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I'm a 20 something McK consultant with a $10 haircut. Maybe $20 with tip. Or $0 now, because it's done at home. I post this fairly frequently, but here we go a

• tclancy 6y ago
  The problem with this is we don't (and one presumes you don't either) know whether you're above or below average. My perspective, from running into people from Big Computer consultancies back in the '00s was that the business model was to hire recent college grads, pump them up with the sheen of the company brand and then let them learn on the job at smaller companies and "failing upward" until they are experienced enough to be loaned out at massive rates based on their long track record of . . . success. Whether any customer during that process benefited from the consultant's journey is mere coincidence.
  • tfehring 6y ago
    Honestly my impression is that management consultants don’t need to be above average to add value, they (or more accurately, the people who implement their recommendations) just need to be empowered to actually do stuff. The recruiting from top schools is primarily because the people hiring them want to think their problems are hard and unique (that’s why they need consultants!) and therefore necessitate the best and brightest.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    I'm not sure what a big computer consultancy is. Is that like IBM? Accenture? I don't think where I fall in the ranks matters much here. Loaned out doesn't feel applicable here though. There are some consultancies that are primarily just staff augmentation. Like, here are some expensive workers for you to use for a while. That's not really what McK does. McK is doubtlessly very expensive. "pumping people up on the job" sounds like a bad faith way to describe training and investing in your employees. I don't have a way to "prove" that the average net impact of McK consulting is positive, and for sure sometimes it won't be right. My only point is that most if not all of the clients I work with are blunt about not knowing how to do X on their own, and when we're done with the project they say they know how to do X. We do fixed price contracts, not per hour, and are incentivized to keep the scope fixed. Our prices are generally higher than competitors, but we still win bids. I don't need to believe McK is the greatest company in the world, but I strongly disagree that we're not making a good faith effort to help clients do things.
    • nus07 6y ago
      Can you give me a couple of examples where McKinsey’s work was helpful to a society ? Jobs were saved, lives were saved , poverty was eradicated ? Everywhere I look it’s just strategies to increase sales ,lay-off lower level employees and boost executive and shareholder profit .
      • klmadfejno 6y ago
        Probably not to a degree that would be satisfying to me as a random external stranger. Most work is very secret, to avoid conflicts of interest. I don't know what others work on. I know of a few high profile things lately that have had positive impact on the world, but it's all NDA'd as well. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/how-we-help-clients/noble-intelligence https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analyti... I guess this group is a decent example of our public things, doing data science stuff to help human trafficking victims and what not. I don't have any experience with this group in particular and cannot speak to it. For my personal work space all I can say is that ~90% of my work felt morally neutral, and 10% felt morally positive. One project was for a similar neutral task in an industry I think is detrimental to society so I declined to do it. That's also a thing which is encouraged and I think is nice. YMMV
• bob33212 6y ago
  In other words your clients have incompetent executives and instead of suggesting those people be replaced you do their work for them since they are the ones paying your fees.
  • aerosmile 6y ago
    It's easy to be critical of executives. A naive narrative could sound like this: "Bob was hired to turn the company around, and 3 months later the company is still bleeding money. Bob sucks." But it's important to understand the two difficult tasks that Bob is facing: 1) Identify all mistakes made by the previous management and come up with a plan to correct them. 2) Get buy-in for your plan and execute it. It might appear that 1) is harder than 2). But it turns out that the company's interests are not always aligned with each and every individual in the company, and implementing change always results in winners and losers. Getting the buy in from losers can understandably be quite hard. And then you also have the winners who sympathize with the losers and don't realize that they will also lose their jobs if the plan is not implemented. When you're running a startup, a CEO can single-handedly turn things around. In a larger corporation, a CEO is going to rely on a chain of command to get things done. When you factor in the misaligned incentives or loyalty for people who are at risk of losing their jobs, it's easy to see how information channels can stop working and neither 1) nor 2) can be accomplished successfully. I agree that brining in a 3rd party like McKinsey feels like a lazy shortcut to addressing the fundamental organizational challenges, but the more I see, the more I am starting to understand the upside of that option.
    • bob33212 6y ago
      It is one thing to bring in some more workers to help you with research you don't have the ability to do. It is another thing to pay someone to make a report backing up a decision you have already made. It is another thing to pay someone to make a decision that you don't want to make, so they can take the blame. The first example is not why management consulting gets a bad name.
      • aerosmile 6y ago
• Terretta 6y ago
  You at your years-of-experience most likely don’t yet find it painful to learn. The folks with one to three decades more time at bat who are hiring you most likely do find learning and change literally painful. Not because of age, but because of “number of trials” at the change experiment, where often someone gets burned. Reading, learning, thinking differently, hurts the ego, as it makes clear you were less informed before, and puts you on unknown ground where you don’t know if you’re failing or not. This is hard for a lot of people, ironically especially hard for folks who started out as high performers in spaces with “known knowns” knowledge available (aka, school and textbooks, where learning isn’t an ego problem, it’s expected that you didn’t know). You haven’t yet developed the instinct to yank your hand off the stove, and you don’t have to stick around long to see if your hand gets burned anyway, so you’re valuable to these folks.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • GreeniFi 6y ago
    I found this very insightful, thank you.
  • aabhay 6y ago
    Sage wisdom
  • Calamity 6y ago
    Maybe it is because I'm still not there yet, but I feel that there is a nugget of wisdom in here that I still can't wrap my head around completely. Is this pointing to the same idea behind "the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken"? I concede I may not be as quick to learn as I was when I was in my late teens/early 20s, but I hope that I'll still be able to learn new things and able to recognize the error in my judgement well into my old age - despite having been a classically high performer in school (although grad school did pummel me down).
• andreilys 6y ago
  ”Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to bring in people who can get shit done, moving bricks at lower levels of the org with the political mandate of the top” It seems more likely that it’s a politically expedient way to get cover for a decision (in other words CYA insurance). If the plan fails, blame the consultants. If it works, take credit for having brought them in. It also puts more pressure on exec to make a decision (we just spent $10M on this strategy plan, are we really going to it on it?). It’s genius, if it didn’t highlight the utter dysfunction of a firm. McKinsey scandals also aren’t confined to Opiod work. It’s also been involved with Enron, corruption in Africa, peddling of mortgage backed securities during ‘07-‘08 crisis and I’m sure many more that they’ve done a great job at hiding from the public.
  • Terretta 6y ago
    Exactly. I called this “decision insurance” elsewhere in this comments section.
  • jvanderbot 6y ago
    So, does this conflict with the "Bad businesses with bad models are more likely to want help changing" narrative? There's a world in which this squares with McKinsey coming in to help those businesses with the change being pushed on them.
    • pm90 6y ago
      Such business should, you know, bring in leaders who can improve their business. Or train their leaders via executive MBA programs (there are so many). McK touts as being able to transform businesses but all they will do is add more costs and send in clueless consultants who your employees will somehow have to try and get along with.
  • salawat 6y ago
    The correct term is plausible deniability or indirection of accountability. It's an advanced political maneuver.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
• wil421 6y ago
  Let’s just post these articles here. > They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.[1] [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/mckinsey-ICE-immigration.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/mckinsey-ICE-immigrati... The CEO of Enron was a former McKinsey consultant and helped them transition from an Oil and Gas company. Arthur Anderson was just the firm left holding the bag at the end. [2] [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling McKinsey helping dictators. [3] [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china... > On October 20th, the Times reported that the government of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had employed operatives to harass dissidents, including the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on October 2nd. The article included the revelation that McKinsey had prepared a nine-page report measuring the public perception of certain Saudi economic policies, and cited three individuals who were driving much of the largely negative coverage on Twitter: a Saudi Arabia-based writer named Khalid al-Alkami, a dissident living in Canada named Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous writer. After the report was created, Al-Alkami was arrested, and Abdulaziz’s brothers living in Saudi Arabia were put in prison. The anonymous Twitter channel was shut down.[4] [4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-saudi-arabia-highlights-its-history-of-unsavory-entanglements https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-...
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    ICE was very bad. A lot of internal strife and change over those (and opiods). Enron and china I'm not really familiar with. The Saudi one is, in my opinion, not a an accurate portrayal. My understanding is McKinsey did not create a report for the Saudi gov't on it and that it was someone who chose a deeply unfortunate example to demo some social network analysis stuff, internally, and not intended to be shared.
    • cryoshon 6y ago
• pm90 6y ago
  > Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that. Sorry that’s all you have to say about your employer quite literally supercharging the opioids pandemic causing unimaginable pain and destruction across America? “It was bad though.” Let me tell you some hard truths. If you’re 20 something you don’t know Jack shit about running a business and the only reason you’re there is because the C Suite wants to “de-risk” their decision making, or the board member heard about McK during golfing with his buddies. If Senior Leaders can’t do X, they should, you know, get training. Go to online schools, get executive MBA training. Why don’t they do that? Because that’s not really the real reason you’re there. McK and other consultancies have been a cancer on corporate America, creating chaos in the name of “digital transformation” or whatever buzzword is new. They capitalize on most companies’ fear of being left behind and get inserted into corporations where they make the jobs of regular employees (you know, the people who you went to school with but decided not to go to McK but get a real job and who are familiar with the same types of things that you are) incredibly difficult with inane processes from “the manual”.
  • alisonkisk 6y ago
    The point is that you can't say that McKinsey are incompetent and not worth the money, while at the same time saying they are so competent that they created the opiod epidemic. It makes you look silly. Doing good economic work for bad people is a (gigantic) ethical flaw, but not a problem with the economic quality of the work and skillset.
    • spamizbad 6y ago
      Opioids pretty much sell themselves. You just need permission to sell them more loosely.
    • ramraj07 6y ago
      Here's a non-contradictory summarisation: 1. McKinseys advice is for the most part useless , often their advice is just politically motivated within the clients offices 2. They have zero morals, they will advice how to optimize the gas chambers (probably not too off the mark, they probably are advising something related to uighurs somewhere, maybe how apple can hide traces of genocide fueled chips from their product lineup) if they can make a couple mills. 3. The despots/murderers recruiting them are still going to go ahead with their addiction rings/gas chambers irrespective of what McKinsey tells them. The argument isn't that McKinsey made the opioid problem worse. Maybe they did but they probably will conveniently agree with us that they were not really consequential. Still doesn't mean everyone from McKinsey shouldn't be considered a dick though.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• A12-B 6y ago
  > Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to bring in people who can get shit done. I don't think consulting is useless or scammy, but come on, you're not rock stars. Consultants advise a business on how to get revenue, and the business implements changes that generate revenue. This leads to the headline we have before us. There's not much more to consulting. Note: my family are consultants.
  • alisonkisk 6y ago
    You could also say that software devs are just technicians just translate specs into machine language. And product managers are just users who get paid to file feature request. And management just coasts on the real workers' work.
  • iwintermute 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp6_3UQLi2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp6_3UQLi2Y Steve said it best.
• mola 6y ago
  No one wants to believe they have a bullshit job. So we usually tell our selves nice little fairy tales to overcome this cognitive dissonance. Truth is, McK and the like, are there just to give mediocre leaders an extremely expensive psychological crutch needed when human beings face uncertainties. Now that these consulting agencies are the behemoth they are, it's mainly corrupt leaders that are being "pursuaded" to use their services. Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the optics of credentials for this sordid affair.
  • volta83 6y ago
    > Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the optics of credentials for this sordid affair. 100% whataboutism, and I'm not defending the OP or McK, but I wonder what you think of the PhD "brains" hired at Google that end up being in charge of implementing a menu in Google Carplay. What are they?
    • geodel 6y ago
      At Google many PhDs may end up working on compilers, language runtimes, vulnerability research data center power saving/cooling and so on. And yeah most importantly implementing menu in Google carplay. So I guess difference is Google has many types of work whereas at McKinsey it is slick MBAs facing fools looking to part with their money.
      • volta83 6y ago
        I know of many CS PhDs working at McK doing MBA-facing jobs. So really, I don't see the difference.
    • mola 6y ago
      They have bullshit jobs. I don't get what's the point of your question? I'm saying the OP has a bullshit job which he fails to acknowledge. I'm also saying is that McK only reason for hiring ppl like OP is virtue signalling and nothing else. And finally that McK is mostly harmful to society. I never talked about why google hires PhDs. :Shrug:
• nsomaru 6y ago
  The reputation of your country is thoroughly ruined in South Africa. Paying the money back (as was agreed, and even then my understanding is that not all of it will be repaid, no interest was offered and no criminal charges have been proffered) will never cover for the gutting of essential skills in key state owned enterprises under the cover of a McK “restructuring”. South Africa is in a perfect storm right now and big consultancies and accounting firms all had their fingers in the cookie jar. They all had a part to play. It makes me sick to think what these consultants might achieve in less democratic states as it’s evident their reach is global and they are legion. In my university days many bright eyed youth wanted to work for these companies. I hope people are waking up! Edit: For anyone interested “Zondo Comission McKinsey” or “McKinsey South Africa Guptas” should get you quite far. Edit2: I’ve just given a brief summary. It’s enlightening to dig into the role of Bain, McKinsey and KPMG especially, their relation to Gupta enterprises (common cause) and their enabling of deals, cutting really good people at key state institutions like SARS (Revenue Service), Eskom (electricity), Transnet (commercial rail). And that’s only what’s in the public domain. The scale of the rot is enormous. Their executives spin corporate speak at our commissions of inquiry (Nugent and Zondo) and do not take any accountability!
  • kabouseng 6y ago
    Absolutely agree. But to be fair, the problems started with the appointment of useless political cronies as heads of these organisation's, who then used the consultants to help themselves with paybacks, commissions and corrupt deals.
• robertlagrant 6y ago
  > That's not evidence of abuse, that's evidence that your org isn't working well Mostly fuelled by management consultancy firms' marketing and sales teams, of course.
• jancsika 6y ago
  Whether this is a bona fide comment or a troll, I love this comment: * quick witted aikido-move-of-a-sentence to accept OP's insult, thereby disarming it * enormous paragraph made up of short, frank, vague sentences with an compelling rhythm of overarching claims that frame the 20-something haircut's ostensible work in a positive light. It's the wrong generation but I'm reading them in Ari Fleischer's no-nonsense, eternally dismissive voice. * anticipating the accusation of happy talk, a final, single sentence to cover one of the many troubling associations McKinsey has had with shithole companies. Even spelled the industry wrong! I'm not being sarcastic or snooty. This is the HN-post version of the pharma commercial pattern of showing heartwarming images of happy people on swings while the narrator enumerates horrific side-effects. Reliably distracting an audience from a topic is a skill, and that reliability is valuable to companies. So to all those naive respondents who want to say that McKinsey is some kind of corporate leech that provides no value-- this very comment is proof that you have no idea what you're talking about. And some at McKinsey, I assume, are just run of the mill consultents.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    I guess I'm glad you enjoyed my prose so much. All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings. It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. I make a healthy wage, but its likely lower than I could get in tech. Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company.
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Consultancy sounds fancy, but when it comes down to it it's fairly mundane. I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing. Does not sexy mean they are not willing to spend the tons of money they have on internal employees?
• andrewem 6y ago
  “Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that.” Great, so let’s not avoid that - with your insider perspective: In what ways do you see McKinsey’s actions with Purdue Pharma as being bad? In what ways were they typical of McKinsey’s behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors been addressed? How do the events with Purdue show what has and hasn’t changed since McKinsey’s deep involvement with Enron?
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    > In what ways do you see McKinsey’s actions with Purdue Pharma as being bad? I think it's mostly self evident. > In what ways were they typical of McKinsey’s behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors been addressed? McK is large and very decentralized, and there's a culture of not talking about work to avoid creating conflicts of interest, so it's easy for one partner to end up doing their own thing in a way that the majority would not agree with. The Opioid work had a spin on it with the rebates that I recall had a mind towards preventing them, but I cannot remember the details so I won't pretend that's supposed to be compelling at all. The work with Opioids, and I would also call out ICE, were high profile struggles internally that have been addressed numerous times by top level leadership on global calls, in a way that I thought was emotionally empathetic to the situation. Voicing dissenting opinions is encouraged, and I think people were free to voice grievances. They have since created a committee whereby other unrelated partners need to review proposals for ethics before it gets approved. If you work for facebook, you build facebook. If you work for mckinsey, you may work on improving access to renewable energy, automaker margins, oil and gas marketing, or pro bono human rights work. Most people will fall into one of the neutral categories. To what degree are you accountable for a few guys doing something completely different that have no particular connection to you? I don't know. It's a weird dynamic but I would say "a bit, but less than a more traditional centralized company". I feel convinced that top level leadership is taking reasonable steps to address ethical issues and the the broad general population of the firm wants to encourage this. I don't know if it's possible to fully prevent bad decisions in the long term. From an external perspective, there's always going to be just one McKinsey, and that's tough to reconcile. I can't say I know anything about Enron.
• cambalache 6y ago
  As a person you are surely good, as an employee of that organization you are a tool to extract as much money as possible from your client and most often than not the person who hired you guys should be fired for having done so. As a 20-something year old generalist you are in no position to be giving "advice" (especially at the rate you charge) considering that "business is hard".
• ghaff 6y ago
  As someone who worked with McKinsey consultants in a past life, this seems pretty spot on. The partner and one of their associates were sharp. The other associate mostly got arrogant. They were brought in around a new product line I was the product manager of. Yes, they spent lots of time interviewing us and basically validated what we told them. That said, they presumably gave executive management some warm and fuzzies that we weren't smoking weed. Sure, they could have just taken our word for what we were telling them, but having a second pair of eyes is actually not a terrible thing. (And it's part of what I did for clients in a subsequent job.) They also gave our business planning people some complicated financial modeling spreadsheet which kept them busy and mostly out of our hair.)
  • toiletfuneral 6y ago
    My friends pour concrete & frame homes. In an hour they generate more for the world the you will in your entire empty life but huge congrats on your degrees and wealth
• ok123456 6y ago
  Was the bread price fixing good work?
• Jcampuzano2 6y ago
  Can we just keep it real instead of spouting this garbage. I've worked alongside and gotten close with consultants on the business/management side having been one in software myself. 99% of the consultants who come in are human Powerpoint/Email factories who just happen to have the skill/trait of being extremely insistent. They push exactly what their client wants to hear and are not doing groundbreaking worldchanging work. In fact in almost every case I worked on, most of the team had literally NEVER done any work in the clients field before, and never performed in the functional role they were being assigned to outside of maybe the partner or project leader assigned to the case who likely had a PHD/MD of some kind in the related field. As others said, they are there as an insurance policy to throw blame.
  • wayoutthere 6y ago
    A big part of what consultants bring is repeat experience — when you’ve watched multiple clients make the same mistakes, you can credibly speak up. And for the kind of transformational work that folks like McKinsey would come in to assess, there’s a huge organizational component that’s actually more complex than the technical components. Building a new technology tool is great, but designing the process the tool implements and rolling it out to non-technical users is the job our buyers hire us to do. We would hire offshore engineers if the engineering work were the majority of the work we do — but the coordination overhead is too high.
• paxys 6y ago
  It's also funny that people can simultaneously say that McKinsey is self-serving and does no real work for their clients, and also that they caused the opioid crisis with their involvement with Purdue. Which one is it?
• cryptica 6y ago
  20 year olds out of university know nothing about business, management, finance or the economy. The financial system and economy are in a constant state of flux, everything they teach in university is already outdated 10 years before you even start the degree. As for economics, most of what they teach has nothing to do with the real economy; just some phony models with fancy math which bear absolutely no relationship to the actual current state of the economy. Any executive who can benefit from the advice of a 20 year old shouldn't be in a leadership position in the first place.
  • jankyxenon 6y ago
    If it's that obvious, stop to think about a few things. Why is management consulting a billion dollar industry? Are there that many clueless executives running F500 companies (pretty much all of them). Or perhaps your understanding of management consulting isn't quite right.
    • cryptica 6y ago
      >> Why is management consulting a billion dollar industry? Because most rich people are idiots but they have direct access to money printers via hundreds of legal money laundering schemes going on in the background so they can afford to waste as much of it as they want on whatever they want and still be profitable.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    Consultants are not expected to just know the answer. They're supposed to figure it out by talking to people in the company and looking at data. A 20 year old with full DB access and a python script can tell an executive a lot of things they don't know.
    • orzig 6y ago
      Agreed, starting my career as an in-house data analyst at a mid-sized public software company, I was able to show executives things they didn't know within a few months. Not because I was particularly smart, but because there was so much low hanging fruit. While I disagreed with him on this point, here's another angle on how low hanging the fruit was: My manager _explicitly_ told us to never use statistics, because we'd be wasting our time with effects which weren't large enough to be obvious.
• toiletfuneral 6y ago
  Hey, fuck you & your useless friends
• BryanBeshore 6y ago
  I'll add one more point to this. Some business executives bring in consultants as a CYA for their boards, employees, etc.
• whoknew1122 6y ago
  > "Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to bring in people who can get shit done, moving bricks at lower levels of the org with the political mandate of the top." Or, to put it another way: You hire a consultant so you can avoid responsibility for your decisions. "I didn't just fire thousands of people, possibly putting some out on the streets. Nope. We're just right-sizing the company based on the advice of this well-respected consultant with a nice haircut." Hire a consultant and get a fall guy and the ability to shirk responsibility for the detrimental impact your decisions have on your workforce.
• Vaslo 6y ago
  I’ve worked with McKinsey on 3 different projects at two companies. One project was honestly helpful in trying to get SAP up and running. The other two were worthless, including a strategy deck about CPG food strategy in China. They basically just took our data and the results we had already provided and had a charismatic speaker (Partner?) who worked in China come in and tell the same story. The few original slides they brought were probably all the same nonsense macroeconomic slides they show to everyone remotely interested in Developing markets like China. The CFO was unimpressed and though they still use them for things, we would never go back for Strategy. For the cost we paid for one month of the engagement I could have hired an MBA analyst/manager working full time doing much of this in house. I personally will not use a big consulting company until we do a better job of forcing consultants to have more skin in the outcome. It’s really nice to come in, have a flashy presentation and then walk out and collect your money. The only “getting shit done” I’ve seen McKinsey do is lining their own pockets.
  • StormyWeather 6y ago
    McKinsey does a lot of "Fees at risk" engagements where they are paid conditional to the outcome
• safog 6y ago
  Man, you're really getting the short end of the stick here - it's actually pretty surprising because even though the forum is tech heavy, you wouldn't expect this much hate on consulting as a business model. Outliers like the Opioid stuff aside, I do think most day to day typical things that consultants do is valuable work for companies. Say you're launching a new product and want to figure out cost based / value based pricing - it's either a single person in the company that does that that might not have a lot of experience in that area or a consultant from a consulting company that has a good track record at doing value based pricing specifically. I know who I'm going to pick.
  • klmadfejno 6y ago
    People have a natural aversion to consultants. They're expensive and accomplish things that feel like they should be easy but in practice are hard. It's also difficult because the opioids work is bad, and there have been other things that are just bad. I don't think its especially representative of the work most people do but its still there and the harm is real. A piece of bad work is probably 12ish people doing their own thing that the majority would tell them not to do. I feel good about the work that I do, not just in that it doesn't harm anyone but in that I think it has positive side effects for society. The opioids work doesn't really affect me, and was hardly financially relevant for the company (before the fine). To give a throwaway fictitious answer, if my job was aiding COVID vaccines or helping education in poor countries, things that I don't have direct knowledge of, but would probably guess McK is involved in without any particular knowledge, I don't know how many "bad" actors or incidents it would take in other unrelated aspects of the firm to get me to not want to work there anymore. There's no big picture. I can't say my work "enables" others to do other work that I may disagree with. On the whole of it by my personal set of values, I enjoy being able to make the contributions I do and would be wary of loosing that. So long as the tone at the top of the org is condemning of things I consider bad (and it is), I think it deserves a level of understanding for how difficult it is to run a network of thousands of partners and avoid things like this. I'm optimistic that the newly enforced sets of checks and balances will prevent such at least some of these kinds of studies from happening again. For now at least, it feels less like "McKinsey" did the bad thing and more like "a group of people who work here" did. Others will disagree, and I get it. I know a couple folks who left on ethical grounds and they retained the support of all their colleagues.