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Moral absolutism has been out of vogue for 50 years, but I encourage everyone to give it a spin. It’s provides such wonderful moral clarity and said clarity is
by spanktheuser 6y ago
Moral absolutism has been out of vogue for 50 years, but I encourage everyone to give it a spin. It’s provides such wonderful moral clarity and said clarity is surprisingly effective at rooting out the sort of poisonous people who ruin friendships, companies and societies. I’ve dealt with numerous McKinsey consultants over a 30 year career. I’ve collected enough data points to feel safe in concluding the following:
• McKinsey is a vile organization without any redemption.
• That they are not condemned as such speak volumes about both our societies’ moral failings and more broadly, our individual failure to care about the people McKinsey helped murder.
• That last point bears repeating: McKinsey will happily and knowingly murder people for money. That only seems like a preposterous or exaggerated statement because we are not accustomed to hearing someone be impolite to evil people in a position to pay us well.
• People who work for McKinsey are sociopaths. Not occasionally. Not sometimes. In all cases. The only exception being people recruited directly from college who quit that firm within a few years of joining.
• Many here are in a position to punish McKinsey alumni. If you are asked to interview someone with McKinsey on their resume, I believe you should absolutely state that they performed terribly regardless of what occurred. I personally find it rewarding to repoer that their interview behavior during the interview seemed erratic, to the extent that I questioned their sobriety. If your sense of humor is as dark as mine I highly suggest this approach. If you have hire / fire authority, it’s much simpler. Don’t hire, do fire.
• Organizations like McKinsey exist because we collectively accept their behavior. When we stop doing that, McKinsey will stop addicting broken, damaged and hurting people to opiates.
Stopping McKinsey is up to us. I make an argument from the left. But I think there are also compelling objections to these parasites that can be made from a position far to the right.
This doesn’t and shouldn’t be a left/right thing. Because it is absolutely a parasites vs producers thing. And everyone, regardless of politics, will be healthier freed of this particular tapeworm.
- CGamesPlay 6y ago> I encourage everyone to give [Moral absolutism] a spin > state that they performed terribly regardless of what occurred... [report] that their interview behavior during the interview seemed erratic, to the extent that I questioned their sobriety Quite some cognitive dissonance you're holding onto there!
- Spooky23 6y agoThey are no more evil than any other business. We live in an era where a certain philosophy has taken root, and government is much weaker than in the past.
- troughway 6y agoWhile I would love to endorse these comments they come across as pretentious posturing, no more than a 4chan LARP session. None of what you just said is going to happen.
- spanktheuser 6y agoNot for you it isn’t.
- nobody9999 6y agoHaving spent some years as an employee of several consulting firms (with an IT focus, not management/McKinsey style), I can comfortably say that a primary goal of a professional services organization is to maximize realization[0] and profitability. When the goal of an organization is maximization of revenue/profit to the exclusion of all else, it's not unusual to see laxity in ethical standards. The mechanism for doing so is to provide quality[1] service and leave the customer satisfied. The article makes it clear that the Sackler family felt this was true for the services provided by McKinsey. You'll note that those are similar metrics that are associated with sex workers. The primary difference between consultants and prostitutes is that being the former is usually (but not always) less degrading. None of the above should be all that surprising to anyone. The question then becomes: "What, if anything, should we do about it?" I posit that we should make the costs of ethical lapses higher than the potential profit of same. We certainly don't have that now. Perhaps we should work to change that? [0] https://www.hainesandlagerquist.com/understanding-utilization-realization-profitability-professional-services-firm/ https://www.hainesandlagerquist.com/understanding-utilizatio... [1] 'Quality' in this context is generally defined as "achieving whatever result the client desires."