of the article feels like fluff.

nerdponx 7y ago
A typical company nowadays has slimmed down, especially in middle management, compared to 50 years ago. The profits of this slimming have not necessarily trickled down. Don't trivialize these points. This has been the econo-political trend for decades, and only now is the general public starting to become aware of it (thanks in no small part to Andrew Yang). It's also the dark secret of the idealistic neoliberalism taught in undergrad economics classes, where they like to emphasize that "the pie has grown" with little regard to how said pie is distributed. Economists understand the subtlety here, but it doesn't end up in the lesson plans and kids come away with some pretty warped ideas about what economic policy.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  Most importantly, it’s not consultants causing this, it’s tech making organizing large groups easier. The consultants are mostly just helping slow changing orgs inch towards better business models. Not crazy cutting edge tech either. We still haven’t seen the business world fully meet the low hanging fruit potential of excel, email, and messaging.
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7y ago

bduerst 7y ago

This article is a little light on the data. Yes, the premise of trends showing union busting and falling middle class wealth levels are established, but the author seems to want to show they were caused, not correlated, by the management consulting industry. This seems to be in an effort to incriminate Buttigieg by proxy (whom I do not care about either way). The argument seems to be willfully ignoring other factors that have contributed to the trends, the most obvious being political. As a counter: I remember protesting the breakup of the public sector unions in my state, which was lead by a Governor with a very specific anti-union agenda, not a management consultancy.

dvt 7y ago

Oh boy, another Yale, LSE, and Oxford graduate lecturing us on "structural inequalities" -- yawn. He's also decided to double-dip and is now back at Yale Law teaching after clerking for a federal judge. Excuse me while I roll my eyes a full 720 degrees. How exactly, sir, are you better than Pete Buttigieg? This is the pot calling the kettle black to the n-th degree. My main problems with the article, apart from the above: 1. The connection between consulting firms like McKinsey and dwindling union memberships is tenuous at best. I'm not sure that there's any causal link, and the article just kind of shoehorns it in. 2. Wait, why are we talking about CEO salaries? What does this have to do with anything? Oh, I get it -- it's going to get The Atlantic a bunch of "controversy clicks" on Facebook and Twitter. 3. "Whereas a century ago, fewer than one in five of America’s business leaders had completed college, top executives today typically have elite degrees" -- a century ago, we also didn't have little boxes that could access the entirety of human knowledge in about 30 milliseconds. A millennia ago, most of us were illiterate. Times change. I'm genuinely not sure what the point is here. 4. "This is a dangerous belief. Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind the structural inequalities that are dismantling the American middle class.." -- but Yale & Oxford educated lawyers can. Got it.

trentdk 7y ago
This reply seems overly aggressive; am I missing something?
- dvt 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm allergic to bullshit and click-bait. And this article has plenty of both.
rohitb91 7y ago
...Do you work for McKinsey?
samcal 7y ago
I don't expect to change your mind, but I had a very different reading of this article than you did and here are my thoughts on the 4 points that you raised: 1. I don't think it's a big secret that stamping out unions is a key part of modern management. If McKinsey and other consulting firms were management consultants, they should be even more aware of that strategy and would have been in a key position to effect that change over a large number of companies. 2. CEO salaries are certainly relevant to the working middle class, since they are commonly seen as tremendously too high and the extra money could contribute to the middle class' wage. 3. I think the point of that sentence is more like "the amount of effort it takes to become successful is significantly greater than it was when the system worked better." 4. He's not trying to be the technocratic management, he's literally arguing against its existence.

Legogris 7y ago

The article brings up very interesting correlations and it'd be interesting to see someone dive deeper in this, but I find the subtitle "Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities." very opinionated, fatalistic and not backed up by the article.

jshaqaw 7y ago

American democracy, the left believes, cannot be rejuvenated by persuading elites to deploy their excessive power somehow more benevolently. Instead, it requires breaking the stranglehold that elites have on our economics and politics, and reempowering everyone else. ... says the Guido Calibresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School

AmericanChopper 7y ago
Change the time and place and you’d pretty much have a Marx quote.
lordlic 7y ago
By analogy... I'm a well-off technocrat and I think the big tech monopolies should be broken up and taxed more (and I think I should be taxed more also). That doesn't make me a hypocrite, it makes my position stronger because it eliminates resentment toward successful tech elites as a possible motive. I think it speaks well of this guy that he's not some bitter barista ranting about elites - he's talking about knocking his own class down a peg.
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  It may speak well of him, but it is the bitter barista, ready to enforce that knocking down a peg, who ends of in control. Just because you are willing to accept a tax increase of some percentage does not align your motives and position with the hypothetical barista. I think that is the actual substance, of not the intent of the parent comment. After all, that bitter barista and his friends have no problem spray painting ‘liberals get the bullet too’ on things as they attempt to prove there point.
  - lordlic 7y ago
    I'm not just willing to accept some small tax increase, I'm willing to accept (and actively advocating/voting for) radical socialist transformation of our economy to a point that would be far beyond anything that would be in my own interest. I vehemently disagree that I'm not "really" on the same side as the barista because our interests don't align. There are some of us out there who will fight for what's right even if it's against our own selfish interests. Obviously we don't share the same struggles as, say, the struggling barista on a day-to-day basis so sometimes the appropriate urgency isn't there but in the end we are 100% on the same side. > it is the bitter barista, ready to enforce that knocking down a peg, who ends of in control This is not really the goal in my experience moving in leftist circles. There's a lot of talk about bringing the wealthy down to the same level as everyone else to eliminate various forms of inequality, but not much talk about inverting the system so that the formerly rich are now under the heel of the formerly poor. The ones "in control" would be everyone, including the former elites.

travisoneill1 7y ago

It should also be noted that McKinsey makes a substantial part of its income from ripping off the government. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-ice-buttigieg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-ic...

pcurve 7y ago
And clueless management at large corporations. My opinion or them is very low after a few engagement in technology implementation. Maybe they are better at general consulting so your mileage may vary.

deleted 7y ago

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supernova87a 7y ago

Yawn. Popular as it is to falsely attribute blame for all of the corporate world's ills on consultants, it's inaccurate and lazy. When you've worked for a consulting company, you learn that none of them are centers of innovation. They didn't create these trends. That's not what their strength is. They're not (and weren't) the ones inventing offshoring, telecommuting, barcodes, bluetooth, etc. They only greased the wheels to help existing trends in business to happen. How could they be the leaders of important business trends? The average tenure of people in consulting is about 3 years. They get in, help do some work a company wanted to do anyway, and get out. Maybe make a few 2x2 charts while they're there to point out the obvious to the oblivious. Don't blame the consultants for getting companies or governments to become the soulless entities they are today. Blame lazy (or malicious or incompetent) thinking at companies and governments, fueled by the desires of everyone to have things at lower price, faster, and smaller, and to not pay for it now but shirk it off as debt to be paid by the future responsible people who can't vote right now. We're all responsible for the trends in business, every one of us in our daily civic and commercial behavior. Consultants were just some of the messengers.

whatshisface 7y ago
Not just the world's consultants, on one particular consultant who kept getting called out, and who is presently running for office. Not that I have any particular support for the 2020 candidates, but what does this author have against that particular individual? It's like the whole thing is written to get at the candidate by convincing people that McKinsey consultants are evil and then mentioning that he used to be one of them.

deleted 7y ago

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spyckie2 7y ago

What a disingenuous article. To put the entire blame on management consultants for wealth inequality and then to say, btw, Pete is one of them - it reeks of agenda politics and a hit piece. Let's talk about the actual substance of the article, which there is surprisingly little. First, the author claims that managers used to come from the working class before 1955, and that the managerial consultant class made it so that working class people could never become managers. A more plausible explanation is that in the older days, planning capacity was more evenly distributed among the working class and as the education system in the US matured, smarter people with the capability for planning and strategy were less likely to start off as a clerk or factory worker. Second, the author claims that the managerial consultant class is responsible for wealth inequality by systematically reducing middle management and pushing the "profits to shareholders" maxim that has dominated corporate America. He implies that America would be just as wealthy and much more evenly distributed if they didn't exist. As much as I would love to pull out a torch and ascribe blame the way the author does (blissfully), it's just not what is happening. No one wants to hear this, but middle managers were cut out not because of an agenda but because they were over payed and inefficient, as measured by the economic system. It's popular but unfair to say that companies benefit the shareholders at the cost of society. Companies benefit the consumer the most through better products and lower costs, which is a tenant of globalism and largely true, as we've experienced a consumption boom that we've never experienced in the history of mankind. Standard of living is incredibly high as consumers. However, consumers are also the employees of companies, and wages have been stagnant for a long time. But it's not that smart, rich, capable people steal from poor, middle class, working people, but rather the systemic properties of capitalism make wealth unequally distributed as a byproduct of producing value efficiently. If you must scratch the itch to blame something, blame the system, not the people in the system. This problem of growing inequality existed for a long time but the lack of visibility and ultra cheap consumption by companies exploiting global opportunities to temporarily reduce cost of goods placated most Americans. Employees (consumers) still get gains from the economy by benefitting from stuff being either cheaper or continually better quality. As long as we can continue to reduce costs or improve quality at same cost, then stagnant wages is not an issue because standard of living is still rising. (Yes, I know standard of living as a metric has been constant or falling since forever, but you can't compare telegraphs to iPhones). Well, after employing cheap labor from 3rd world countries and making possibly the cheapest produced goods in history from China, we've mined out all the global opportunities. Going even cheaper is no longer an option (although there is no lack of trying) - that bandaid is no more, and now people want a stronger fix - this has been the conversation topic of the election and for most America for about 5-10 years. To do what the author does - imply that people, not systems, are to blame - is a step back in terms of discourse. It indicates to me that the author puts blame and agenda politics over a desire to understand and solve issues, and cleverly masks it by sounding intelligent.

tacitusarc 7y ago

I really despise McKinsey but this just feels like a strange hit piece on Pete Buttigieg.

throwawaysea 7y ago

This just seems like an article written to attack a viable moderate Democrat (Pete Buttigieg). The narrow characterization of management consulting companies seems disconnected from reality. And of course, there’s the author’s biased worldview, as he authored “The Meritocracy Trap”.

lambdasquirrel 7y ago

How is it that there's no mentioning that the pipeline to get into McKinsey is hardly technocratic – and that there's little reason to believe that its management is technocratic too? The values of that world are not exactly aligned with "Hackers and Painters." Say what you will about one value system versus the other, if you will. We don't have to judge their culture versus ours. But, cmon...

kriro 7y ago

My first lesson in the real world after I graduated was that the big name consulting companies are in many instances just well managed brand names. They are often used by management to "objectify" decisions tat are already made. Specifically decisions that are not easy to sell to everyone like layoffs. It basically goes like this: 1) We think X people need to go 2) Hire BCG/McKinsey (the more recognized, the better so usually one of the two) 3) After an "independent" audit they recommend X people need to go (sorry we can't really do anything about it, after all this famous consulting company recommended it) Had the same experience with technology consultants when management wanted to switch the tech stack to something they thought they needed. At a smaller company I worked for, we basically needed to add a tech consultant to all bigger projects as insurance for big companies that were our customers and that was a hot mess because they knew it and sent the most junior/inexperienced people who were usually a net negative on productivity. I also had two cases of very lackluster big name consulting companies. One had done some of the calculations in the wrong currency which lead to interesting results and one had the classic slides with names/logo of another client on them. Back at university I strongly considered putting in some years at a big name consulting company to boost my CV, make some money and get insights into some interesting projects. It seemed like genuinely interesting work, too. Pretty glad I didn't go that route. I'm curious if someone here has more positive experiences working with (or maybe for) consulting companies. My current mindset is...avoid at all costs.

throwaway_bcg 7y ago
Hi, I have worked at a top tier consulting firm to improve a companies technology offering. From my experience, there are two stories consultants of these companies tell themselves. One of them is the one you just told right now. The other is where they can genuinely help with the problem at hand. Some consultants really provide objective value to the current working of a companies system and provide well needed direction to a companies strategy. Our firm has helped change operation fundamentals for these firms at crucial points in their lifetime.
- majos 7y ago
  What do you think is the split between these stories? How many gigs/how much revenue fall into bucket one vs bucket two, if you had to guess?

myspy 7y ago

As a non-americas, I view these companies with wariness. They are at the center of a change that is outsourcing what wouldn't have needed to be outsourced. Of people overworking themselves and pushing that behaviour down on others. On young people having no life experience and inflicting massive damage on other people. Maybe there are some that do good work, but there are so many consultancies, that we forgot somehow to structure businesses without making profit the one and only goal. The sentence about profit in that article best describes the problem. Businesses should be about humans and not profit first. At least when trying to increase profit think about the consequences on society and the people.

apexalpha 7y ago
McKinsey came into my company with a new, foreign CEO. They wrote some report that (obviously) agreed with what the CEO was planning to do. Then it turned out all their numbers about Churn, employee engagement, profit, revenue. All turned out wrong. Quarter after quarter all their prediction are turning out to be complete bullshit, even though there was no economic downturn or any big change that happened. They left with millions in fees, taking no credit or blame. The CEO left as well. The rest of the company is trying to fix their mess.

ausbah 7y ago

Regardless of whether or not major consulting groups are actually ever worth the money or as good as their reputation makes them out to be, they're still morally bankrupt organizations that have no issue helping authoritarian regimes, rich people rip off governments, or the like.

sjg007 7y ago

This reminds me of the adage that if a small town has one lawyer then that lawyer is broke due to a lack of business. But if the town has two lawyers then they will have more business then they know what to do with. I want to say it is a Mark Twain quote but I can't find the reference.