13 ms·

When McKinsey comes to town

309 points by mitchbob 4y ago

richardwhiuk 4y ago
Interesting to know to what extent McKinsey is liable under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act here....
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/yC1YQ https://archive.ph/yC1YQ
- neonate 4y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20221205184247/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n24/laleh-khalili/in-clover http://web.archive.org/web/20221205184247/https://www.lrb.co...
keepquestioning 4y ago
- ahelwer 4y ago
  There are plenty of non-old-white-boys at McKinsey doing heinous stuff. I wish fixing things was as simple as increasing diversity, I really really do. Improving diversity is laudable goal in itself; don't count on it to fix these sorts of problems.
- blahblah1234567 4y ago
  no offense, but "human nature" disregards all physical/mental characteristics.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    No it doesn't. It should, if assessed accurately and without bias, but it doesn't, largely because those conditions are impossible.
    - blahblah1234567 4y ago
      My personal, humble opinion: Recent political trends and the shaky, politicized conclusions they posit do not supersede human nature.
xrayarx 4y ago
The article starts with an Indian dynasty in South Africa is cought with the most brazen corruption. Around 10% of the annual gdp where stolen, with the help of mckinsey. The rest is a history of consulting companies and their (criminal) endeavours
tequila_shot 4y ago
I've been in one of the "Big 4" Consulting firms, and I can vouch for the article. As a "Senior" the Customer is charged 150-160$/hour and on top of that 25% for travel. The work that we did for these customers was lackluster. We used to come in as "experts", get all the technical work done from body shops in India and offshore. I was shocked to see that Customers just keep paying for these expensive services, and have no clue they are getting hoodwinked.
- runnerup 4y ago
  I've heard that curing internal myopia is a top priority for McKinsey this decade. Focus is on broadening gender/age/economic background and also broadening professional experience backgrounds. They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss. Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Oh, glad McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. You aren't developing shit when every single person you hire leaves after 2 years, don't astroturf this garbage here. What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
    - factsarelolz 4y ago
      > McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. Do the 80 hour work weeks not ruin the psychology of non-LGBTQ folxs?
newsclues 4y ago
When I think of McKinsey, I think of organized crime. It seems like gangsters in suits.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  There is quite a lot of overlap. For a while I was neighbors with bottom tier Russian mafia members working at McKinsey at do nothing jobs. They would tell me about their yearly Mea-Culpa whenever McKinsey was caught in yet another scandal. Edit: corrected spelling, thanks
  - SargeDebian 4y ago
    Baker McKenzie is a law firm, that’s not the same company.
- hackandthink 4y ago
  Best friends with Purdue/Sackler. Wikipedia: "In February 2021, McKinsey paid $600 million to settle investigations into its role in promoting sales of OxyContin and fueling the greater opioid epidemic"
CrypticShift 4y ago
At least, this book will make amazon books search results for "McKinsey" a little more balanced… Does anybody know how much McKinsey services are used in the C-suite around silicon valley (Or big tech in general) ?
- throwaway202212 4y ago
  Former McKinsey employee here. They have a large office in Silicon Valley and serve most of the big tech companies (largely on boring non-tech topics).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
occasionaldev 4y ago
This is only one part of it, but pay grades for government employees in the US are far lower than private industry when it comes to things like software developers. Just look at the GS rates [1], why would a good developer choose to make 50% or less of what they could make in the private sector? It'd be hard to convince the general public that we should be paying $100k+ for young devs working directly for the government, which is already more money than most senior level scheduled gov employees. So we then have this whole convoluted contracting process where consultancies run by people who know how to write and win bids, but know nothing about software engineering, end up being hired to write software systems. All because the government can't really build highly skilled teams on their own. Again, it's not all of the problem (not by a long shot), but it definitely contributes. Plus, the government employing people directly is socialism, but paying an incompetent consulting firm that plays middle-man to the system isn't. [1] https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2022 https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2022
- luckylion 4y ago
  They'd make 50% or less of what they make in the private sector for the difference in job security and workload.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  Partly because private sector tech salaries were artificially inflated to an insane degree by cheap money that flooded VC coffers.
  - demuxxed 4y ago
    The money is real at some companies. We’re less than 100 people with more than 200m in yearly revenue. Market positioning is worth more than engineering excellence, but paying top salaries to reduce the execution risk is worth it. I would expect the leetcoding and system design interviews across the industry to get much tougher and juniors to get squeezed out before top salaries drop. Software has very high leverage in the right markets. It’s comparable to pro euro football where the teams that already have eyeballs will pay huge sums for top players in order to keep the eyeballs. Software salaries will only become more bimodal as VC money tightens.
mck_throwaway 4y ago
I worked at McKinsey for three years. Here are a few thoughts. Sorry it's so long, didn't have time to make it more concise. - I'd guess >95% of people never run into anything morally questionable while there. My teams always tried to do their best and I never felt like we were helping achieve any sort of nefarious goal. Most of the time I think we were worth the money for our clients. - I do think the culture makes it more likely for individuals to take risks that may end up getting them in trouble. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, and a lot of money (and prestige) at stake. It's easy to imagine individuals cracking under that pressure and making bad choices, and that the rest of the team might fall in line so that they can also succeed. I'd put most of the blame here on McKinsey and some on the individuals involved - maybe 70/30. - I'd guess most other consultancies have bodies hidden somewhere that are similar to McKinsey's (questionable contracts, outright fraud, botched projects, moral failures, etc). - The closest I got to something morally questionable was a project where we had a huge contract to help the client cut costs, including firing people. You'd think our budget would have been on the chopping block too, but I guess not. Obviously this left a bad taste in most of our mouths. I feel we tried to do our best, but I doubt we were worth our fees in that instance. The company eventually merged with another, so even more people were fired in the end. - The 'internal firewalls' are real - if you've been on a project for one big company in an industry, they won't let you work for a project with another one. There were internal experts we couldn't talk to because of concerns in this area. I'm sure this hasn't been 100% true 100% of the time, but generally I think this is a real concern for McK (if they couldn't guarantee this they'd lose client trust) so they make a real effort to prevent it. - While I was there, projects with the tobacco companies were famous for having better work/life balance than almost any other project. They were hard to staff because so many junior consultants refused on ethical grounds, so I guess this was a carrot? - I can mostly only speak to the US. I heard some jawdropping stories about how reliant the Saudi government is on McKinsey and other consultants to get almost any work done, even the most basic things. But that's all secondhand gossip. In general, the sense I get is that the standard in the US offices doesn't carry over to every global location, but I don't have the personal experience to say that for sure.
- throwaway202212 4y ago
  I also worked at McKinsey. 5 years, with some of that time in the Johannesburg office. Agree with the above and don't have much to add. But AMA.
mjfl 4y ago
People who are paid to have credentials that are deffered to in courts of law.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Very reminiscent of Chas T Main (bought by Parsons in 1985) as described in John Perkin's "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas._T._Main https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas._T._Main The chapter in Perkin's book on the post-oil shock economic entanglements with Saudi Arabia is very relevant. It's fundamentally about the establishment of the petrodollar recycling scheme that was intended to solve the balance-of-payments crisis - i.e. dollars flowing into Gulf Arab dictatorships represented a current account imbalance on the US/Europe side, which in turned required a capital account imbalance on the Saudi side. Thus, buying Saudi oil with dollars required the Saudis to invest those dollars back into the USA and Europe, and in exchange for agreeing to this scheme the House of Saud got military protection, engineering assitance, etc., with outfits like Chas T Main and McKinsey and Vinnell serving as the glue that held it all together (along with extensive arms sales). While many have forgotten, the Shah of Iran was also a key player in that system before the Islamic Revolution. Notably, the vast majority of Saudi citizens live in near-Third World conditions, particularly the Shias in the east and the tribal groups in the south, not that this gets widely reported, while the 15,000+ members of the House of Saud and their hangers-on (the bin Ladens, bin Mahfouzes, etc.) collect the vast majority of the wealth that isn't re-invested back into the USA. Understanding current world events really requires an understanding of this balance-of-payments dynamic, because that was essentially the same deal that was offered to Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin, via the same entities, and which Putin eventually rejected after 2003 in favor of using Russian oil money to rebuild the Russian military and generally increase the general standard of living inside Russia. Prior to that, Putin was regularly praised in the US media (much like Syria's Assad before his 2009 deals with Iran and Russia). This also accounts for the differential treatment of various authoritarian government leaders by the USA and its economic partners like Britain, i.e. Saudi Arabia is not treated like Iran or Russia. For example, if Putin had taken that deal, then today's war in Ukraine would likely be called 'a fight against neo-Nazi terrorist elements' in corporate media, much as the Saudi assault on Yemen is protrayed as a struggle against Al Qaeda and so on. This is certainly no defense of Putin, who has held onto power for decades now - but there aren't really any 'good guys' in this storyline, the 'democratic norms and humanitarian values' claims are all nonsense. It's more like how the New York City mafia organizations or the Mexican drug cartels fought each other over access to territory and profits than anything else.
Havoc 4y ago
They basically played the role of willing useful idiot. A side story really. The real story here is that it took a decade+ to arrest (not convict...arrest) the Guptas and the vast majority of the money is likely never to be recovered (disappeared into middle east). i.e. Functionally this was a successful heist of multi-generational wealth. Same story on government enablers size - Zuma clan is now wealthy. The will to go after players like this is simply not there - in SA or internationally. Good business breaking countries it seems
stephc_int13 4y ago
In case some you are not aware; McKinsey and similar companies have been progressively replacing public servants in government offices and administrations all over the world, for decades. There was a relatively big scandal in France before the last election, as they crossed some lines, but this is far from over.
- mayankkaizen 4y ago
  From the article - > The revolving door between McKinsey, regulators, policymakers and businesses is a consistent feature of the consulting businesses.
malthaus 4y ago
Every single consulting article brings out comments who make the same mistake: There's a difference between strategy consulting (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain) and consultants that do large implementation projects (e.g. Accenture). Yes, it's not so black and white these days as both do a bit of both but the reasons they are hired are very different: Strategy: best practices, ass-covering, politics. Smaller teams, shorter timeframe, C-level. Think interviews & powerpoint slides. Implementation: body leasing, offloading large projects. Larger teams, IT-heavy, longer timeframes. Actual coding / documentation, etc. And no, your experience working on a 300-people core banking project at Accenture doesn't translate to a 5-people McKinsey project. And while both types are "expensive", they are needed in the corporate world. Because work in that environment is more than just writing code in a text editor, it's mostly politics at the top.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Would you describe examples of negative impacts to businesses' performance from not hiring these firms?
  - curiousllama 4y ago
    It’s not uncommon for firms that need to do big layoffs to not hire consulting firms, and then screw up the layoffs (multiple rounds, bad severance, etc.) There’s a certain class of work that is (1) really critical to get right the first time and (2) only done once a decade. That’s the type of stuff where it’s good to hire an outside firm - the outside guys go from company to company, doing this one rare thing over and over. Other examples might include M&A (eg divestitures), offshoring (eg standing up a factory in Mexico), or new market entry (eg launching a product in a brand new country).
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Most strategy consultants are saying what management already knows but needs to confirm in case things go bad in order to cover their ass. Without the consultants they maybe wouldn’t make the “difficult” choice of laying people off or paying pharmacies to get people addicted to opiates and therefore the business would suffer.
jmtucu 4y ago
I had the chance to work after this boys were hired by the client, they are good in consulting and strategy but at tech level they are really bad and always delegated to teams in India for pennies.
bambax 4y ago
The article doesn't mention it, but McKinsey in France is currently under judicial inquiries for at least two reasons: - They worked on the presidential campaigns of Macron in 2017 and 2022, and were awarded huge government contracts with little or no bidding afterwards - They didn't pay any taxes in France since 2011, sending money to the mothership instead to reduce taxable profits to zero; and their managing partner, who is accused of having lied to parliament about it, resigned in the wake of that discovery. Here's one article (of many), in French: https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-enquete-judiciaire-ouverte-pour-financement-illegal-de-la-campagne-demmanuel-macron-en-2017-24-11-2022-3XA3WCMVG5DMJGWWLJPCNOXG2I.php https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-... (Disable javascript to bypass the firewall). So it's not just South Africa, UK and the US; it really is everywhere.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I'm of the age where, as a fresh grad, I was kind of impressed by the Big Consultancies in general and by McKinsey in particular. Few of my viewpoints have changed more drastically in the last 30 years. Now, when I see someone has one of those firms on their resume or business card, I just assume they're not someone I want to hire or work with. Or even have a beer with.
- neilv 4y ago
  Both of the ex-McKinsey people I've worked with have been decent.
whatever1 4y ago
Nobody trusts consulting companies, but they are like a notary service. The c suite wants a change, the big 4 will create a deck that supports that with their seal of approval. Then the c-execs can present it to the board and move on with their original plan.
diogenescynic 4y ago
When I worked at PayPal, the Assistant Treasurer’s husband worked at Deloitte and then the Assistant Treasurer greatly expanded the number of consultants used by Deloitte (from the same team as her husband and many of them actually reported to her husband). They were usually working on unaccountable projects and billing us for work we did ourselves. Many of the consultants were fresh college grads with no relevant experience. Hilariously, one lived in Berkeley but would get a hotel in San Jose during the week to avoid commuting. I was always flabbergasted no one cared about how the budget was being spent. The people pushing consultant budgets are usually the worst sort of managers and doing it because of some ulterior motive in my opinion.
- etempleton 4y ago
  You hire agencies or consultants for 1 of 3 reasons. 1. You have no idea what you are doing. You like shiny things and the consultants are shiny, fancy, and use big words. 2. You know what you are doing and realize you have a gap in your org and it will take too long to fix it so you need outside help in the short term. This is the only good reason to hire an agency or consultant. 3. You are a bad actor. Work is a political game to you that you are trying to win. Fuck the organization. Fuck your colleagues. A consulting firm can be both a shield and a hammer. It provides plausible deniability for failure, it gives you a trump card in arguments with colleagues and it buries everyone in fancy presentations, reports, and jargon that no human has the time to sit down and parse.
aeschinder 4y ago
Previous company of mine wanted to make drastic reorganization changes and so they hired McKinsey to simply echo what they already wanted to happen. This is to provide cover for upper management (a.k.a. the "wooden desks") who can then use the official McKinsey report as a shield against any backlash. They can simply point at the report and shrug their shoulders in apparent helplessness in the face of the recommendations of the "experts". It was quite the Office Space moment.
curiousllama 4y ago
Everyone is saying that ChatGPT is going to make homework & internet forums irrelevant. How about consultants? They're just putting words on a page anyway - you think that can't be automated? Honestly, I think I might try...
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  Consultants make money by being a brand. The work spat out by ChatGPT could be identical, but you can't charge as much without the Big 4 brand. It's the same for uni — you probably get similar from a public school vs. Harvard, but Harvard gets you the prestige.
  - curiousllama 4y ago
    Oh, I wouldn’t replace consulting companies. I’d sell it to them. You think they don’t know they’re making sh*t up anyway?
    - itisit 4y ago
      You don't think the clients know it as well? There is a tacit collective grift practiced by both sides. Truly bullshit jobs. Coast and collect.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"The Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon paid all three firms lavishly for `engaging human- centred design', developing a `culture of continuous improvement' and other meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms." As a younger person, I recall being informed that a culture of continuous improvement originated in the manufacturing centres of Japan after WWII. They told us the term for it was "kaizen". I do not know if any of that was true, but it sounded sensible then and I always carried the idea with me. Having used it in sports coaching and having seen the results on the playing field, I do not consider a "culture of continuous improvement" to be meaningless management-speak. Assuming one can get a team to buy-in, it works. IMHO, the alternative to continuously trying to improve, complacency, mediocrity, laziness, or whatever we choose to call it, is nothing to celebrate. Please note. Not intending to defend McKinsey here or clients who spend taxapayer revenue on vacuous consulting. But as a general principle, I would defend the idea of "creating a culture of continuous improvement". Same goes for the oft-used term "growth mindset". The terminology might sound silly, but the principles are sound, not to mention timeless, IMHO. Maybe I misread the sentence in the context of the article. If so, pay no mind. (I did peruse the book a while back and discussed it with a friend who used to work for a McKinsey competitor.)
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I think the difference is one of introducing all the jargon and acronyms and vocabulary for something like "culture of continuous improvement" vs. actually implementing it. It's easy to talk. It's easy to convice yourself that talking and ceremony == doing. But it's the doing that matters.
waylandsmithers 4y ago
As a former (briefly, due to an acqui-hire) consultant at one of the big companies mentioned, this was a really interesting read. I never thought anything the company did was morally wrong per se, it was just a different business model that I didn't really want to be a part of. The role of most people in the U.S. was landing the big deal, talking the client down when things went wrong, and then winning an extension for additional services at the end. Actual implementation was just a cost to be minimized and handled somewhere at one of the company's offshore sites. Somehow it all worked out (usually) even for some truly massive projects.
mathattack 4y ago
My observation is that clients hire BigName consultants for one of two reasons: 1 - They need external validation/blame. 2 - They don’t trust their own people to execute. In reality I’ve found it’s more efficient to just hire the ex-consultants and not pay the markup.
college_physics 4y ago
the book that would factually describe the bizarro world of large corporations and the fungal ecosystems that have been structured around them has not been written yet and it won't be written for a while. it would have chapters laying out the Kafkaesque, extractive bureaucracy, the amoral shenanigans concocted between lawyers, accountants and consultant suits in the remote top floors of tall glass buildings, the endless financial engineering, the non-stop cut-and-paste acquisitions and disposals, the vacuity of management fads and the zero signal-to-noise ratio of inane powerpoints regurgitating platitudes (the high-art of saying nothing because reality is too gross to discuss). somehow we are supposed to believe that this is the pinnacle of successful private enterprise. the natural evolution of "best practice" as articulated in posh business schools in fact historians of the future, with the independence and clarity granted by the passage of time would be very brutal about the type of social pathology this is.
mattewong 4y ago
> One gets the sense that [the authors] think the consultants they write about are rotten apples, but [they are wrong] OK I paraphrased the rest of the sentence into the last 3 words but if you bothered to read to the end, you see that the reviewer completely lost her way. Purporting to review a book, she concluded by the end that its authors are misguided because the real culprit is not the consultants, but rather, every pursuit of efficiency, including all "software development". > software development [is] in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation
_8j50 4y ago
Why can't I reply to the top posts with archive links? Very strange.
specialist 4y ago
If one was to scratch the surface of any given inept, wasteful government entity, I wager 7 delicious jelly-filled donuts they'd find the culprit is in fact some well-connected consultants or vendor. All appropriations, budgets, bids, contracts, revenue, finances, and so forth, must be public by default. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  Jelly filled donuts are never delicious.
charles_f 4y ago
Let's also not forget that one time when McKinsey advised their pharma customers to take advantage of the opioid crisis and got caught red-handed(1). It gets one to wonder, how many times did they do something similarly despicable and were not caught. 1: random article there, tons more available through google https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mckinsey-to-pay-for-role-in-opioid-crisis_n_601bc1cec5b6c0af54d1091b https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mckinsey-to-pay-for-role-in-o...
FabHK 4y ago
Is there anything new? I remember more or less the same criticisms two decades ago: - Lewis Pinault, Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting, 2001 - Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, 2005 https://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Demons-Inside-Unscrupulous-Corporate/dp/006661998X/ https://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Demons-Inside-Unscrupulous... https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446576565/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446576565/
TrackerFF 4y ago
Most gov. work that MBB (McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting) works on is pretty boring stuff. It's mostly just lazy politicians offloading their work onto these firms, and unfortunately that kind of culture has been allowed to fester in far too many countries. Fortunately, it seems like there's a growing focusing on consultancy use and frivolous spending. Hopefully lazy politicians will get called out more on this kind of stuff...even though it might just be the oppositions calling each other out, but more transparency is always good.

309 points by mitchbob 4y ago

richardwhiuk 4y ago

Interesting to know to what extent McKinsey is liable under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act here....

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/yC1YQ https://archive.ph/yC1YQ

neonate 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20221205184247/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n24/laleh-khalili/in-clover http://web.archive.org/web/20221205184247/https://www.lrb.co...

keepquestioning 4y ago

ahelwer 4y ago
There are plenty of non-old-white-boys at McKinsey doing heinous stuff. I wish fixing things was as simple as increasing diversity, I really really do. Improving diversity is laudable goal in itself; don't count on it to fix these sorts of problems.
blahblah1234567 4y ago
no offense, but "human nature" disregards all physical/mental characteristics.
- banannaise 4y ago
  No it doesn't. It should, if assessed accurately and without bias, but it doesn't, largely because those conditions are impossible.
  - blahblah1234567 4y ago
    My personal, humble opinion: Recent political trends and the shaky, politicized conclusions they posit do not supersede human nature.

xrayarx 4y ago

The article starts with an Indian dynasty in South Africa is cought with the most brazen corruption. Around 10% of the annual gdp where stolen, with the help of mckinsey. The rest is a history of consulting companies and their (criminal) endeavours

tequila_shot 4y ago

I've been in one of the "Big 4" Consulting firms, and I can vouch for the article. As a "Senior" the Customer is charged 150-160$/hour and on top of that 25% for travel. The work that we did for these customers was lackluster. We used to come in as "experts", get all the technical work done from body shops in India and offshore. I was shocked to see that Customers just keep paying for these expensive services, and have no clue they are getting hoodwinked.

runnerup 4y ago
I've heard that curing internal myopia is a top priority for McKinsey this decade. Focus is on broadening gender/age/economic background and also broadening professional experience backgrounds. They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss. Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Oh, glad McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. You aren't developing shit when every single person you hire leaves after 2 years, don't astroturf this garbage here. What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
  - factsarelolz 4y ago
    > McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. Do the 80 hour work weeks not ruin the psychology of non-LGBTQ folxs?

newsclues 4y ago

When I think of McKinsey, I think of organized crime. It seems like gangsters in suits.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
There is quite a lot of overlap. For a while I was neighbors with bottom tier Russian mafia members working at McKinsey at do nothing jobs. They would tell me about their yearly Mea-Culpa whenever McKinsey was caught in yet another scandal. Edit: corrected spelling, thanks
- SargeDebian 4y ago
  Baker McKenzie is a law firm, that’s not the same company.
hackandthink 4y ago
Best friends with Purdue/Sackler. Wikipedia: "In February 2021, McKinsey paid $600 million to settle investigations into its role in promoting sales of OxyContin and fueling the greater opioid epidemic"

CrypticShift 4y ago

At least, this book will make amazon books search results for "McKinsey" a little more balanced… Does anybody know how much McKinsey services are used in the C-suite around silicon valley (Or big tech in general) ?

throwaway202212 4y ago
Former McKinsey employee here. They have a large office in Silicon Valley and serve most of the big tech companies (largely on boring non-tech topics).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

occasionaldev 4y ago

This is only one part of it, but pay grades for government employees in the US are far lower than private industry when it comes to things like software developers. Just look at the GS rates [1], why would a good developer choose to make 50% or less of what they could make in the private sector? It'd be hard to convince the general public that we should be paying $100k+ for young devs working directly for the government, which is already more money than most senior level scheduled gov employees. So we then have this whole convoluted contracting process where consultancies run by people who know how to write and win bids, but know nothing about software engineering, end up being hired to write software systems. All because the government can't really build highly skilled teams on their own. Again, it's not all of the problem (not by a long shot), but it definitely contributes. Plus, the government employing people directly is socialism, but paying an incompetent consulting firm that plays middle-man to the system isn't. [1] https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2022 https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2022

luckylion 4y ago
They'd make 50% or less of what they make in the private sector for the difference in job security and workload.
miguelazo 4y ago
Partly because private sector tech salaries were artificially inflated to an insane degree by cheap money that flooded VC coffers.
- demuxxed 4y ago
  The money is real at some companies. We’re less than 100 people with more than 200m in yearly revenue. Market positioning is worth more than engineering excellence, but paying top salaries to reduce the execution risk is worth it. I would expect the leetcoding and system design interviews across the industry to get much tougher and juniors to get squeezed out before top salaries drop. Software has very high leverage in the right markets. It’s comparable to pro euro football where the teams that already have eyeballs will pay huge sums for top players in order to keep the eyeballs. Software salaries will only become more bimodal as VC money tightens.

mck_throwaway 4y ago

I worked at McKinsey for three years. Here are a few thoughts. Sorry it's so long, didn't have time to make it more concise. - I'd guess >95% of people never run into anything morally questionable while there. My teams always tried to do their best and I never felt like we were helping achieve any sort of nefarious goal. Most of the time I think we were worth the money for our clients. - I do think the culture makes it more likely for individuals to take risks that may end up getting them in trouble. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, and a lot of money (and prestige) at stake. It's easy to imagine individuals cracking under that pressure and making bad choices, and that the rest of the team might fall in line so that they can also succeed. I'd put most of the blame here on McKinsey and some on the individuals involved - maybe 70/30. - I'd guess most other consultancies have bodies hidden somewhere that are similar to McKinsey's (questionable contracts, outright fraud, botched projects, moral failures, etc). - The closest I got to something morally questionable was a project where we had a huge contract to help the client cut costs, including firing people. You'd think our budget would have been on the chopping block too, but I guess not. Obviously this left a bad taste in most of our mouths. I feel we tried to do our best, but I doubt we were worth our fees in that instance. The company eventually merged with another, so even more people were fired in the end. - The 'internal firewalls' are real - if you've been on a project for one big company in an industry, they won't let you work for a project with another one. There were internal experts we couldn't talk to because of concerns in this area. I'm sure this hasn't been 100% true 100% of the time, but generally I think this is a real concern for McK (if they couldn't guarantee this they'd lose client trust) so they make a real effort to prevent it. - While I was there, projects with the tobacco companies were famous for having better work/life balance than almost any other project. They were hard to staff because so many junior consultants refused on ethical grounds, so I guess this was a carrot? - I can mostly only speak to the US. I heard some jawdropping stories about how reliant the Saudi government is on McKinsey and other consultants to get almost any work done, even the most basic things. But that's all secondhand gossip. In general, the sense I get is that the standard in the US offices doesn't carry over to every global location, but I don't have the personal experience to say that for sure.

throwaway202212 4y ago
I also worked at McKinsey. 5 years, with some of that time in the Johannesburg office. Agree with the above and don't have much to add. But AMA.

mjfl 4y ago

People who are paid to have credentials that are deffered to in courts of law.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Very reminiscent of Chas T Main (bought by Parsons in 1985) as described in John Perkin's "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas._T._Main https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chas._T._Main The chapter in Perkin's book on the post-oil shock economic entanglements with Saudi Arabia is very relevant. It's fundamentally about the establishment of the petrodollar recycling scheme that was intended to solve the balance-of-payments crisis - i.e. dollars flowing into Gulf Arab dictatorships represented a current account imbalance on the US/Europe side, which in turned required a capital account imbalance on the Saudi side. Thus, buying Saudi oil with dollars required the Saudis to invest those dollars back into the USA and Europe, and in exchange for agreeing to this scheme the House of Saud got military protection, engineering assitance, etc., with outfits like Chas T Main and McKinsey and Vinnell serving as the glue that held it all together (along with extensive arms sales). While many have forgotten, the Shah of Iran was also a key player in that system before the Islamic Revolution. Notably, the vast majority of Saudi citizens live in near-Third World conditions, particularly the Shias in the east and the tribal groups in the south, not that this gets widely reported, while the 15,000+ members of the House of Saud and their hangers-on (the bin Ladens, bin Mahfouzes, etc.) collect the vast majority of the wealth that isn't re-invested back into the USA. Understanding current world events really requires an understanding of this balance-of-payments dynamic, because that was essentially the same deal that was offered to Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin, via the same entities, and which Putin eventually rejected after 2003 in favor of using Russian oil money to rebuild the Russian military and generally increase the general standard of living inside Russia. Prior to that, Putin was regularly praised in the US media (much like Syria's Assad before his 2009 deals with Iran and Russia). This also accounts for the differential treatment of various authoritarian government leaders by the USA and its economic partners like Britain, i.e. Saudi Arabia is not treated like Iran or Russia. For example, if Putin had taken that deal, then today's war in Ukraine would likely be called 'a fight against neo-Nazi terrorist elements' in corporate media, much as the Saudi assault on Yemen is protrayed as a struggle against Al Qaeda and so on. This is certainly no defense of Putin, who has held onto power for decades now - but there aren't really any 'good guys' in this storyline, the 'democratic norms and humanitarian values' claims are all nonsense. It's more like how the New York City mafia organizations or the Mexican drug cartels fought each other over access to territory and profits than anything else.

Havoc 4y ago

They basically played the role of willing useful idiot. A side story really. The real story here is that it took a decade+ to arrest (not convict...arrest) the Guptas and the vast majority of the money is likely never to be recovered (disappeared into middle east). i.e. Functionally this was a successful heist of multi-generational wealth. Same story on government enablers size - Zuma clan is now wealthy. The will to go after players like this is simply not there - in SA or internationally. Good business breaking countries it seems

stephc_int13 4y ago

In case some you are not aware; McKinsey and similar companies have been progressively replacing public servants in government offices and administrations all over the world, for decades. There was a relatively big scandal in France before the last election, as they crossed some lines, but this is far from over.

mayankkaizen 4y ago
From the article - > The revolving door between McKinsey, regulators, policymakers and businesses is a consistent feature of the consulting businesses.

malthaus 4y ago

Every single consulting article brings out comments who make the same mistake: There's a difference between strategy consulting (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain) and consultants that do large implementation projects (e.g. Accenture). Yes, it's not so black and white these days as both do a bit of both but the reasons they are hired are very different: Strategy: best practices, ass-covering, politics. Smaller teams, shorter timeframe, C-level. Think interviews & powerpoint slides. Implementation: body leasing, offloading large projects. Larger teams, IT-heavy, longer timeframes. Actual coding / documentation, etc. And no, your experience working on a 300-people core banking project at Accenture doesn't translate to a 5-people McKinsey project. And while both types are "expensive", they are needed in the corporate world. Because work in that environment is more than just writing code in a text editor, it's mostly politics at the top.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
Would you describe examples of negative impacts to businesses' performance from not hiring these firms?
- curiousllama 4y ago
  It’s not uncommon for firms that need to do big layoffs to not hire consulting firms, and then screw up the layoffs (multiple rounds, bad severance, etc.) There’s a certain class of work that is (1) really critical to get right the first time and (2) only done once a decade. That’s the type of stuff where it’s good to hire an outside firm - the outside guys go from company to company, doing this one rare thing over and over. Other examples might include M&A (eg divestitures), offshoring (eg standing up a factory in Mexico), or new market entry (eg launching a product in a brand new country).
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Most strategy consultants are saying what management already knows but needs to confirm in case things go bad in order to cover their ass. Without the consultants they maybe wouldn’t make the “difficult” choice of laying people off or paying pharmacies to get people addicted to opiates and therefore the business would suffer.

jmtucu 4y ago

I had the chance to work after this boys were hired by the client, they are good in consulting and strategy but at tech level they are really bad and always delegated to teams in India for pennies.

bambax 4y ago

The article doesn't mention it, but McKinsey in France is currently under judicial inquiries for at least two reasons: - They worked on the presidential campaigns of Macron in 2017 and 2022, and were awarded huge government contracts with little or no bidding afterwards - They didn't pay any taxes in France since 2011, sending money to the mothership instead to reduce taxable profits to zero; and their managing partner, who is accused of having lied to parliament about it, resigned in the wake of that discovery. Here's one article (of many), in French: https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-enquete-judiciaire-ouverte-pour-financement-illegal-de-la-campagne-demmanuel-macron-en-2017-24-11-2022-3XA3WCMVG5DMJGWWLJPCNOXG2I.php https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-... (Disable javascript to bypass the firewall). So it's not just South Africa, UK and the US; it really is everywhere.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I'm of the age where, as a fresh grad, I was kind of impressed by the Big Consultancies in general and by McKinsey in particular. Few of my viewpoints have changed more drastically in the last 30 years. Now, when I see someone has one of those firms on their resume or business card, I just assume they're not someone I want to hire or work with. Or even have a beer with.

neilv 4y ago
Both of the ex-McKinsey people I've worked with have been decent.

whatever1 4y ago

Nobody trusts consulting companies, but they are like a notary service. The c suite wants a change, the big 4 will create a deck that supports that with their seal of approval. Then the c-execs can present it to the board and move on with their original plan.

diogenescynic 4y ago

When I worked at PayPal, the Assistant Treasurer’s husband worked at Deloitte and then the Assistant Treasurer greatly expanded the number of consultants used by Deloitte (from the same team as her husband and many of them actually reported to her husband). They were usually working on unaccountable projects and billing us for work we did ourselves. Many of the consultants were fresh college grads with no relevant experience. Hilariously, one lived in Berkeley but would get a hotel in San Jose during the week to avoid commuting. I was always flabbergasted no one cared about how the budget was being spent. The people pushing consultant budgets are usually the worst sort of managers and doing it because of some ulterior motive in my opinion.

etempleton 4y ago
You hire agencies or consultants for 1 of 3 reasons. 1. You have no idea what you are doing. You like shiny things and the consultants are shiny, fancy, and use big words. 2. You know what you are doing and realize you have a gap in your org and it will take too long to fix it so you need outside help in the short term. This is the only good reason to hire an agency or consultant. 3. You are a bad actor. Work is a political game to you that you are trying to win. Fuck the organization. Fuck your colleagues. A consulting firm can be both a shield and a hammer. It provides plausible deniability for failure, it gives you a trump card in arguments with colleagues and it buries everyone in fancy presentations, reports, and jargon that no human has the time to sit down and parse.

aeschinder 4y ago

Previous company of mine wanted to make drastic reorganization changes and so they hired McKinsey to simply echo what they already wanted to happen. This is to provide cover for upper management (a.k.a. the "wooden desks") who can then use the official McKinsey report as a shield against any backlash. They can simply point at the report and shrug their shoulders in apparent helplessness in the face of the recommendations of the "experts". It was quite the Office Space moment.

curiousllama 4y ago

Everyone is saying that ChatGPT is going to make homework & internet forums irrelevant. How about consultants? They're just putting words on a page anyway - you think that can't be automated? Honestly, I think I might try...

yawnxyz 4y ago
Consultants make money by being a brand. The work spat out by ChatGPT could be identical, but you can't charge as much without the Big 4 brand. It's the same for uni — you probably get similar from a public school vs. Harvard, but Harvard gets you the prestige.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  Oh, I wouldn’t replace consulting companies. I’d sell it to them. You think they don’t know they’re making sh*t up anyway?
  - itisit 4y ago
    You don't think the clients know it as well? There is a tacit collective grift practiced by both sides. Truly bullshit jobs. Coast and collect.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"The Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon paid all three firms lavishly for `engaging human- centred design', developing a `culture of continuous improvement' and other meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms." As a younger person, I recall being informed that a culture of continuous improvement originated in the manufacturing centres of Japan after WWII. They told us the term for it was "kaizen". I do not know if any of that was true, but it sounded sensible then and I always carried the idea with me. Having used it in sports coaching and having seen the results on the playing field, I do not consider a "culture of continuous improvement" to be meaningless management-speak. Assuming one can get a team to buy-in, it works. IMHO, the alternative to continuously trying to improve, complacency, mediocrity, laziness, or whatever we choose to call it, is nothing to celebrate. Please note. Not intending to defend McKinsey here or clients who spend taxapayer revenue on vacuous consulting. But as a general principle, I would defend the idea of "creating a culture of continuous improvement". Same goes for the oft-used term "growth mindset". The terminology might sound silly, but the principles are sound, not to mention timeless, IMHO. Maybe I misread the sentence in the context of the article. If so, pay no mind. (I did peruse the book a while back and discussed it with a friend who used to work for a McKinsey competitor.)

SoftTalker 4y ago
I think the difference is one of introducing all the jargon and acronyms and vocabulary for something like "culture of continuous improvement" vs. actually implementing it. It's easy to talk. It's easy to convice yourself that talking and ceremony == doing. But it's the doing that matters.

waylandsmithers 4y ago

As a former (briefly, due to an acqui-hire) consultant at one of the big companies mentioned, this was a really interesting read. I never thought anything the company did was morally wrong per se, it was just a different business model that I didn't really want to be a part of. The role of most people in the U.S. was landing the big deal, talking the client down when things went wrong, and then winning an extension for additional services at the end. Actual implementation was just a cost to be minimized and handled somewhere at one of the company's offshore sites. Somehow it all worked out (usually) even for some truly massive projects.

mathattack 4y ago

My observation is that clients hire BigName consultants for one of two reasons: 1 - They need external validation/blame. 2 - They don’t trust their own people to execute. In reality I’ve found it’s more efficient to just hire the ex-consultants and not pay the markup.

college_physics 4y ago

the book that would factually describe the bizarro world of large corporations and the fungal ecosystems that have been structured around them has not been written yet and it won't be written for a while. it would have chapters laying out the Kafkaesque, extractive bureaucracy, the amoral shenanigans concocted between lawyers, accountants and consultant suits in the remote top floors of tall glass buildings, the endless financial engineering, the non-stop cut-and-paste acquisitions and disposals, the vacuity of management fads and the zero signal-to-noise ratio of inane powerpoints regurgitating platitudes (the high-art of saying nothing because reality is too gross to discuss). somehow we are supposed to believe that this is the pinnacle of successful private enterprise. the natural evolution of "best practice" as articulated in posh business schools in fact historians of the future, with the independence and clarity granted by the passage of time would be very brutal about the type of social pathology this is.

mattewong 4y ago

> One gets the sense that [the authors] think the consultants they write about are rotten apples, but [they are wrong] OK I paraphrased the rest of the sentence into the last 3 words but if you bothered to read to the end, you see that the reviewer completely lost her way. Purporting to review a book, she concluded by the end that its authors are misguided because the real culprit is not the consultants, but rather, every pursuit of efficiency, including all "software development". > software development [is] in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation

_8j50 4y ago

Why can't I reply to the top posts with archive links? Very strange.

specialist 4y ago

If one was to scratch the surface of any given inept, wasteful government entity, I wager 7 delicious jelly-filled donuts they'd find the culprit is in fact some well-connected consultants or vendor. All appropriations, budgets, bids, contracts, revenue, finances, and so forth, must be public by default. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

fijiaarone 4y ago
Jelly filled donuts are never delicious.

charles_f 4y ago

Let's also not forget that one time when McKinsey advised their pharma customers to take advantage of the opioid crisis and got caught red-handed(1). It gets one to wonder, how many times did they do something similarly despicable and were not caught. 1: random article there, tons more available through google https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mckinsey-to-pay-for-role-in-opioid-crisis_n_601bc1cec5b6c0af54d1091b https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mckinsey-to-pay-for-role-in-o...

FabHK 4y ago

Is there anything new? I remember more or less the same criticisms two decades ago: - Lewis Pinault, Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting, 2001 - Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, 2005 https://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Demons-Inside-Unscrupulous-Corporate/dp/006661998X/ https://www.amazon.com/Consulting-Demons-Inside-Unscrupulous... https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446576565/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0446576565/

TrackerFF 4y ago

Most gov. work that MBB (McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting) works on is pretty boring stuff. It's mostly just lazy politicians offloading their work onto these firms, and unfortunately that kind of culture has been allowed to fester in far too many countries. Fortunately, it seems like there's a growing focusing on consultancy use and frivolous spending. Hopefully lazy politicians will get called out more on this kind of stuff...even though it might just be the oppositions calling each other out, but more transparency is always good.