8 ms·

NYC Paid McKinsey $27.5M to Stem Jail Violence. Instead, Violence Soared

168 points by haltingproblem 6y ago

onetimemanytime 6y ago
For another $27.5 M McKinsey will tell them why violence soared. An intern and one first year hire will work full time--for a whole month on that.
pstuart 6y ago
We really need to have a collective discussion on what "justice" really is. Most people don't care about prison reform because it's a place for bad people who did bad things, and they don't deserve good things. While that attitude is fucked up on the morality of it alone, it also ends up being pro-crime, as it promotes a system that is designed to create more criminals.
- Quekid5 6y ago
  "We"? I think a lot of the Scandiwegian countries already decided that rehabilitation is the best course. You may agree/disagree with that, I'm just pointing out that the discussion has been had (and is essentially over) in quite a few places. EDIT: Also, I absolutely agree, fwiw. If the discussion hasn't been had in your country, please do push for it.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Sorry, I pulled an americanism and had the US primarily in mind :-). Scandiwegia is a lovely exception and should be rightfully proud of that.
    - Quekid5 6y ago
      No worries :).
    - ant6n 6y ago
      Wtf is Scandiwegia?
      - pstuart 6y ago
        https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Scandiwegian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Scandiwegian First time I've heard of it as well. I like it.
        ant6n 6y ago
        Last I checked Norwegia is part of Scandinavia (??)
        ant6n 6y ago
        (I mean Norway)
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    Well it’s not surprising. Prison is basically a school for criminals on how to become even better at being criminals. Our Scandinavian politicians are almost solely focused on the number off how likely a person is to commit a crime after a prison sentence has been fulfilled, and our stats say that criminals become worse, so they shorten the prison sentence more and more. The prison system is broken because hanging around with morally broken people is not good for anyone. Let me point out that prison sentences for minor drug offenses are quite rare so we don’t have much of that particular problem.
    - pstuart 6y ago
      The War on Drugs was literally designed to create more criminals -- and only in that has it been successful.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        No, it was designed to reduce crime and drug availability. Nobody would design a program with the goal of creating more crime.
        pstuart 6y ago
        There's plenty of evidence out there that refutes your assumption (happy to provide it if you're interested). It's not that they wanted more crime -- they wanted criminalized behavior to wield as a weapon against people of color (and hippies, in Nixon's case). If it was ever about reducing harm from drugs there's plenty of better ways to do that, don't you think?
- manigandham 6y ago
  It's extremely hard to understand how things are on the inside without direct experience. This makes it difficult to even discuss the topic, even if you find people have the empathy for it. There are also too many vested commercial interests in keeping the status quo.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  That prisons are or should be about justice in the first place seems worthy of skepticism. It seems to me prisons have many possible uses. Rehabilitation is a popular one, as is justice/retribution/revenge/punishment/deterrent (these all seem like different perspectives on the same concept.) These two broad motivations for prisons, rehabilitation or retribution, often dominate discussions about prisons, but what of the simple utility in keeping dangerous people away from those they might want to harm? A prison need not be inherently punishing to achieve this end, nor does it necessarily need to be rehabilitating (though rehabilitation would help keep costs low in the long run.)
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Revenge should explicitly not be part of the system. Deterrence and public safety should be the key drivers. "Rehabilitation" has a nice ring to it, but the only institutional approach for that is education. It would be cheaper to pay for an apartment/tuition/food than to house someone in a prison: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/19/how-much-does-it-cost-send-someone-prison/ https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/19/how-much-does-it-cost...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Quekid5 6y ago
At risk of being a bit trite and derivative... [Management] "Consulting Firm" are the key words here.
treyfitty 6y ago
Why does it seem like McKinsey is impervious from their pseudoscience mistakes? This is one of many instances where McKinsey acted in bad faith, and flat out lied about their numbers. If any other business did that, they’d have a tarnished reputation. As an “elite” consulting firm, shouldn’t that be the nail in their coffin?
- djohnston 6y ago
  military industrial complex i think
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    No, that's why Boeing, Raytheon, et al are impervious to their mistakes. McK is impervious because they contract in such a way as to never actually have to deliver anything. A sea wolf sub is a tangible deliverable. You can tell it's not fit for purpose in a physical fashion. You can always BS around the kinds of soft deliverables that are specialties of McK.
    - Technically 6y ago
      McKinsey is part of the military industrial complex (though these days we need to loop in "educational" too): https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/02/spies-intelligence-community-mckinsey-1390863 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/02/spies-intelligence... Still, you haven't addressed how they seem to remain popular despite being ineffective. My sense is it's a "nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey" kind of deal and they're just on the Washington nepotistic short list.
- spamizbad 6y ago
  I get the impression if you're at McKinsey you're basically a "made man" and are impervious to most normal professional consequences for failure, provided that failure does not significantly reduce billing. Also the people who hire you are in the same situation. So things like this are inevitable.
- ffggvv 6y ago
was_boring 6y ago
Serious question: does McKinsey have a track record of success and what we see in the news is a small number of failures; or are they just really good at selling the C-Suite?
- pseudo0 6y ago
  Mayor de Blasio's deputy, part of the group that decided to hire McKinsey in the first place, is now a senior advisor there... Maybe hiring decisions like that have something to do with it? > The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.
- GCA10 6y ago
  Excellent question, and I'll offer you a frustrating answer that splits the difference. Because McKinsey works in so many areas, it has a huge portfolio of outcomes. There's not a lot of public visibility into what each exact outcome might be. So the firm (and others like it) are able to benefit from this opacity. To wit: top consulting firms are able to present prospective clients with a recap of their best engagements and wins. Is that representative? Cherry picked? No one ever knows.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  There is definitely a level of networking effects and downright cronyism. However one thing that is less talked about is that external consultants are extremely useful to implement unpopular decisions or to 'settle' disputed decisions. If investors appoint a new CEO and he needs to implement something unpopular like fire people, it is much easier to get the whole board behind the decision if an external consultancy "analizes" the issue and proposes measures (usually aligned with the CEO's direction). The same thing happens with 'factions' of the board if some people are behind a proposal but are being blocked be another 'faction', an external consultancy can act as a arbiter (usually in the direction of those who hired them). A useful consequence is that in terms of accountability you can always take cover behind the recommendation of the subject matter expert consultants. All that said there are definitely a lot of bright people with insightful knowledge in that field. My point is that consultancy as a business also ends up serving a less glamorous purpose.
ykevinator 6y ago
And no refund right?
kolbe 6y ago
> Among the issues that plagued the project: McKinsey, which had never before advised a jail or prison system, made data errors that further undercut the results it reported from Restart units. This makes no sense, right? Who would ever choose to spend this money. Even if you are as cynical as possible about the intelligence of NYC public servants, they would never choose to spend money in this way. Whenever I see something like this, I ask "where did the $27.5m go?" It didn't just enter a void called McKinsey; it was bonused out to people and given to subcontractors. And IME, whenever it makes no sense where public money went when judged through the lens of the good of the people, it ends up making a lot of sense when judged through the lens of paying off special interests and political allies.
- cma 6y ago
  Someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread: the guy who hired McKinsey now got a cushy senior advisor job at McKinsey that doesn't even impact his full time teaching duties.
CrazyCatDog 6y ago
You call McKinsey when you have a problem to be solved. And, you lose the opportunity to observe the contrapositive. There are many documented cases of: call McKinsey -> things get worse, but in most cases (personal opinion) the outcome would have been significantly more dire had McKinsey’s proffered solution not been implemented. It’s difficult in the public sector, but most contracts these days have kpi bonus/claw-back clauses. Simply put, they are aware of their biases, they try and adjust contractually to align, they have smart people (because they can afford to be picky) who have a tremendous work ethic. Just don’t let them anywhere near Swiss Airways! [1] [1] https://tbkconsult.com/did-mckinsey-company-kill-swissair/ https://tbkconsult.com/did-mckinsey-company-kill-swissair/
- andreilys 6y ago
  Flip a coin. Heads we gain credit for giving you an amazing strategy, tails you lose because you don't know how to implement our amazing strategy. It's a Heads I Win Tails You Lose situation.
  - GCA10 6y ago
    Nobody gets enduringly rich being a roulette player. But it's surprising how lucrative it can be to set yourself up as a Roulette Coach.
    - matthewsinclair 6y ago
      That really is the quote of the day. Well played.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  > the outcome would have been significantly more dire had McKinsey’s proffered solution not been implemented It's the classic can't-be-wrong-no-matter-what-happens situation. Since there is no practical way to re-run the experiment, they can always claim "at least we made it less bad." And the clients are prone to buy into it also, because it makes them look like they didn't make a bad decision to engage the consultants. Same thing frequently seen with politicians and their supporters.
amoorthy 6y ago
I worked for BCG for a few years. Like McKinsey, sharp, hard-working people. But often insufficiently experienced to advise on strategy of increasingly complex industries. Moreover, they lack the political and social capital to drive change, which is why so much of the project's success depends on the credibility of the hiring point person and the vision they already had prior to hiring the consulting firm. The industry is outdated as its "insights" are relatively common knowledge among F500 company executives. This may be why government is hiring them more often. Regardless the industry is on the decline. I wrote about this 7 years ago: https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-hire-strategy-consultants-notes-from-ex-BCG-consultant https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-h...
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > the industry is on the decline. I wrote about this 7 years ago Thanks. That would explain my perception that McKinsey has been trading on its reputation for the last 15 years at least. At this point I'd only consider Bain, of the big three - and that's because I don't know much about them. It's one of those system traps they liked to talk about: the industry is in decline, so the good people leave.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  My perception is that the consultant's advice is rarely put into action in the end. Is this correct ? People keep on hiring consultants as some sort of marketing of the process in their project.
  - amoorthy 6y ago
    I think you're right but I don't know the stat behind how often the strategy gets implemented. As other have said, it has much to do with the hiring point person and if the consulting firm essentially endorses an idea s/he already had. Rarely does a consulting firm come up with a brand new strategy and convince the client to implement it.
- xivzgrev 6y ago
  As a former MC myself, I would add another point why people hire MC firms - Political cover. You have an urgent problem, your stakeholders want change now, but you can get people off your back if you hire McKinsey. Or, you know what you want to do already, but it’s a big change so you get McKinsey to sign off on it. If it doesn’t go well you have cover ie we made the best possible decision we could - we hired McKinsey!
LatteLazy 6y ago
In 90% of cases, management consultants' job is to waste time and trick people into thinking something will change. Doing so allows management to avoid addressing the issues AND to lie and say they will/are. I've seen that happen twice in finance, once in software and 3 times in engineering. McKinsey seem to have done that extremely well in this case. They allowed the jail to continue running, violence to continue, no extra funding was used and the federal regulator was assuaged. A new mayor avoided a costly, expensive, divisive, problem from a predecessor. 27.5m is cheap for that. That's why the mayor will hire them again next year.
wonderwonder 6y ago
I think the thing that is being overlooked here is that these are real people that whose safety was gamed so that a consulting firm could get paid and with the full cooperation of the very people who's job it is to ensure that safety. The way the US allows the prison system to treat human beings as simple profit points while discarding their safety or any semblance of rehabilitation is appalling. Guards who very often work for private companies are essentially given godlike powers of life, death and torture with no consequences. Its pretty revolting how we allow wards of the state to be treated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey (Link is disturbing) It really appears that the US has no bottom when it comes to the treatment of its most vulnerable, and whether or not these are good people, they are in a power structure where they are indeed the most vulnerable. As a society we should strive to be better than this.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  The "prison profits" slogan isn't great, because it conceals the nature of the power structure that perpetuates the system. The US prison system is a patronage system, not a profit system. It provides stable, nontradable jobs for a large group of relatively low skill people. Guards, cops, and corporate vendors to those groups. It turns out that Microsoft is a good example of that latter category. Managing a patronage system is a particularly potent form of political power. Patronage systems underwrite most examples of "Machine Politics", particularly Chicago style Machine Politics. I would personally like to see the word "patronage" return to American political discourse. It's something our ancestors talked a lot about, but we don't. Patronage systems brought down the USSR.
xivzgrev 6y ago
OP: this should be updated to say (2019), since this article is almost a year old
civilized 6y ago
I'm no fan of McKinsey but the story told in this article seemed very incurious about some essential questions. Like, what was Restart, in terms of specific policy changes? What was the motivation or rationale behind it? Was it just about sorting inmates based on the HUB algorithm? This happens a lot when I'm reading ProPublica. It's fascinating while I'm reading it, but at the end I'm left wondering what exactly just happened, and whether I got duped by sophisticated outrage porn. They look for dysfunction with tunnel vision to the detriment of coherence and context.
creddit 6y ago
When I see articles like this I always think about a few things: 1) Hiring a consulting firm is a great way to get the heat off of your own back. It's amazing this works too, because, at the end of the day, the consultants don't have control! They just make recommendations that you can choose to accept or not. NYC was in full control the entire time but here they get to shift the blame to a 3rd party without any actual control. What a great deal as a manager to remove culpability. 2) It's amazing how much everyone hates consultants and immediately begin to pile on them in these cases without any consideration for the culpability of those who took the recommendations. It makes #1 that much stronger! 3) Ultimately whenever I see this I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people who took the recommendations and implemented them. Don't let them (the managers of NYC jails) shift the blame to an out group you're conditioned to hate when the entire locus of control is on the managers!!!
somberi 6y ago
This article from The Economist, aligns with my experience: TLDR: Thinking ants working hard to sprinkle consultorial fairy-dust. https://archive.is/Lj9Wv#selection-757.83-757.107 https://archive.is/Lj9Wv#selection-757.83-757.107
xcavier 6y ago
MC’s no.1 source of work is it’s global network of former-MC alumni
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
Why would anyone hire a company like McKinsey to solve problems that they have no experience with? The people running the jail seem like a better starting point than a team who has never run or even seen a jail.
rkagerer 6y ago
As a consultant with a reputation for actually getting real results and delighting my clients, firms like McKinsey whose reputation is built on fake hype make me sick. Why would you hire a bunch of generalists who are probably less informed in your sector than your own staff and lack any track record of building great companies? What a waste! Go hire someone who's proven themselves instead. Maybe a champion from your competitor, a hero from the open source community, a promising young startup who's running circles around you. Some quotes from the article: - Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract. - As they formulated a reform plan, the consultants did not solicit the views of inmates, clinic staff or others with direct insights into drivers of violence. - The city’s bill from McKinsey would include $5.5 million for data analytics... These tools, however, proved I'll-suited - Officials discovered coding errors in spreadsheets used to collect violence data from Restart units. The flaws were significant. If you're going to hire a big firm like this because you think they bring reputation and prestige, at least tie a portion of their remuneration to performance outcomes.
- bra-ket 6y ago
  What I keep hearing these firms are brought in for purely political reasons, when management wants something done but has to offload the responsibility to some external brand, so in case things go south they can shift the blame. Seems to work in this case.
haltingproblem 6y ago
My hope is that enough of these exposes and the prestige of working at McKinsey will be akin to having worked at Enron or a WorldCom i.e. it becomes a scarlet letter instead of an elite marker. The thing that baffles me is not that the majority of McKinsey consultants would go along with it but there are almost zero whistleblowers. I guess it shows the power of McKinsey's narrative and the strength of the McKinsey alumni (read: mafia) to blacklist the whistleblower.

For another $27.5 M McKinsey will tell them why violence soared. An intern and one first year hire will work full time--for a whole month on that.

pstuart 6y ago

We really need to have a collective discussion on what "justice" really is. Most people don't care about prison reform because it's a place for bad people who did bad things, and they don't deserve good things. While that attitude is fucked up on the morality of it alone, it also ends up being pro-crime, as it promotes a system that is designed to create more criminals.

Quekid5 6y ago
"We"? I think a lot of the Scandiwegian countries already decided that rehabilitation is the best course. You may agree/disagree with that, I'm just pointing out that the discussion has been had (and is essentially over) in quite a few places. EDIT: Also, I absolutely agree, fwiw. If the discussion hasn't been had in your country, please do push for it.
- pstuart 6y ago
  Sorry, I pulled an americanism and had the US primarily in mind :-). Scandiwegia is a lovely exception and should be rightfully proud of that.
  - Quekid5 6y ago
    No worries :).
  - ant6n 6y ago
    Wtf is Scandiwegia?
    - pstuart 6y ago
      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Scandiwegian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Scandiwegian First time I've heard of it as well. I like it.
      - ant6n 6y ago
        Last I checked Norwegia is part of Scandinavia (??)
        ant6n 6y ago
        (I mean Norway)
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  Well it’s not surprising. Prison is basically a school for criminals on how to become even better at being criminals. Our Scandinavian politicians are almost solely focused on the number off how likely a person is to commit a crime after a prison sentence has been fulfilled, and our stats say that criminals become worse, so they shorten the prison sentence more and more. The prison system is broken because hanging around with morally broken people is not good for anyone. Let me point out that prison sentences for minor drug offenses are quite rare so we don’t have much of that particular problem.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    The War on Drugs was literally designed to create more criminals -- and only in that has it been successful.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      No, it was designed to reduce crime and drug availability. Nobody would design a program with the goal of creating more crime.
      - pstuart 6y ago
        There's plenty of evidence out there that refutes your assumption (happy to provide it if you're interested). It's not that they wanted more crime -- they wanted criminalized behavior to wield as a weapon against people of color (and hippies, in Nixon's case). If it was ever about reducing harm from drugs there's plenty of better ways to do that, don't you think?
manigandham 6y ago
It's extremely hard to understand how things are on the inside without direct experience. This makes it difficult to even discuss the topic, even if you find people have the empathy for it. There are also too many vested commercial interests in keeping the status quo.
bigbubba 6y ago
That prisons are or should be about justice in the first place seems worthy of skepticism. It seems to me prisons have many possible uses. Rehabilitation is a popular one, as is justice/retribution/revenge/punishment/deterrent (these all seem like different perspectives on the same concept.) These two broad motivations for prisons, rehabilitation or retribution, often dominate discussions about prisons, but what of the simple utility in keeping dangerous people away from those they might want to harm? A prison need not be inherently punishing to achieve this end, nor does it necessarily need to be rehabilitating (though rehabilitation would help keep costs low in the long run.)
- pstuart 6y ago
  Revenge should explicitly not be part of the system. Deterrence and public safety should be the key drivers. "Rehabilitation" has a nice ring to it, but the only institutional approach for that is education. It would be cheaper to pay for an apartment/tuition/food than to house someone in a prison: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/19/how-much-does-it-cost-send-someone-prison/ https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/19/how-much-does-it-cost...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Quekid5 6y ago

At risk of being a bit trite and derivative... [Management] "Consulting Firm" are the key words here.

treyfitty 6y ago

Why does it seem like McKinsey is impervious from their pseudoscience mistakes? This is one of many instances where McKinsey acted in bad faith, and flat out lied about their numbers. If any other business did that, they’d have a tarnished reputation. As an “elite” consulting firm, shouldn’t that be the nail in their coffin?

djohnston 6y ago
military industrial complex i think
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  No, that's why Boeing, Raytheon, et al are impervious to their mistakes. McK is impervious because they contract in such a way as to never actually have to deliver anything. A sea wolf sub is a tangible deliverable. You can tell it's not fit for purpose in a physical fashion. You can always BS around the kinds of soft deliverables that are specialties of McK.
  - Technically 6y ago
    McKinsey is part of the military industrial complex (though these days we need to loop in "educational" too): https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/02/spies-intelligence-community-mckinsey-1390863 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/02/spies-intelligence... Still, you haven't addressed how they seem to remain popular despite being ineffective. My sense is it's a "nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey" kind of deal and they're just on the Washington nepotistic short list.
spamizbad 6y ago
I get the impression if you're at McKinsey you're basically a "made man" and are impervious to most normal professional consequences for failure, provided that failure does not significantly reduce billing. Also the people who hire you are in the same situation. So things like this are inevitable.
ffggvv 6y ago

was_boring 6y ago

Serious question: does McKinsey have a track record of success and what we see in the news is a small number of failures; or are they just really good at selling the C-Suite?

pseudo0 6y ago
Mayor de Blasio's deputy, part of the group that decided to hire McKinsey in the first place, is now a senior advisor there... Maybe hiring decisions like that have something to do with it? > The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.
GCA10 6y ago
Excellent question, and I'll offer you a frustrating answer that splits the difference. Because McKinsey works in so many areas, it has a huge portfolio of outcomes. There's not a lot of public visibility into what each exact outcome might be. So the firm (and others like it) are able to benefit from this opacity. To wit: top consulting firms are able to present prospective clients with a recap of their best engagements and wins. Is that representative? Cherry picked? No one ever knows.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
There is definitely a level of networking effects and downright cronyism. However one thing that is less talked about is that external consultants are extremely useful to implement unpopular decisions or to 'settle' disputed decisions. If investors appoint a new CEO and he needs to implement something unpopular like fire people, it is much easier to get the whole board behind the decision if an external consultancy "analizes" the issue and proposes measures (usually aligned with the CEO's direction). The same thing happens with 'factions' of the board if some people are behind a proposal but are being blocked be another 'faction', an external consultancy can act as a arbiter (usually in the direction of those who hired them). A useful consequence is that in terms of accountability you can always take cover behind the recommendation of the subject matter expert consultants. All that said there are definitely a lot of bright people with insightful knowledge in that field. My point is that consultancy as a business also ends up serving a less glamorous purpose.

ykevinator 6y ago

And no refund right?

kolbe 6y ago

> Among the issues that plagued the project: McKinsey, which had never before advised a jail or prison system, made data errors that further undercut the results it reported from Restart units. This makes no sense, right? Who would ever choose to spend this money. Even if you are as cynical as possible about the intelligence of NYC public servants, they would never choose to spend money in this way. Whenever I see something like this, I ask "where did the $27.5m go?" It didn't just enter a void called McKinsey; it was bonused out to people and given to subcontractors. And IME, whenever it makes no sense where public money went when judged through the lens of the good of the people, it ends up making a lot of sense when judged through the lens of paying off special interests and political allies.

cma 6y ago
Someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread: the guy who hired McKinsey now got a cushy senior advisor job at McKinsey that doesn't even impact his full time teaching duties.

CrazyCatDog 6y ago

You call McKinsey when you have a problem to be solved. And, you lose the opportunity to observe the contrapositive. There are many documented cases of: call McKinsey -> things get worse, but in most cases (personal opinion) the outcome would have been significantly more dire had McKinsey’s proffered solution not been implemented. It’s difficult in the public sector, but most contracts these days have kpi bonus/claw-back clauses. Simply put, they are aware of their biases, they try and adjust contractually to align, they have smart people (because they can afford to be picky) who have a tremendous work ethic. Just don’t let them anywhere near Swiss Airways! [1] [1] https://tbkconsult.com/did-mckinsey-company-kill-swissair/ https://tbkconsult.com/did-mckinsey-company-kill-swissair/

andreilys 6y ago
Flip a coin. Heads we gain credit for giving you an amazing strategy, tails you lose because you don't know how to implement our amazing strategy. It's a Heads I Win Tails You Lose situation.
- GCA10 6y ago
  Nobody gets enduringly rich being a roulette player. But it's surprising how lucrative it can be to set yourself up as a Roulette Coach.
  - matthewsinclair 6y ago
    That really is the quote of the day. Well played.
throwaway201103 6y ago
> the outcome would have been significantly more dire had McKinsey’s proffered solution not been implemented It's the classic can't-be-wrong-no-matter-what-happens situation. Since there is no practical way to re-run the experiment, they can always claim "at least we made it less bad." And the clients are prone to buy into it also, because it makes them look like they didn't make a bad decision to engage the consultants. Same thing frequently seen with politicians and their supporters.

amoorthy 6y ago

I worked for BCG for a few years. Like McKinsey, sharp, hard-working people. But often insufficiently experienced to advise on strategy of increasingly complex industries. Moreover, they lack the political and social capital to drive change, which is why so much of the project's success depends on the credibility of the hiring point person and the vision they already had prior to hiring the consulting firm. The industry is outdated as its "insights" are relatively common knowledge among F500 company executives. This may be why government is hiring them more often. Regardless the industry is on the decline. I wrote about this 7 years ago: https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-hire-strategy-consultants-notes-from-ex-BCG-consultant https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-h...

tuatoru 6y ago
> the industry is on the decline. I wrote about this 7 years ago Thanks. That would explain my perception that McKinsey has been trading on its reputation for the last 15 years at least. At this point I'd only consider Bain, of the big three - and that's because I don't know much about them. It's one of those system traps they liked to talk about: the industry is in decline, so the good people leave.
mav3rick 6y ago
My perception is that the consultant's advice is rarely put into action in the end. Is this correct ? People keep on hiring consultants as some sort of marketing of the process in their project.
- amoorthy 6y ago
  I think you're right but I don't know the stat behind how often the strategy gets implemented. As other have said, it has much to do with the hiring point person and if the consulting firm essentially endorses an idea s/he already had. Rarely does a consulting firm come up with a brand new strategy and convince the client to implement it.
xivzgrev 6y ago
As a former MC myself, I would add another point why people hire MC firms - Political cover. You have an urgent problem, your stakeholders want change now, but you can get people off your back if you hire McKinsey. Or, you know what you want to do already, but it’s a big change so you get McKinsey to sign off on it. If it doesn’t go well you have cover ie we made the best possible decision we could - we hired McKinsey!

LatteLazy 6y ago

In 90% of cases, management consultants' job is to waste time and trick people into thinking something will change. Doing so allows management to avoid addressing the issues AND to lie and say they will/are. I've seen that happen twice in finance, once in software and 3 times in engineering. McKinsey seem to have done that extremely well in this case. They allowed the jail to continue running, violence to continue, no extra funding was used and the federal regulator was assuaged. A new mayor avoided a costly, expensive, divisive, problem from a predecessor. 27.5m is cheap for that. That's why the mayor will hire them again next year.

wonderwonder 6y ago

I think the thing that is being overlooked here is that these are real people that whose safety was gamed so that a consulting firm could get paid and with the full cooperation of the very people who's job it is to ensure that safety. The way the US allows the prison system to treat human beings as simple profit points while discarding their safety or any semblance of rehabilitation is appalling. Guards who very often work for private companies are essentially given godlike powers of life, death and torture with no consequences. Its pretty revolting how we allow wards of the state to be treated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey (Link is disturbing) It really appears that the US has no bottom when it comes to the treatment of its most vulnerable, and whether or not these are good people, they are in a power structure where they are indeed the most vulnerable. As a society we should strive to be better than this.

rmrfstar 6y ago
The "prison profits" slogan isn't great, because it conceals the nature of the power structure that perpetuates the system. The US prison system is a patronage system, not a profit system. It provides stable, nontradable jobs for a large group of relatively low skill people. Guards, cops, and corporate vendors to those groups. It turns out that Microsoft is a good example of that latter category. Managing a patronage system is a particularly potent form of political power. Patronage systems underwrite most examples of "Machine Politics", particularly Chicago style Machine Politics. I would personally like to see the word "patronage" return to American political discourse. It's something our ancestors talked a lot about, but we don't. Patronage systems brought down the USSR.

xivzgrev 6y ago

OP: this should be updated to say (2019), since this article is almost a year old

civilized 6y ago

I'm no fan of McKinsey but the story told in this article seemed very incurious about some essential questions. Like, what was Restart, in terms of specific policy changes? What was the motivation or rationale behind it? Was it just about sorting inmates based on the HUB algorithm? This happens a lot when I'm reading ProPublica. It's fascinating while I'm reading it, but at the end I'm left wondering what exactly just happened, and whether I got duped by sophisticated outrage porn. They look for dysfunction with tunnel vision to the detriment of coherence and context.

creddit 6y ago

When I see articles like this I always think about a few things: 1) Hiring a consulting firm is a great way to get the heat off of your own back. It's amazing this works too, because, at the end of the day, the consultants don't have control! They just make recommendations that you can choose to accept or not. NYC was in full control the entire time but here they get to shift the blame to a 3rd party without any actual control. What a great deal as a manager to remove culpability. 2) It's amazing how much everyone hates consultants and immediately begin to pile on them in these cases without any consideration for the culpability of those who took the recommendations. It makes #1 that much stronger! 3) Ultimately whenever I see this I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people who took the recommendations and implemented them. Don't let them (the managers of NYC jails) shift the blame to an out group you're conditioned to hate when the entire locus of control is on the managers!!!

somberi 6y ago

This article from The Economist, aligns with my experience: TLDR: Thinking ants working hard to sprinkle consultorial fairy-dust. https://archive.is/Lj9Wv#selection-757.83-757.107 https://archive.is/Lj9Wv#selection-757.83-757.107

xcavier 6y ago

MC’s no.1 source of work is it’s global network of former-MC alumni

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

Why would anyone hire a company like McKinsey to solve problems that they have no experience with? The people running the jail seem like a better starting point than a team who has never run or even seen a jail.

rkagerer 6y ago

As a consultant with a reputation for actually getting real results and delighting my clients, firms like McKinsey whose reputation is built on fake hype make me sick. Why would you hire a bunch of generalists who are probably less informed in your sector than your own staff and lack any track record of building great companies? What a waste! Go hire someone who's proven themselves instead. Maybe a champion from your competitor, a hero from the open source community, a promising young startup who's running circles around you. Some quotes from the article: - Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract. - As they formulated a reform plan, the consultants did not solicit the views of inmates, clinic staff or others with direct insights into drivers of violence. - The city’s bill from McKinsey would include $5.5 million for data analytics... These tools, however, proved I'll-suited - Officials discovered coding errors in spreadsheets used to collect violence data from Restart units. The flaws were significant. If you're going to hire a big firm like this because you think they bring reputation and prestige, at least tie a portion of their remuneration to performance outcomes.

bra-ket 6y ago
What I keep hearing these firms are brought in for purely political reasons, when management wants something done but has to offload the responsibility to some external brand, so in case things go south they can shift the blame. Seems to work in this case.

haltingproblem 6y ago

My hope is that enough of these exposes and the prestige of working at McKinsey will be akin to having worked at Enron or a WorldCom i.e. it becomes a scarlet letter instead of an elite marker. The thing that baffles me is not that the majority of McKinsey consultants would go along with it but there are almost zero whistleblowers. I guess it shows the power of McKinsey's narrative and the strength of the McKinsey alumni (read: mafia) to blacklist the whistleblower.