5 ms·
"McKinsey is a very different firm today than when these matters first took place" No they are most certainly not. Corruption is in McKinsey's DNA. Outside of
by languagehacker 2y ago
"McKinsey is a very different firm today than when these matters first took place"
No they are most certainly not. Corruption is in McKinsey's DNA. Outside of the specific harms that McKinsey has caused across the country and across the world, management consulting groups in general have been utilized to sidestep legal protections against corporations within a shared industry colluding against each other. Companies like McKinsey, Bain, Accenture, etc., have been instrumental in the rapid increase of executive compensation, flat comp for workers compared to inflation, intentionally unsafe practices and corner-cutting to save money, and just generally creating as many negative externalities as possible in the name of feeding the beast that Milton Friedman created with his rhetoric about the primacy of the shareholder.
A good read on this topic is "When McKinsey Comes to Town" by Forsyth and Bogdanich. There's a whole chapter dedicated to the South African bribery scandal. Sagar was not just a bad apple -- the company itself is the rot.
- awanderingmind 2y agoThank you for this, I agree.
- vundercind 2y agoYuuuup. They launder both corporate espionage and collusion as “best practices” (where’d they learn those? Your company! And your competitors!)
- alexashka 2y agoThis. More broadly, anyone that claims you can improve anything by sending randoms who read some books to companies and 'consult' there is selling you a fantasy.
- asdff 2y agoPart of that is the side effect that the companies themselves are not giving their own employees time to actually pause from the slog in the trenches for a second and you know, read the book themselves. Instead book readers are brought in to consult on operations.
- StableAlkyne 2y agoThere is some value in that they can ignore whatever dumb red tape exists at your company. Also politically harder for middle managers to just ignore what the expensive consultants are suggesting
- psunavy03 2y agoI once watched a webinar on YouTube by Dave Snowden, who invented Cynefin and was an IBM VP. I think his words were something like "I hired those guys from time to time, not because I had any intention of doing what they recommended, but because it got the board and C-Suite off my back long enough for me to frame the problem in my head and decide what I was going to do."
- alexashka 2y agoMiddle managers who read some books and proceed to 'manage' are selling you a fantasy. You can't fix one fantasy with another fantasy.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- moshegramovsky 2y agoAm I correct in remembering that they had some kind of involvement in the Purdue Pharmaceutical debacle? It seems like you are exactly right: McKinsey is not really a good company.
- mateus1 2y agoThey weren’t just involved. They were the brains behind some evil moves such as giving bonuses per opioid OD rates and bribing the best pill pushing doctors with bribes disguised as speaker fees.
- autoexec 2y agoDid anyone at McKinsey & Co ever see a day in jail for it? Last I heard they didn't even have a conviction for anything, just settlements in which they agreed to a fine while they still insisted that they didn't do anything illegal.
- smt88 2y agoIt takes a lot to go beyond the corporate veil and hold individuals criminally liable. I think prosecutors rarely try unless it's a slam dunk.
- soraminazuki 2y agoI still can’t wrap my head around the fact that causing hundreds of thousands of deaths for profit doesn’t result in a swift conviction.
- moshegramovsky 2y agoI think it's more a case of "where there's a will, there's a way".
- maeil 2y agoNo, hence we're now seeing cases like Brian Thompson's where citizens rightly take law enforcement into their own hands because the actual judiciary has been completely captured by the wealthy class.
- jjkaczor 2y agoIt isn't just them - all of the "big 4" do the same things - "KTMJ" has had dozens of scandals over the years...
- jncfhnb 2y agoMcKinsey is not a part of the big 4. And it’s KPMG
- Incipient 2y agoI think they meant it as a acronym potentially? But the "big 4" are typically to refer to the accounting firms. "big 3" are for management consulting? Bain, Boston, and mckinsey? Or does deloitte fit in there? Anyway neither here nor there.
- jjkaczor 2y agoI meant it as a joke - it is a reference to the financial/accounting firm from the movie "The Batman"... bad enough it drove one of their auditors crazy ...
- chasd00 2y agoAh McKinsey, my favorite story was from my sister who worked there some years ago. McKinsey worked on strategy for the Obama and McCain campaigns at the same time! Heh talk about heads I win tails you lose. I guess an Obama win was what was best for McKinsey.
- cafard 2y agoAbraham Lincoln brought back from the dead couldn't have won as a Republican in 2008 with the economy the way it was.
- highcountess 2y agoThey’re also an organization in which sexual predation is normal.