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McKinsey Under Criminal Investigation over Opioid-Related Consulting

418 points by impish9208 3y ago

Mobius01 3y ago
I have no more to say than… good. I’ve been witness first hand of their consulting practices and the aftermath on people’s lives.
impish9208 3y ago
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mckinsey-faces-criminal-probe-over-opioid-related-consulting-a3f816d4?st=04n3pw90tsqe7mk https://www.wsj.com/articles/mckinsey-faces-criminal-probe-o...
al_borland 3y ago
Considering they have already paid out close to $1B to settle various other claims… >McKinsey previously paid $641.5 million to resolve claims by state attorneys general and another $230 million to resolve claims by local governments. It has also settled cases by Native American tribes. https://www.reuters.com/legal/mckinsey-pay-78-million-us-opioid-settlement-with-health-plans-2023-12-30/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/mckinsey-pay-78-million-us-opi... … I’m going to assume this won’t go well for them either. I hope this leads to an expanded investigation against all the other harmful advice they’ve unleashed on the world. This firm should not be sitting in the trusted position they are in.
- gravescale 3y ago
  > trusted position they are in. Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South? "We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defence we did specifically check with McKinsey and they said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us".
  - Pingk 3y ago
    No one ever got fired for hiring a consulting firm to check if a potentially risky strategy will make them money. If it pays off, the fee doesn't matter because we made more money. If it lost money, well we did our due diligence so we were just unfortunate.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South? It's both. There's some expectation that they aren't actively self-dealing... Besides the obvious expectation that they'd love to sell you further services. That's normal and expected, whereas them shilling for their other clients is not.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    But why do we respect that name as a sign off? What if a CEO said, “We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defense we did specifically check with the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ kid and he said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us". I don’t find McKinsey any more credible than a child sticking his fingers in the mouth of a baby who is surprised when he gets bit.
    - tech_buddha 3y ago
      It makes me ill writing this, but I believe it is due to the big consulting firms recruiting from elite academic institutions. Our primitive brains ascribe incredible value to institutions of any sort. Not that the universities are bad themselves of course, but that there is a belief in the general public that those graduates are smarter or better.
      - al_borland 3y ago
        I think the issue there is that these new grads parachute into companies to advise top level executives, while have no real world experience on how business or people actually are in the real world. A lot of things sound great on paper when learning in the classroom, but don’t play out well in real life. A consultant position should be one a person earns after spending 20 years in the industry, it is not something anyone should start out as.
- ta988 3y ago
  The problem investigating companies like that is that each law syit only looks at a tiny slice of the committed crimes and can't go look for anything else that's not the topic of the lawsuit. So you basically have to start all over again and hope enough will leak so you can start making a case...
misswaterfairy 3y ago
> McKinsey also advised Purdue and Endo on how to target the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for sales of their products, according to documents made public through the firm’s settlements with state and local governments. This advisory work occurred while McKinsey was simultaneously working as a consultant for the VA itself. McKinsey has said that it advised the VA on matters unrelated to opioid procurement. Conflicts of interest are rife in utilising these consulting companies for government services. Australia has an ongoing saga with a similar theme[1], where a consulting company, PwC, played both sides to the advantage of corporate friends, and got caught. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal
- oooyay 3y ago
  The VA and VA healthcare are somewhat separate but they are in a unique position to be able to detect something along the lines of, "Given an increase in opioid prescriptions what is the relative increase in homelessness and substance use disorder services saught by members." I also have a somewhat petty comment to make while juxtaposing this with this: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/marijuana.asp https://www.publichealth.va.gov/marijuana.asp
  - salad-tycoon 3y ago
    It’s a federal law and the VA is a federal agency. What would you propose? VA offers multiple “edgy” therapies like ketamine therapy but there’s just no room for that for MJ. Don’t like the law? Lobby to change it. Also, frankly I’ve worked in states with legal and not legal status and nobody really cares. Maybe the pencil pushers and disability raters are different. Don’t know. This discussion is much larger than these comments but ultimately my point is the VA should absolutely never ever ever decide to become a legislative branch. God help us if the VA becomes some quasi chevron deference pretend legislative arm of the federal government and decides to interpret and/or disregard federal laws.
    - oooyay 3y ago
      Kind of an aside, but it takes a lot of energy to respond to rants like this. Maybe that's on me, but if you're a vet then I'd assume you'd know how difficult it is to get anything changed at the VA much less lobbying to change an incorrectly scheduled drug. What my point was is that it's incredibly hypocritical for the VA to have a history of denying veterans medical care over marijuana and then they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar with McKinsey about opioids - an epidemic that they had plenty of data on from the DOD. When I got out in 2012 the DOD base hospitals were chalk full of addicts that their hospital system had created due to over prescription and then subsequently processing people out. I postured whether they had an even bigger picture because it's also the VAs job to track people when they get out; the exception I made was that healthcare and the VA are somewhat separate but related entities. I do realize the marijuana policy has changed drastically, but it's not reason to forget the last decade.
readyplayernull 3y ago
Also, previously on HN: > Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NetOpWibby 3y ago
  WTF YIKES
- lakomen 3y ago
  Wow, that explains a lot
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- fransje26 3y ago
  Ah. Explains why Google quietly dropped their "Don't be evil" I guess..
  - hirvi74 3y ago
    I am fairly certain Google never truly took that motto to heart to begin with.
ummonk 3y ago
Having known a McKinsey consultant in the past, my general heuristic is that everything negative reported in the media about it is completely true, along with a heap of insider trading and conflict of interest that doesn’t get reported in the media.
- dannykwells 3y ago
  100%
- neilv 3y ago
  Anecdata: the two ex-McKinsey people I've worked with were both decent. I have skepticism of management consulting in general, and concern about the opioid thing, but I don't want people lumped in with that undeservedly.
  - jordanb 3y ago
    Nah at this point, if you are willing to sign on with a company like McKinsey it suggests you have absolutely no moral compass. What they do is very well understood.
    - neilv 3y ago
      I'm guessing that, today, the opioid thing might've really changed how people think of it, and maybe even the undergrads who get targeted for recruitment will have heard of it. That's fairly recent, though.
      - hobs 3y ago
        How about being called out for targeting the brutal murder of Jamāl Aḥmad Khāshqujī? They play ball with all sorts of shitty regimes (including the united states) McKinsey has way more crimes than the opioid epidemic.
      - jcranmer 3y ago
        The Wikipedia article on McKinsey is over half just discussing various controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... This is a company that has fueled (among other things) the Enron scandals, opioid epidemic, Saudi repression of dissidents. Some of this is--as a big consulting company--it has its hands in a lot of things, so some of those things are bound to be unpleasant. But it's also clear that there doesn't appear to be much of an ethical filter for what work it takes on. I honestly would be more surprised at this point if McKinsey hasn't helped plan out a genocide.
sn41 3y ago
Another related case in Pennysylvania: https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/ag-shapiro-puts-a-stop-to-mckinseys-proliferation-of-the-opioid-crisis/ https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/ag-shapiro-put... Quote from the website: "The complaint, filed along with the settlement, details how McKinsey advised Purdue and other opioid manufacturers on how to maximize profits from its opioid products, including targeting high-volume opioid prescribers, using specific messaging to get physicians to prescribe more OxyContin to more patients, and circumventing pharmacy restrictions in order to deliver high-dose prescriptions. When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue."
- consp 3y ago
  > When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue. Isn't that the assumption of guilt and if the documents are lost the worst can be taken from them?
paulorlando 3y ago
From 2021 when the story got a lot of attention: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/responsibility-clawbacks-mckinsey-purdue-pharma/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/responsibility-clawbacks-mck...
tky 3y ago
Highly recommend reading “When McKinsey Comes to Town” for a close look at decade after decade of malfeasance. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinsey-comes-to-town-by-walt-bogdanich-and-michael-forsythe/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...
JCM9 3y ago
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for McKinsey. They’ve gone from scandal to scandal over the last 10 years or so and their once vaunted reputation is now in shambles. They deserve whatever is coming to them here. There are certainly some decent folks that have passed through McKinsey but the firm is, ironically, in desperate need of some good advice on how to run a company.
- smt88 3y ago
  Enron didn't kill Arthur Anderson. Nothing is going to kill McKinsey. They're too intertwined with powerful people.
  - jjeaff 3y ago
    What? Enron DID kill Arthur Anderson. They completely collapsed in mid 2002, right after Enron. They were also big players in the WorldCom collapse, so that contributed as well.
    - smt88 3y ago
      The corporate entity collapsed, but the consulting business continued at Accenture (and notably BearingPoint, among others), and substantial portions of the accounting business survives to this day as Andersen Tax and a few spinoff firms founded by ex-partners. The only reason we haven't "another Enron" is because of Sarbanes-Oxley, not because Arthur Andersen was sufficiently destroyed.
      - stevesimmons 3y ago
        Your chronology is incorrect. - Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting split in 1989. It was an acrimonious divorce, with a long arbitration settlement finally concluding on 1 Jan 2000. - That settlement gave AA exclusive use of the Andersen name. So Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture on 1 Jan 2000. - Enron collapsed in 2001 and Arthur Andersen went out of business in 2002. So it's not accurate to say that AA's consulting business continued at Accenture; the split happened a decade earlier.
wnc3141 3y ago
The suspicions of the working man's least favorite firm appear to in the process of confirmation. Now the naked ambition of capitalism's worst impulses must fester elsewhere.
throwaway743 3y ago
Good.
sidcool 3y ago
Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ
geodel 3y ago
I guess they were just leveraging synergies between pharma company and pharma regulator. Isn't this all Ivy league management education about.
spxneo 3y ago
Not only this opiod thing but this McKinsey outfit has singlehandedly responsible for Canada's recent immigration policy which many regard as failure with a strangely generous contract awarded by Trudeau It's rather bizarre to hand off key policies such as immigration to a foreign consulting company, one which is controversial enough.
- achow 3y ago
  Quick search.. Trudeau government had spent $66 million on sole-sourced McKinsey contracts since coming to power in 2015... under the Liberals McKinsey contracts have “exploded” by a factor of 30, according to Radio-Canada. This is particularly true at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, where insiders have fingered McKinsey with designing the Trudeau government’s policy of dramatically ramping up immigration to unprecedented levels. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-the-latest-country-accused-of-handing-outsized-power-to-mckinsey https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-the-la...
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    8M per year is not very much
    - snapcaster 3y ago
      People commit murder over far far less
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        … sure? But my point is that this is not a lot of work. I find the claim that it had exploded 30x to be almost impossible. Because you will struggle to do a single McKinsey project for 1/30th of 8M.
        rpdillon 3y ago
        You took the 66M and ammortized it annually, which backed you into the "You can't hire McKinsey for 1/30th of $8M" corner. The orignal source is trivial to find, and makes the calculation using total amounts during the respective terms. > In the nine years of the Harper government, McKinsey was awarded $2.2 million in federal contracts. During Trudeau's seven years in office, the company has received $66 million from the federal government. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1946212/the-value-of-one-consulting-firms-federal-contracts-has-skyrocketed-under-the-trudeau-government https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1946212/the-value-of...
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Every single time I’ve had a frustrating, anti-user experience with a product, it’s tied to some bottomline boosting “optimization” dreamed up by an MBA MBAs are the worst thing to happen to capitalism, and McKinsey has been at its very forefront
Sleaker 3y ago
I think wsj started blocking anyone that uses bypass paywall, anyone got archives of this yet?
crivabene 3y ago
To get quickly up to speed on McKinsey, I would recommend to watch an episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight on the subject: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ
- trogdor 3y ago
  To quickly get up to speed you suggest I watch a 26-minute video? We have different definitions of the word “quickly.”
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Watch it at 1.5x speed then. LWT episodes usually include interview clips and other pieces of media to tell the story. I'd rather see that an zero citation op-ed screed that would be a 5-minute read.
lavp 3y ago
https://archive.md/7Fk72 https://archive.md/7Fk72
antipropaganda 3y ago
Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants. The losers are only (a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures. (b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc. (c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc. We should all get MBAs and enjoy the gravy train.
- Voultapher 3y ago
  I'm increasingly of the opinion that corporations are an elaborate scheme to provide some people with money and status without them actually providing value to society. Mainly the MBA class. "You know what this rowboat with two people rowing and six managing needs? Another management layer." Leeches like McKinsey are right at the heart of it. If you add enough indirection and shared responsibility, the most atrocious outcomes become palatable. Another way to view them, is as slow AIs directly driving the sixth mass extinction event.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  As someone who works at McKinsey I get kind of irritated by this meme. It is objectively and obviously not true for external blame because all work by McKinsey is NDA’d. you’re almost never allowed to share that McKinsey helped on anything because we want to maintain firewalls between teams working for competitors / vendors / customers internally and externally as much as possible. I don’t really buy it for internal blame either.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    I thought the advice was NDA'd to hide the fact that exactly the same advice was being sold to different organisations?
trustno2 3y ago
One think I did appreciate about McKinsey is how they will advise anyone. Left-wing dictators, right-wing dictators, normal governments, big tech small tech, banks, you name it. There is something freeing with "it's just money"... you don't question their political loyalties or how they are affiliated - they don't care, they just want cash. Unfortunately actually working with them made me realize they are kind of useless and their main value is that they can produce a lot of powerpoint presentations, and eat an infinite amount of money per slide. In my opinion/experience they are not evil, they are just useless. But YMMV
- wazoox 3y ago
  The core of their mission is making people in responsibility unaccountable. Some government will pay McKinsey to advise them on some brain-dead policy, and when the policy inevitably fails they can say "we consulted the experts and followed their advice", doubled with "every other government followed the same expert advice". Typical "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM / Microsoft" mindset.
hardlianotion 3y ago
It couldn't happen to nicer people. McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate.
- fransje26 3y ago
  > McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate. So a cancer on a cancer?
tohnjitor 3y ago
The ride never ends. https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters-delivers-wins-results-revisited https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters...
gorbachev 3y ago
They will pay a fine, which will a miniscule percentage of the profit they got from the work they did regarding OxyContin, nobody will be fired never mind go to prison. I would be absolutely shocked, if anything other than that happens.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that the fines / settlements outweigh the consulting revenue of one project, which was probably staffing 7ish people for several months. I would wager the costs here are over 10-100x the associated revenues.
amai 3y ago
McKinsey should be under criminal investigation for basically everything they do.

418 points by impish9208 3y ago

I have no more to say than… good. I’ve been witness first hand of their consulting practices and the aftermath on people’s lives.

impish9208 3y ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mckinsey-faces-criminal-probe-over-opioid-related-consulting-a3f816d4?st=04n3pw90tsqe7mk https://www.wsj.com/articles/mckinsey-faces-criminal-probe-o...

al_borland 3y ago

Considering they have already paid out close to $1B to settle various other claims… >McKinsey previously paid $641.5 million to resolve claims by state attorneys general and another $230 million to resolve claims by local governments. It has also settled cases by Native American tribes. https://www.reuters.com/legal/mckinsey-pay-78-million-us-opioid-settlement-with-health-plans-2023-12-30/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/mckinsey-pay-78-million-us-opi... … I’m going to assume this won’t go well for them either. I hope this leads to an expanded investigation against all the other harmful advice they’ve unleashed on the world. This firm should not be sitting in the trusted position they are in.

gravescale 3y ago
> trusted position they are in. Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South? "We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defence we did specifically check with McKinsey and they said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us".
- Pingk 3y ago
  No one ever got fired for hiring a consulting firm to check if a potentially risky strategy will make them money. If it pays off, the fee doesn't matter because we made more money. If it lost money, well we did our due diligence so we were just unfortunate.
- vkou 3y ago
  > Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South? It's both. There's some expectation that they aren't actively self-dealing... Besides the obvious expectation that they'd love to sell you further services. That's normal and expected, whereas them shilling for their other clients is not.
- al_borland 3y ago
  But why do we respect that name as a sign off? What if a CEO said, “We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defense we did specifically check with the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ kid and he said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us". I don’t find McKinsey any more credible than a child sticking his fingers in the mouth of a baby who is surprised when he gets bit.
  - tech_buddha 3y ago
    It makes me ill writing this, but I believe it is due to the big consulting firms recruiting from elite academic institutions. Our primitive brains ascribe incredible value to institutions of any sort. Not that the universities are bad themselves of course, but that there is a belief in the general public that those graduates are smarter or better.
    - al_borland 3y ago
      I think the issue there is that these new grads parachute into companies to advise top level executives, while have no real world experience on how business or people actually are in the real world. A lot of things sound great on paper when learning in the classroom, but don’t play out well in real life. A consultant position should be one a person earns after spending 20 years in the industry, it is not something anyone should start out as.
ta988 3y ago
The problem investigating companies like that is that each law syit only looks at a tiny slice of the committed crimes and can't go look for anything else that's not the topic of the lawsuit. So you basically have to start all over again and hope enough will leak so you can start making a case...

misswaterfairy 3y ago

> McKinsey also advised Purdue and Endo on how to target the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for sales of their products, according to documents made public through the firm’s settlements with state and local governments. This advisory work occurred while McKinsey was simultaneously working as a consultant for the VA itself. McKinsey has said that it advised the VA on matters unrelated to opioid procurement. Conflicts of interest are rife in utilising these consulting companies for government services. Australia has an ongoing saga with a similar theme[1], where a consulting company, PwC, played both sides to the advantage of corporate friends, and got caught. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal

oooyay 3y ago
The VA and VA healthcare are somewhat separate but they are in a unique position to be able to detect something along the lines of, "Given an increase in opioid prescriptions what is the relative increase in homelessness and substance use disorder services saught by members." I also have a somewhat petty comment to make while juxtaposing this with this: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/marijuana.asp https://www.publichealth.va.gov/marijuana.asp
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  It’s a federal law and the VA is a federal agency. What would you propose? VA offers multiple “edgy” therapies like ketamine therapy but there’s just no room for that for MJ. Don’t like the law? Lobby to change it. Also, frankly I’ve worked in states with legal and not legal status and nobody really cares. Maybe the pencil pushers and disability raters are different. Don’t know. This discussion is much larger than these comments but ultimately my point is the VA should absolutely never ever ever decide to become a legislative branch. God help us if the VA becomes some quasi chevron deference pretend legislative arm of the federal government and decides to interpret and/or disregard federal laws.
  - oooyay 3y ago
    Kind of an aside, but it takes a lot of energy to respond to rants like this. Maybe that's on me, but if you're a vet then I'd assume you'd know how difficult it is to get anything changed at the VA much less lobbying to change an incorrectly scheduled drug. What my point was is that it's incredibly hypocritical for the VA to have a history of denying veterans medical care over marijuana and then they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar with McKinsey about opioids - an epidemic that they had plenty of data on from the DOD. When I got out in 2012 the DOD base hospitals were chalk full of addicts that their hospital system had created due to over prescription and then subsequently processing people out. I postured whether they had an even bigger picture because it's also the VAs job to track people when they get out; the exception I made was that healthcare and the VA are somewhat separate but related entities. I do realize the marijuana policy has changed drastically, but it's not reason to forget the last decade.

readyplayernull 3y ago

Also, previously on HN: > Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NetOpWibby 3y ago
WTF YIKES
lakomen 3y ago
Wow, that explains a lot
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fransje26 3y ago
Ah. Explains why Google quietly dropped their "Don't be evil" I guess..
- hirvi74 3y ago
  I am fairly certain Google never truly took that motto to heart to begin with.

ummonk 3y ago

Having known a McKinsey consultant in the past, my general heuristic is that everything negative reported in the media about it is completely true, along with a heap of insider trading and conflict of interest that doesn’t get reported in the media.

dannykwells 3y ago
100%
neilv 3y ago
Anecdata: the two ex-McKinsey people I've worked with were both decent. I have skepticism of management consulting in general, and concern about the opioid thing, but I don't want people lumped in with that undeservedly.
- jordanb 3y ago
  Nah at this point, if you are willing to sign on with a company like McKinsey it suggests you have absolutely no moral compass. What they do is very well understood.
  - neilv 3y ago
    I'm guessing that, today, the opioid thing might've really changed how people think of it, and maybe even the undergrads who get targeted for recruitment will have heard of it. That's fairly recent, though.
    - hobs 3y ago
      How about being called out for targeting the brutal murder of Jamāl Aḥmad Khāshqujī? They play ball with all sorts of shitty regimes (including the united states) McKinsey has way more crimes than the opioid epidemic.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      The Wikipedia article on McKinsey is over half just discussing various controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... This is a company that has fueled (among other things) the Enron scandals, opioid epidemic, Saudi repression of dissidents. Some of this is--as a big consulting company--it has its hands in a lot of things, so some of those things are bound to be unpleasant. But it's also clear that there doesn't appear to be much of an ethical filter for what work it takes on. I honestly would be more surprised at this point if McKinsey hasn't helped plan out a genocide.

sn41 3y ago

Another related case in Pennysylvania: https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/ag-shapiro-puts-a-stop-to-mckinseys-proliferation-of-the-opioid-crisis/ https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/ag-shapiro-put... Quote from the website: "The complaint, filed along with the settlement, details how McKinsey advised Purdue and other opioid manufacturers on how to maximize profits from its opioid products, including targeting high-volume opioid prescribers, using specific messaging to get physicians to prescribe more OxyContin to more patients, and circumventing pharmacy restrictions in order to deliver high-dose prescriptions. When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue."

consp 3y ago
> When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue. Isn't that the assumption of guilt and if the documents are lost the worst can be taken from them?

paulorlando 3y ago

From 2021 when the story got a lot of attention: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/responsibility-clawbacks-mckinsey-purdue-pharma/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/responsibility-clawbacks-mck...

tky 3y ago

Highly recommend reading “When McKinsey Comes to Town” for a close look at decade after decade of malfeasance. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinsey-comes-to-town-by-walt-bogdanich-and-michael-forsythe/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...

JCM9 3y ago

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for McKinsey. They’ve gone from scandal to scandal over the last 10 years or so and their once vaunted reputation is now in shambles. They deserve whatever is coming to them here. There are certainly some decent folks that have passed through McKinsey but the firm is, ironically, in desperate need of some good advice on how to run a company.

smt88 3y ago
Enron didn't kill Arthur Anderson. Nothing is going to kill McKinsey. They're too intertwined with powerful people.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  What? Enron DID kill Arthur Anderson. They completely collapsed in mid 2002, right after Enron. They were also big players in the WorldCom collapse, so that contributed as well.
  - smt88 3y ago
    The corporate entity collapsed, but the consulting business continued at Accenture (and notably BearingPoint, among others), and substantial portions of the accounting business survives to this day as Andersen Tax and a few spinoff firms founded by ex-partners. The only reason we haven't "another Enron" is because of Sarbanes-Oxley, not because Arthur Andersen was sufficiently destroyed.
    - stevesimmons 3y ago
      Your chronology is incorrect. - Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting split in 1989. It was an acrimonious divorce, with a long arbitration settlement finally concluding on 1 Jan 2000. - That settlement gave AA exclusive use of the Andersen name. So Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture on 1 Jan 2000. - Enron collapsed in 2001 and Arthur Andersen went out of business in 2002. So it's not accurate to say that AA's consulting business continued at Accenture; the split happened a decade earlier.

wnc3141 3y ago

The suspicions of the working man's least favorite firm appear to in the process of confirmation. Now the naked ambition of capitalism's worst impulses must fester elsewhere.

throwaway743 3y ago

Good.

sidcool 3y ago

Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

geodel 3y ago

I guess they were just leveraging synergies between pharma company and pharma regulator. Isn't this all Ivy league management education about.

spxneo 3y ago

Not only this opiod thing but this McKinsey outfit has singlehandedly responsible for Canada's recent immigration policy which many regard as failure with a strangely generous contract awarded by Trudeau It's rather bizarre to hand off key policies such as immigration to a foreign consulting company, one which is controversial enough.

achow 3y ago
Quick search.. Trudeau government had spent $66 million on sole-sourced McKinsey contracts since coming to power in 2015... under the Liberals McKinsey contracts have “exploded” by a factor of 30, according to Radio-Canada. This is particularly true at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, where insiders have fingered McKinsey with designing the Trudeau government’s policy of dramatically ramping up immigration to unprecedented levels. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-the-latest-country-accused-of-handing-outsized-power-to-mckinsey https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-the-la...
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  8M per year is not very much
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    People commit murder over far far less
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      … sure? But my point is that this is not a lot of work. I find the claim that it had exploded 30x to be almost impossible. Because you will struggle to do a single McKinsey project for 1/30th of 8M.
      - rpdillon 3y ago
        You took the 66M and ammortized it annually, which backed you into the "You can't hire McKinsey for 1/30th of $8M" corner. The orignal source is trivial to find, and makes the calculation using total amounts during the respective terms. > In the nine years of the Harper government, McKinsey was awarded $2.2 million in federal contracts. During Trudeau's seven years in office, the company has received $66 million from the federal government. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1946212/the-value-of-one-consulting-firms-federal-contracts-has-skyrocketed-under-the-trudeau-government https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1946212/the-value-of...

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Every single time I’ve had a frustrating, anti-user experience with a product, it’s tied to some bottomline boosting “optimization” dreamed up by an MBA MBAs are the worst thing to happen to capitalism, and McKinsey has been at its very forefront

Sleaker 3y ago

I think wsj started blocking anyone that uses bypass paywall, anyone got archives of this yet?

crivabene 3y ago

To get quickly up to speed on McKinsey, I would recommend to watch an episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight on the subject: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ

trogdor 3y ago
To quickly get up to speed you suggest I watch a 26-minute video? We have different definitions of the word “quickly.”
- rchaud 3y ago
  Watch it at 1.5x speed then. LWT episodes usually include interview clips and other pieces of media to tell the story. I'd rather see that an zero citation op-ed screed that would be a 5-minute read.

lavp 3y ago

https://archive.md/7Fk72 https://archive.md/7Fk72

antipropaganda 3y ago

Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants. The losers are only (a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures. (b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc. (c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc. We should all get MBAs and enjoy the gravy train.

Voultapher 3y ago
I'm increasingly of the opinion that corporations are an elaborate scheme to provide some people with money and status without them actually providing value to society. Mainly the MBA class. "You know what this rowboat with two people rowing and six managing needs? Another management layer." Leeches like McKinsey are right at the heart of it. If you add enough indirection and shared responsibility, the most atrocious outcomes become palatable. Another way to view them, is as slow AIs directly driving the sixth mass extinction event.
jncfhnb 3y ago
As someone who works at McKinsey I get kind of irritated by this meme. It is objectively and obviously not true for external blame because all work by McKinsey is NDA’d. you’re almost never allowed to share that McKinsey helped on anything because we want to maintain firewalls between teams working for competitors / vendors / customers internally and externally as much as possible. I don’t really buy it for internal blame either.
- arethuza 3y ago
  I thought the advice was NDA'd to hide the fact that exactly the same advice was being sold to different organisations?

trustno2 3y ago

One think I did appreciate about McKinsey is how they will advise anyone. Left-wing dictators, right-wing dictators, normal governments, big tech small tech, banks, you name it. There is something freeing with "it's just money"... you don't question their political loyalties or how they are affiliated - they don't care, they just want cash. Unfortunately actually working with them made me realize they are kind of useless and their main value is that they can produce a lot of powerpoint presentations, and eat an infinite amount of money per slide. In my opinion/experience they are not evil, they are just useless. But YMMV

wazoox 3y ago
The core of their mission is making people in responsibility unaccountable. Some government will pay McKinsey to advise them on some brain-dead policy, and when the policy inevitably fails they can say "we consulted the experts and followed their advice", doubled with "every other government followed the same expert advice". Typical "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM / Microsoft" mindset.

hardlianotion 3y ago

It couldn't happen to nicer people. McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate.

fransje26 3y ago
> McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate. So a cancer on a cancer?

tohnjitor 3y ago

The ride never ends. https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters-delivers-wins-results-revisited https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters...

gorbachev 3y ago

They will pay a fine, which will a miniscule percentage of the profit they got from the work they did regarding OxyContin, nobody will be fired never mind go to prison. I would be absolutely shocked, if anything other than that happens.

jncfhnb 3y ago
It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that the fines / settlements outweigh the consulting revenue of one project, which was probably staffing 7ish people for several months. I would wager the costs here are over 10-100x the associated revenues.

amai 3y ago

McKinsey should be under criminal investigation for basically everything they do.