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I wouldn't hold any special reverence for McKinsey. In general with any of the management consultants, you're going to get people with very little actual exper

I wouldn't hold any special reverence for McKinsey. In general with any of the management consultants, you're going to get people with very little actual experience telling you how to run your company. Whilst some of the stuff, usually more accountancy / factual based, doesn't require experience, and thus may be delivered to a high standard, you're also going to got a bunch of hot takes that don't make sense in reality. Outsourcing, the Spotify model, and not really agile Agile are all sold by the top tier consultants, even though you basically can't name successful examples.

seanhunter 4y ago
Completely agree. We had McKinsey crawling all over one company I worked for and in the "workstream" I was the main point of contact for they had the first meeting where they "were in listening mode" and at the end of the meeting I said "look, if your plan for this workstream is to take everything I've just told you and put it on powerpoint slides and tell it back to us while charging for your time that's not going to work. So if we have a session tomorrow you actually have to bring something". They called our CEO and shut our workstream because they said they didn't think they could add enough value. All the other workstreams continued for a while with them burning our investors' money and also all ended with a big nothingburger. Basically the team we worked with had one guy who was genuinely brilliant - razor sharp, really knew his stuff etc just great - and like 8 people there whose function was to pad the billable hours, make slides, carry printouts and drink the free coffee.
sys_64738 4y ago
I'm sure some management consultants provide utility to a lot of larger companies which might be inefficient. I know some of them have identified procedures or process that are irrational or time consuming and can offer ways to improve efficiency. But a lot of it doesn't lead to any change in the end.

seanhunter 4y ago

Completely agree. We had McKinsey crawling all over one company I worked for and in the "workstream" I was the main point of contact for they had the first meeting where they "were in listening mode" and at the end of the meeting I said "look, if your plan for this workstream is to take everything I've just told you and put it on powerpoint slides and tell it back to us while charging for your time that's not going to work. So if we have a session tomorrow you actually have to bring something". They called our CEO and shut our workstream because they said they didn't think they could add enough value. All the other workstreams continued for a while with them burning our investors' money and also all ended with a big nothingburger. Basically the team we worked with had one guy who was genuinely brilliant - razor sharp, really knew his stuff etc just great - and like 8 people there whose function was to pad the billable hours, make slides, carry printouts and drink the free coffee.

sys_64738 4y ago

I'm sure some management consultants provide utility to a lot of larger companies which might be inefficient. I know some of them have identified procedures or process that are irrational or time consuming and can offer ways to improve efficiency. But a lot of it doesn't lead to any change in the end.