[HN Gopher] McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid c...
___________________________________________________________________
McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role:
source
Author : onetimemanytime
Score : 434 points
Date : 2021-02-04 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| When company management wants to make a big change they hire
| consultants to provide cover and justification for it. The
| consultants role is to agree to and implement whatever the
| management's desired change is. The consultants exist to provide
| an air of authority behind the decision and to act as a
| smokescreen to the employees facing the change. If the plan
| succeeds, upper management takes the credit. If it fails, the
| burden can be shifted onto the consultants.
|
| Companies like McKinsey will say whatever you want them to say,
| and there is no shortage of conflicting case studies to 'prove'
| their points.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Sometime (often in my limited experience) they do the same in
| order NOT to change. My employer before last Brough consultants
| in to see how they could improve. Employees listed the same
| things as we're listed 3 years previous when the same exercise
| came in. No action was taken, just lots of considering and
| discussions.
| Balgair wrote:
| Aside: When this occurs, how do the C-suite look at themselves
| and think that they are the ones in charge? You'd think that
| they'd just have the ability to do it regardless, but an
| expensive whipping boy (almost literally) is the better fit.
| How political is your org such that this even becomes a
| possibility to contemplate? What terrible lack of communication
| and respect between layers causes this? (These questions are
| rhetorical, of course)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Imagine you're a VP, or even a C-Suite Executive...
|
| Your employees get to make decisions based on what they
| _think_ is best, what feels right. You don 't have that
| luxury. Investors, the board, other managers who are vying
| for your position all demand numbers-based decision making
| and justification. So what do you do? You hire a well known
| consultancy to produce documents and data that supports your
| position. You can now justify your actions by pointing to
| what they've made for you. And, you have the added bonus of
| the sunken cost fallacy. "Well of course we took their
| advice, don't you know how much we paid for it?"
| Judgmentality wrote:
| So the VP's job is to be disingenuous to everyone except
| the consultants? He's already made up his mind about what
| to do, knows he can't get buy-in from employees, so he
| hires an external firm to generate the data he has already
| decided is correct.
|
| I feel like all the comments talking about a breakdown of
| trust seem even more poignant now after reading your
| comment.
| Closi wrote:
| > When company management wants to make a big change they hire
| consultants to provide cover and justification for it. [..]
| Companies like McKinsey will say whatever you want them to say,
| and there is no shortage of conflicting case studies to 'prove'
| their points.
|
| Not really, there are plenty of cheaper companies you can hire
| to do this when you know the solution and just need to bring in
| someone to do something unpopular - McKinsey is expensive!
|
| In my experience there are 4 key types of job. I've put my own
| percentages for what I have experienced, but different people
| in different companies will obviously vary dramatically.
|
| * Problems where the client genuinely doesn't know the right
| solution, and wants you to help (30%-40%)
|
| * Problems where the client knows a kind of half-baked
| solution, or has a load of ideas, and wants you to make a
| fully-baked solution (30%-40%)
|
| * Problems where the client knows the solution, and you are
| assisting in implementation/further work because the client
| doesn't have resource or time to do it, or wants someone with
| specific skills that they don't have internally, for example
| procurement support, negotiating a merger/acquisition, time
| sensitive projects e.t.c. (20%)
|
| * Problems where the client knows the solution, and just wants
| you to tell it to them in a report because that gives it
| authority or the consultants can take the blame (less than 10%)
| strbean wrote:
| > there are plenty of cheaper companies you can hire to do
| this
|
| Isn't McKinsey like the IBM of their field, though? Hiring
| someone cheap makes it harder to pass the buck if it doesn't
| work out. "Nobody ever got fired for buying McKinsey" and all
| that.
| todipa wrote:
| $573M will be minimally felt at the organization level. It is
| less than 5% of global revenues.
| paxys wrote:
| 5% of total revenue is a MASSIVE charge. Most companies in the
| world have profit margins lower than that. They will absolutely
| feel that in their financial statements.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| This is not a retail merchant. This is a big five
| consultancy. I can assure you their margins are well above
| 30%.
| the_drunkard wrote:
| McKinsey or its partners have been directly involved in Enron,
| Valeant, and now an opioid crisis that's claimed thousands (if
| not millions of lives).
|
| "In for a penny, in for a pound" - this should be McKinsey's new
| corporate slogan.
|
| Valeant article:
| https://www.ft.com/content/0bb37fd2-ef63-11e5-aff5-19b4e2536...
|
| Enron article:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/mar/24/enron.theob...
| hirple wrote:
| McKinsey are involved in almost every company in the Fortune
| 500, and have been for decades.
|
| Of course they're going to be around for almost any given
| corporate failure.
| toby wrote:
| Totally agree, this is cherry-picking.
|
| I don't have an opinion on how useful McKinsey is, but I'll
| note that no one is pointing out that they also did a lot of
| work for Microsoft before their big turnaround.
| the_drunkard wrote:
| Enron and Valeant are two of the most significant examples
| of corporate malfeasance over the past 20 years; McKinsey
| or its partners were directly involved in both.
|
| That's not cherry-picking.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| I think they work more than a third of F500 companies.
| What's your definition of cherry picking?
| vypr007 wrote:
| Approaching this from a cold math perspective, like a McK
| consultant would.. $573M settlement for approx 450k deaths, is a
| a little over $1200 per death if that is given away as
| compensation at all.
|
| Not bad for McK I'd say. The consultants really managed this
| well.
| mrosett wrote:
| Your assumption is that without McK's involvement nobody would
| have died of opioid overdoses during that window. That seems
| very questionable.
| leafmeal wrote:
| From the New York Times article, "The amount McKinsey is paying
| is substantially more than it earned from opioid-related work
| with Purdue or Johnson & Johnson, Endo International and
| Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, its other opioid-maker clients, a
| person involved in the settlement negotiations said"
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids...
| [deleted]
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| Yeah, but liquidated damages can far exceed the cost of the
| project. In most CapEx you can see clauses that include 3-10X
| the cost of the project in potential liquidated damages if
| your robot goes down and damages things, or causes the line
| to go down. I have no idea how this is handled from the
| Service side but i imagine it's similiar. IANAL.
| glaucon wrote:
| And if I killed someone to get their wallet no one suggests
| that because I didn't get much out of the wallet it's OK for
| met to have a lenient sentence ?
|
| If McKinsey knowingly offered advice that led to thousand of
| deaths then the penalty should be more than $1200/body
| regardless of what their fees were.
| leafmeal wrote:
| What do you think an appropriate penalty is? When I first
| read this headline I was worried the fine would be just a
| slap on the wrist. I was glad to see it was more
| substantial.
|
| Personally, I think a fine like this is just if it causes
| consulting firms to think about the consequences of their
| actions and do the right thing in the future. Making firms
| responsible for damages they cause would be best. Making it
| it clearly unprofitable is a good step.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| For basic fraud/bad behavior, off the top of my head, at
| least 5-6x what they made from it might be good. Anything
| involving direct, long term physical harm (such as death)
| needs a secondary penalty on top of this unrelated to
| profits made.
|
| You have to account for not all of these schemes being
| uncovered. Then you have to add an actual penalty on top
| of it.
| glaucon wrote:
| Generally, for just plain old fraud or similar, this gets
| close to it for me. In this particular case however,
| where the wrong doing resulted in many deaths I think
| some other approach is appropriate.
|
| I would really like to see more argument over why jail
| time is not an appropriate response for senior leaders
| within organisations that currently suffer nothing more
| than a fine. Where an organisation has shareholders if
| the fine is _really_ big then the persons perceived as
| responsible will, presumably /hopefully, see their career
| prospects suffer but really to provide an incentive where
| the benefits can be supremely high I think seeing a few
| of your peers spending time in jug would help. I
| appreciate the problem is knowing who to jail and I
| appreciate that's a hard problem and I don't have a ready
| answer for it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Oh no, they didn't break even.
| StormyWeather wrote:
| I am not defending what the firm did but we are talking about a
| study that took place in 2017, it has nothing to do with what
| happened before and certainly doesn't account for all deaths
| after 2017 either.
| a3n wrote:
| A mere licensing fee.
| [deleted]
| dia80 wrote:
| The opinions on consultants in the thread is largely negative and
| it's suggested hiring them is a sign of organisational
| dysfunction. If you can find information on consulting spend in
| annual reports you could create a "consultant factor" for stocks
| and see if big spenders underperform.
| cycomanic wrote:
| That relies on the premise that stock performance is somehow
| correlated with health or overall performance of a company. I
| think we have recently seen plenty of evidence that the
| correlation is likely only weak (and I'm not just talking about
| GME).
| omalleyt wrote:
| There's a level of dysfunction that causes a company to
| acknowledge the issue and hire consultants. And then there's a
| level of dysfunction that causes the company to not acknowledge
| the issue and not hire consultants. The latter level is higher
| sharkweek wrote:
| The absolutely most fascinating part of this is learning how
| McKinsey has long argued that making recommendations that
| businesses may or may not act on does not create legal liability
| (until this).
|
| I'm trying to see that argument applied in any other instance and
| it becomes totally ridiculous.
|
| "You see, your honor, I merely suggested to my client that he
| kill his neighbor in order to take his land, I didn't think he'd
| actually _DO_ it!"
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Are they actually legally liable in this case or just paying a
| settlement to get their name out of the press and get away
| cleanly from the issue?
| frankbreetz wrote:
| >>As part of the settlement, McKinsey admits to no wrongdoing.
| https://www.npr.org/2021/02/04/963864747/consulting-giant-mc...
| josho wrote:
| We should do away with settling out of court without a
| statement of who is at fault. The court could reject the
| settlement if the core issue of the case is not addressed.
|
| By way of analogy this is why it's a needed change. Applying
| settlements to criminal law I could murder you, and settle
| the case for some dollar amount and not have to admit guilt.
|
| In short settling out of court is a way for the wealthy to
| avoid meaningful penalties.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think it was a criminal case but a civil one. The
| plaintiff can drop it if they want.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's incredibly normal. It's a regularly negotiated term
| that's used to shield the wrongdoer from continued civil
| liability.
|
| Frankly, I think it's such transparent bullshit that we
| should abolish it. Really, you admit to no wrong doing but
| you're willing to fork over half a billion because ...?
| phrz wrote:
| If you're going to be made to pay out _and_ concede
| liability, why not simply go to trial and suffer the same
| legal fate? It 's not there as a mere legalese recitation
| or to shield the defendant's ego. To finish your rhetorical
| question, the reason you pay out but admit no wrongdoing is
| in recognition of the risk of financial liability stemming
| from the litigation.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| > why not simply go to trial and suffer the same legal
| fate?
|
| The same reason most people take a plea bargain. Punitive
| damages. "Prison for six months, or the risk of a jury
| sending you to prison for ten years" is a pretty strong
| incentive to plead guilty.
|
| If the punitive damages can be expected to be 10-20x of
| what you'd settle for, you'd probably just take the plea.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Yeah, but innocent people have to take pleas all the time
| because of it.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I want them to go to trial. I think it's incredibly
| unseemly that we as a society bring down the hammer on
| individual drug dealers, but let corporate ones wash the
| blood off their hands with shareholder money.
|
| Each one of these people deserves a pair of steel
| bracelets and their day in court in front of a jury of
| their peers.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think McKenzie would be found innocent in a court of
| law. This is a settlement because they don't want to be
| dragged through the mud in PR. They provided advice, the
| company chose to act on it. Unless their Advice Misslead
| regarding the legal risk, they are in the clear. If it
| was misleading, the damages would be to Purdue.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I'm no lawyer, but providing advice to a client who then
| goes ahead and breaks the law with said advice sure
| sounds like it meets the federal charge of conspiracy.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| That's a pretty standard part of settlements, and very nearly
| semantically void.
|
| The more salient facts for someone who's looking to this as
| an instructive story are: they advised a company to do some
| things that had some pretty hefty consequences, those
| consequences came back to bite them, and it cost them $573M
| plus legal fees and damaged reputation.
|
| $573M is $573M, regardless of whether a court orders you to
| pay it, or whether it's the amount you're paying to avoid
| having to find out how much the court would order you to pay.
| The fact that no ruling went onto the books is small
| consolation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That if anybody sues you for the same thing you've already
| been investigated and fined for, _they had better have
| enough money to relitigate the entire thing_ is more than a
| small consolation, it 's a public subsidy.
| dreen wrote:
| Yeah, if "simply carrying out orders" is not an appropriate
| defence then "simply given advice on orders" isn't either. Both
| are caught in the gravitational field of the guilt of the
| person in the middle.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| One would have thought that at least one person on their in-
| house counsel team would have heard the term "civil conspiracy"
| before.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think there are times when this disclaimer makes sense.
| Industry regulation can be quite complicated and nuanced enough
| that an action might be illegal despite not seeming so on the
| surface. They also can vary between jurisdiction.
|
| Having an experienced industry lawyer review future business
| plans is just good sense.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Note that the only other place it works like this law. Lawyers
| are always "providing advice" about complex legal matters, with
| no actual responsibility for the outcome (with limited
| exceptions). So the idea that lawyers would apply similar logic
| to a reasonably-similar circumstance (in terms of complexity,
| difficulty, potential liability, etc.) is not unreasonable.
| wittyreference wrote:
| What? Lawyers are absolutely liable. Their only shield is in
| the most complex realms where the actual legal theory isn't
| yet tested in court / with a regulator, so you know going in
| their advice may not pan out, because it's /experimental/.
|
| That's not the vast majority of law, though.
| arethuza wrote:
| I don't know about the US but lawyers in the UK most
| definitely have liability for what they recommend - if a
| lawyer gives me advice that ends up causing me PSX because it
| was legally wrong then I'd have a pretty good case for a
| claim on their professional indemnity insurance.
| peteretep wrote:
| Only if you can show negligence
| LatteLazy wrote:
| This case aside, isn't that a well accepted legal doctrine?
| Encouraging someone to do something is rarely a crime.
| Incitement to riot is the only exception I can think of.
| vmchale wrote:
| Every time I hear about McKinsey in a headline it's for doing
| something reprehensible.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| There are people here who say that the consultants are too
| expensive and are often needed by decision makers to tick a box.
| But many forget how this demand is created. In a startup, things
| have to happen fast, some technical debt is unavoidable or the
| lesser evil. So everything is carrying on, people are hired, many
| management layers are integrated with what I would call human
| resources debt( managers covers their own, the top level does not
| know what is happening at the bottom) and suddenly, the demand
| for an external consultant is created. This is the price you pay
| for the fast growth and overlooking the little obstacles. Now the
| top level management will send a corporate detective aka
| consultant because he does not trust the management layers, they
| want a neutral party review and a suggestion to fix it, because
| nobody else did. Makes sense to me and yes, this forum is very
| capitalism minded, a 100 usd haircut is fine, first impression
| and all.
| jariel wrote:
| It's interesting because McK is a club, not a company. They are a
| relatively disparate group of people operating on the basis of
| culture, it's not top down.
|
| Some partners can go way off the reservation compared to others,
| and they may have little to do with one another.
| jypepin wrote:
| so $573M settlement for 450000 overdoses. So they value life at
| $1275. The Sackler family is worth $13b. Ridiculous.
| StormyWeather wrote:
| copypasta from an answer to a similar comment above:
|
| I am not defending what the firm did but we are talking about a
| study that took place in 2017, it has nothing to do with what
| happened before and certainly doesn't account for all deaths
| after 2017 either.
| tebuevd wrote:
| No one ever admits guilt. No one ever goes to prison. These fines
| are just "cost of doing business".
| [deleted]
| crawdog wrote:
| Through all of this, no one has received any jail time. That's
| the biggest crime.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| I know someone who worked for McKinsey for a few years, and some
| of the projects he described were straight up slimy. The one I
| recall right now was helping a big payday lender (read: large
| scale loan shark) figure out how to get their money back from
| people who were behind on their payments. The problem was that
| they can only attempt to withdraw so many times from someone's
| bank before they're banned, so the agreed solution was to
| estimate the best time of the month when the client had received
| their paycheck, but before they had used it to pay rent and other
| expenses.
|
| This person is no longer working there, and I'm not surprised.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| As a very early P2P lending participant in the early days of
| Prosper Lending, I've seen the other side of this. Many
| borrowers adopt a mindset that they have earned the money they
| borrowed and don't feel that they need to pay it back. I came
| in to Prosper with a distaste for the apparent predatory lender
| tactics and came out with an appreciation that not everything
| that seems predatory really is. While there are plenty of
| legitimately shady lending practices, reasonably high APRs and
| the collection tactic you described are not some of them.
| bumby wrote:
| > _reasonably high APRs_
|
| I think the disagreement may be on the definition of
| "reasonable".
|
| Similar to utilities, I don't think most people begrudge a
| company for making a "reasonable" profit. The problem
| sometimes comes when it starts to become unreasonable level
| of profit, predicated on lack of transparency and shady
| tactics
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| How do people have such a strong opinion on what level of
| profit is reasonable if they don't know the default rate?
|
| The average person thinks companies make over 5x the profit
| they actually make, and they think the amount of profit
| correlates negatively with how responsible and good for the
| world the company is (when in fact there's very little
| discernable correlation, and it may be positive). What
| profit people begrudge is likely not particularly relevant,
| given how uneducated those opinions generally are.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm pretty agnostic in my opinion on this personally
| because I don't know their profit margin, default rate
| etc. I also think these lenders fulfill a worthwhile
| service in some cases. Note that I didn't actually define
| what reasonable should be.
|
| People do get a say in the policies of their society in a
| democracy, whether educated or not. People also think
| NASAs budget is 50x what it is, but it doesn't mean we
| should strip away their right to vote, it means they need
| to be educated (or their representatives, by proxy).
| Otherwise it's just advocating for a technocracy
| [deleted]
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| > I think the disagreement may be on the definition of
| "reasonable".
|
| Agreed. It very much does depend on the default rate.
|
| FWIW when I now see 10%+ APRs on unsecured loans for
| presumably highly rated borrowers and much higher rates for
| riskier borrowers, I'm no longer shocked.
| cmmeur01 wrote:
| Asserting your debt as more important than someone's housing
| does seem like a pretty shitbag thing to me.
| majani wrote:
| Not paying back debts as agreed is tantamount to stealing,
| which is even shittier IMO
| underwater wrote:
| In the first scenario the borrower can't pay their rent,
| is evicted and possibly becomes homeless.
|
| In the second scenario the worst case is that the payday
| lender becomes insolvent, the company collapses, and the
| workers go and find other jobs because they're not the
| ones suffering financial stress.
|
| How is that worse.
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| For the most part, America abolished debtors prisons in
| 1833, and they were found unconstitutional in 1983
| (Bearden v. Georgia). I say for the most part because
| that offer doesn't apply to things like fines and court
| fees [1].
|
| Assuming you're truthful in your application for the
| loan, it's not theft. It may be a poor decision on the
| part of the lender, but of course, that's why interest
| rates exist and scale with your likelihood of
| nonrepayment.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/08/30/f
| ederal-...
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It ultimately comes down to what type of housing people
| have a "right" to. If I can't afford the house I bought,
| I'll need to sell it and downsize or rent a smaller/cheaper
| place. That's not because the bank is being a shitbag about
| my debt.
| t-writescode wrote:
| You say that but every debt company will say that very
| thing. Miss enough credit card bills, and they come for
| you; and, in states that don't protect the house, that's
| fair game.
| wittyreference wrote:
| People say that like the "debt" doesn't ultimately matter -
| as if adopting a policy of "you only get property ownership
| rights if you can prove you're sorrier than the person who
| claimed your stuff" won't lead to calamity over the medium-
| long term.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| You've drawn yourself a caricature of a hard scrabble
| borrower who's just trying to make ends meet and has the
| best of intentions with regards to their debts.
|
| In my Prosper experience that was the rare exception. The
| typical defaulting borrower bought themselves a shiny new
| toy and literally felt entitled to the money. As if their
| success in securing the loan was sufficient justification
| to have earned the money outright.
|
| The drama on the Prosper lending forums, where lenders and
| borrowers could directly communicate with each other, was
| epic and educational.
| golemiprague wrote:
| How do you think the people who lend the money and their
| employees pay their housing costs? Not saying that there
| shouldn't be some humanity involved if possible but it
| certainly not shitbag, they gave someone money and he
| should give it back.
| bumby wrote:
| I understand the compassion behind your point, but to play
| devils advocate: doesn't every bank that holds mortgages
| and every landlord assume this very thing?
|
| Fall behind far enough and your debt takes priority over
| staying in your home. Hell, even the government will kick
| you out if you fall behind far enough on property taxes
| arcticbull wrote:
| The reality is that this is a very difficult situation all
| around.
|
| 1) Lenders probably shouldn't be lending money to people
| they know cannot repay the debts. This is also why APRs are
| so high - most people simply don't.
|
| 2) People who know they can't repay the debts shouldn't be
| borrowing in the first place. This is also why lenders have
| to go to such extremes to collect their debts.
|
| This is a function of being poor in a country like America
| with zero social safety net. If you're desperate and on the
| ropes and have nothing to fall back on you'll do whatever
| it takes to get by including take out loans that you can't
| afford, from lenders who know you can't repay them.
|
| The problem isn't predatory lending, or deadbeat borrowers,
| it's a deeply unequal society which doesn't look after its
| own, with rampant wealth and income inequality and a total
| lack of social safety net.
|
| In an ideal world, folks would be able to rely on
| unemployment or UBI to get by tough stretches, and this
| system would disappear instantly. Half the country is busy
| breathlessly screaming socialism over what the rest of the
| world considers a "functioning government" and the other
| half has other things on their mind like walking back
| stupid bathroom laws, and in the end, nothing fundamentally
| changes.
| malandrew wrote:
| How do you design an unemployment/UBI system that
| provides an incentive not to use it unless necessary and
| not to stay on it any longer than is necessary?
| jrumbut wrote:
| I would say that while this is a real concern, our
| current system places way too high a priority on
| addressing it.
| sammax wrote:
| The whole point of UBI is that _everyone_ gets it,
| _unconditionally_. There is no not using it or not
| staying on it. You just get the UBI, and it should be
| enough to pay for basic living costs, and most people
| also want to be able to afford luxuries so the incentive
| to work is not gone.
| lostcolony wrote:
| You don't have to.
|
| How many people have you met who were happy doing
| nothing, living with nothing, AND who made good employees
| doing anything at all?
|
| I've met exactly zero.
|
| The ambitious won't want to stay there; the unambitious
| may "unfairly" get their basic needs met, but they're
| hardly living the high life, and the lost -useful- labor
| to society is negligible. Almost certainly more than
| offset by the ambitious who can now take risks they
| otherwise couldn't, knowing that if they fail they at
| least aren't going to end up hungry and homeless.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| What do you do about unambitious people who live beyond
| their UBI means and end up being unable to pay the rent?
| cycomanic wrote:
| It's funny how these sort of questions are always being
| used to counter a safety net for the poor, but at the
| same time nobody does anything about rampant tax evasion
| and avoidance, which is much much more money.
| lostcolony wrote:
| What do you do -now- about the ambitious people who live
| beyond their salaried means and end up being unable to
| pay the rent?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So what problem does UBI solve, then?
| [deleted]
| lostcolony wrote:
| It guarantees a certain level of means. Obviously. It's
| not intending to address people who live outside their
| means; there are other controls for that. It's to ensure
| that a person's means is sufficient to cover their basic
| needs.
|
| A person who is responsible with $10 a month may not be a
| credit risk, but clearly can't cover their needs; a
| person spending $10k a month when their job pays them
| only $8k is clearly a credit risk, living outside their
| means, despite earning enough to cover far more than
| their basic needs. You're strawmanning.
| arcticbull wrote:
| This is in line with the results of Canada's early UBI
| experiments; substantially nobody left the workforce
| except to pursue liberal arts or stay-at-home parenting,
| both of which have intrinsic value. People are motivated
| by a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors,
| including their social group at work, finding meaning in
| their lives through their work, and so on.
|
| UBI and unemployment isn't provide enough for a lavish
| lifestyle, you can achieve that through work.
|
| > The ambitious won't want to stay there; the unambitious
| may "unfairly" get their basic needs met, but they're
| hardly living the high life, and the lost -useful- labor
| to society is negligible.
|
| Certainly true, and of course, automation will replace
| the missing labor in the pool, and the continued march of
| development will lead to even lower birth rates (already
| well below replacement rate of 2.1 is almost every
| developed nation), and there will be fewer and fewer of
| these folks in time.
|
| Canada's most recent UBI experiment, cancelled recently
| (2020) by Ford & co, was showing excellent results [1],
| and so did the earlier one in 1974 [2].
|
| [1] https://newatlas.com/good-thinking/canada-basic-
| income-exper...
|
| [2]
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-
| forgot...
| bumby wrote:
| I think the major fault with these studies is there
| participants know the benefits will end. I think this
| biases them towards continued working because they view
| it as a short term windfall that won't sustain them
| rather than a long term solution. It would be incredibly
| hard to design an experiment to control for this.
|
| Conversely, I think the hard part about implementing UBI
| is that it would be incredibly hard to roll back once
| people become accustomed to it
| lostcolony wrote:
| The question I always wonder, when people bring this up,
| is if they've applied it to themselves.
|
| If they had a basic UBI of, say, $20k, would they quit
| their job, and not look for work, not work on personal
| projects, not look to go back to school, nothing, just do
| what they are assuming others will do, sit around, watch
| TV, that sort of thing? Rather than keep striving, keep
| working, and have both an extra $20k being paid to them
| currently, and that safety net in place in case they lose
| their job?
|
| Because I can't imagine doing that. I -like- having a
| higher quality of life. I desire to do things, to affect
| things. In fact, the most frustrating jobs I've had were
| the ones that felt like they handcuffed me from leaving
| due to the salary (not to mention things like equity
| cliffs and paying back signon bonus), but deprived me of
| any real empowerment or responsibility to affect change.
| If this logic applied to me, I should be thrilled; I
| barely have to do anything, am barely expected to do
| anything, and am paid through the nose. But I end up
| hating it and wanting out.
|
| Even something like working McDonald's; would the
| additional pay of working there on top of UBI be worth
| it? If not, what would have to change? Better working
| conditions? More pay? I'd be interested to find out; why
| -don't- people find service industry jobs desirable? Why
| would someone choose to be unemployed, if their
| disposable income is higher working there? Are they just
| lazy, as America likes to paint it, or are there
| institutional problems that could be addressed, but
| remain unaddressed due to the inability for people to
| just quit and walk away?
|
| We actually have some anecdotal data to this; people who
| inherit money sufficient they could live the rest of
| their lives doing nothing.
|
| If it's multiple millions, yeah, people do decide not to
| work, "trust fund babies" and the like.
|
| But plenty of people get a few hundred thousand and a
| house. That's enough that, if invested, they could pay
| property taxes and live a basic life without working.
| They could sell the house and move out of the country,
| and live even cheaper. How many do it in lieu of working?
| Very few. Why? Because they desire something more.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If they had a basic UBI of, say, $20k, would they quit
| their job, and not look for work, not work on personal
| projects, not look to go back to school, nothing, just do
| what they are assuming others will do, sit around, watch
| TV, that sort of thing? Rather than keep striving, keep
| working, and have both an extra $20k being paid to them
| currently, and that safety net in place in case they lose
| their job?_
|
| Depends on person and their situation.
|
| Would I quit my job and go on UBI if I could?
|
| Me before marriage and a kid: in my line of work and with
| my hobbies, sure! I'll fulfill my need of doing crazy
| hobby projects and after few years of doing _just_ that
| (and social life) I 'd probably get bored and get back to
| work somewhere. Or spin one of my projects into a
| business. Or start contracting half-time to have some
| more spending money.
|
| Me now: I'd probably cut down work a bit, but I can use
| the extra cash to ensure good conditions and financial
| safety for my kid.
|
| Me if I worked in just about any other field: _fuck no_ ,
| not if I knew the benefits would end. Software industry
| is special (and still will be for at least a couple of
| years) - a programmer with decent skills can _just_ find
| a job or start a company. For every other field, the many
| years long gap in your CV will scream "not good worker
| material". Keeping the working history continuous is
| something on the minds of majority of westerners; failing
| to do that is likely to result in being hireable only for
| jobs not much better than the UBI.
| bumby wrote:
| Anecdotally I've seen both sides. I've seen people get
| social security or disability benefits and coast for the
| rest of their lives without working even though they have
| the ability to do so without affecting their benefits. I
| assume they value sleeping in and not having to answer to
| anyone. Their idea of a good time is spending hours
| hiking or watching tv or various other things that have
| negligible cost.
|
| I've also known those who get said benefits and either
| use it as a leg-up to get ahead or just donate it while
| they keep working. Honestly, I've seen more in the former
| category than the latter.
|
| I suspect it cuts down along the industriousness subset
| of the Big Five personality traits. Those who get
| intrinsic satisfaction doing/building are probably likely
| to be in the latter group. I bet HN skews towards this
| which is why so many find it difficult to comprehend why
| somebody would want to just loaf around with their life.
| To your very thoughtful questions about why someone
| wouldn't want to continue working, my guess is the roles
| they qualify for aren't intrinsically satisfying to them
| because it's a poor mating of their personality and the
| jobs society has deemed necessary or they don't pay
| enough to make the juice worth the squeeze
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yeah; I wasn't saying one side doesn't exist. It was more
| in tandem with my parent post - the people who are happy
| to watch TV, hike, just kinda bum around, doing nothing
| else, desiring nothing else...how often are they great
| workers?
|
| I meant the question in response to the observation that
| "we don't know what happens long term if people are
| promised this kind of money" - right, but the presumption
| there is that it will cause people to quit en masse, that
| they won't look to work, or use it as an excuse to better
| themselves in a way that society values as well. But will
| you? I mean, you're on HN; you likely care about
| bettering yourself, likely have some ambitions. If people
| with those things aren't dissuaded from working...what's
| the concern? That we won't have enough checked out people
| in useless administrative tasks, or poorly performing
| manual labor or service jobs that we then collectively
| complain about, while also refusing to pay well for?
| bumby wrote:
| > _what 's the concern?_
|
| I think the concern is there may not be enough
| "ambitious" people to maintain productivity to sustain
| the non-ambitious folks.
|
| Thinking back to a previous job that most people would
| probably assume employees incredibly driven people, I can
| honestly say many were not. Hours wasted on long
| lunches/breakfasts/breaks, surfing the Internet for
| auctions, bouncing from office to office for hours to
| gossip, really anything to distract them from the work
| that needs done, all the while complaining there wasn't
| enough time in the day to get it completed. If a "world
| class" organization is like this I don't want to know
| what a "lesser" one is like.
|
| The best employees are always those who value the work
| itself. I think very few people find their work
| intrinsically motivating and are only doing it because of
| an extrinsic reward (status, money, whatever).
| Unfortunately, after talking to many in that former
| organization I don't think they have a very good grasp on
| what _is_ intrinsically motivating to themselves.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Your example kind of makes my point? Those people you
| mention...how much were they really adding to the org?
|
| If a company is happily paying white collar worker wages
| to people who are that big a waste of space, why not pay
| them $20k in UBI and let them go, $20k to someone who
| needs it, and not waste everyone's time? Let those people
| have the safety net necessary to find themselves, so to
| speak. Worst case is they stay on and we're in the same
| situation we're in now; best case they leave and figure
| out what motivates them.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Indeed, I think the challenge is around committing to a
| 50 year study that they won't cancel later in a
| discretionary way.
|
| > Conversely, I think the hard part about implementing
| UBI is that it would be incredibly hard to roll back once
| people become accustomed to it
|
| So we are left with something people like and don't want
| to give up, and that's bad because... :)
| bumby wrote:
| > _So we are left with something people like and don 't
| want to give up, and that's bad because... :)_
|
| Sorry, I should have taken the time to elaborate.
|
| There's certainly a conceivable scenario when the
| situation is either unsustainable or not providing a net
| benefit.
|
| For the first case, consider a petrostate whose
| population is heavily subsidized by its oil sales. If oil
| price drops, whether by lack of demand or over supply,
| they may not have the funds to continue these benefits
| without debt, regardless if the populace "likes" them.
|
| In the second scenario, it's possible that it creates
| unintended consequences (like spikes in drug use, drop in
| life expectancy, reduced productivity) that become a
| larger social ill than what it was trying to prevent.
| Despite society being worse off, it becomes hard to scale
| it back because of the psychological endowment effect.
|
| I'm not saying its likely, just as a counter point that
| just because people like a benefit it means it should
| continue. I think it's important to do a "pre-mortem" on
| these kinds of policies to make sure we have the
| guardrails in place before implementing them.
| mlac wrote:
| My concern is that lenders will start loaning against it
| at ridiculously high rates on UBI income streams - "Get
| 100K today for signing away your UBI payments!" or "just
| pay us the monthly amount of your UBI payment!".
|
| After thinking about it a while, I realized the law would
| need to protect the UBI payments from being accessible in
| bankruptcy. That would significantly limit lenders
| willing to lend on that money. Those who did would be
| charging very high-interest rates on it and probably
| limit the total amount backed by it, so someone can't
| borrow 200k and then declare bankruptcy but have it be
| protected.
|
| Even writing this out now, I'm not sure that this would
| work because I'm not sure how you prioritize lenders for
| someone's assets who declares bankruptcy.
|
| I also see upward pressure on housing prices - right now,
| few landlords know what the market can take for pricing.
| It would be easy to bump everyone's rent by a few hundred
| dollars when UBI kicks in because you know everyone can
| afford it.
|
| Technology and the market structure are so efficient at
| extracting value from things that it's hard to design any
| policy that will effectively achieve the desired outcome
| of providing food, clothing, and shelter for all citizens
| without some wonky unintended consequences.
| liminal wrote:
| The "U" in UBI stands for "universal". Everyone gets it
| all the time.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Same with the people I know at Mckinsey. I makes sense though,
| companies contract out the work that would cause them bad
| publicity. Then when someone writes a news story they can say
| "hey, that wasn't us, it was the consultants."
| trhway wrote:
| >so the agreed solution was to estimate the best time of the
| month when the client had received their paycheck, but before
| they had used it to pay rent and other expenses.
|
| The Purdue OxyContin's 12 hours higher dose and thus higher
| addictiveness "solution" instead of the 8 hour based lower dose
| cycle similarly bears all the hallmarks of being produced by
| MBA consultants.
| strbean wrote:
| Along with the whole different release times thing.
|
| People obviously have different metabolisms, so the duration
| of effect was different for different people. When these
| people told their doctors that their dose didn't last a full
| 8 hours, and they were experiencing pain after, say, 6
| hours... their doctors were advised by Purdue to simply up
| their dosage, rather than give them a different dosing
| schedule. Pretty direct approach to creating addicts.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Considering the sacrifice and hard work that people make to get
| into a top management consultancy, no one leaves due to ethical
| concerns. If they do, the entire world comes to know about it
| through self-promotion (hire me! buy my book! hear my TED
| talk). People rationalize morally questionable behavior in all
| walks of life. Management consultants aren't even the decision
| makers who have to pull the trigger, and it's far easier to
| sleep at night as an advisor than it is an operator.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| This statement says that 40+ US States and DC. I have seen 50
| states in other articles.
|
| Does this mean that the Feds can still go after them? The Dems
| are historically _very_ friendly to the Pharma industry in
| ensuring outcomes in-spite of populist posturing. Can Medicare
| /Medicaid/VA sue them for recovery of monies spent in treating
| addictions and prescriptions?
| andrewon wrote:
| Failure of free market mechanism?
|
| McKinsey optimized the business strategy to maximize profit. The
| strategy is locally optimal but a net negative at society scale.
|
| I always puzzle why some economists oppose the basic idea of
| regulating drugs. Layman like us won't have the prior knowledge
| to tell the difference between snake oil and effective treatment.
| Drug maker won't have the incentive to conduct expensive
| randomized trials. Are we going to tell by reading Amazon
| reviews?
| asjldkfin wrote:
| It's funny reading comment here saying how "Consulting is useless
| BS" whilst also condemning them for "turbocharging Opioid sales"
| BinaryAsteroid wrote:
| Would you describe a parasite that kills its host as efficient?
| tyingq wrote:
| There is a less contradictory note of "Consulting is useless
| BS" and "Shame on them for taking dirty money".
| asjldkfin wrote:
| A $500MM fine is a bit beyond "shame on you for taking dirty
| money".
|
| I doubt any marketing firms working for Purdue was fined
| $500MM despite contributing to the same outcome. And that's
| because they didn't have the same impact.
|
| The justice system metes out punishment relative to one's
| contribution to the crime.
| tyingq wrote:
| The fine seems related to the amount of damning quotes that
| came from McKinsey produced materials. They left a bigger
| paper trail than anyone else.
|
| Like this sort of thing:
|
| _" One was to give distributors a rebate for every
| OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold. The
| slides are notable for their granular detail.
|
| For example, McKinsey estimated that 2,484 CVS customers
| would overdose or develop an opioid use disorder in 2019
| from taking OxyContin. CVS said the plan was never
| implemented."_
|
| Not implemented, so didn't end up being effective. But
| damn.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| That's not how justice works; damning quotes determine
| guilt; not the magnitude of guilt.
| tyingq wrote:
| It was a negotiated settlement, there weren't any pre-set
| rules on how the amount was agreed upon.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Except there is, a negotiation is based on the next best
| alternative; which is the legal system.
|
| Mcks wouldn't have settled for that much if they thought
| they'd fare better in court.
| tyingq wrote:
| They didn't want it in court because it would have made a
| documented legal precedent around liability.
|
| _" One former partner called the settlement hugely
| significant because it shatters the distance that
| McKinsey -- which argues that it only makes
| recommendations -- puts between its advice and its
| clients' actions. For decades, the firm has avoided legal
| liability for high-profile failures of some clients,
| including the energy company Enron and Swissair,
| Switzerland's defunct national airline."_
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-
| opioids...
| asjldkfin wrote:
| 1. I think that's making a guess into their intentions
| which we're not qualified to do
|
| 2. Even if we take #1 for granted, the $500MM figure is
| still based on something. The counter-party could've
| settled for $100MM or insisted on $1B but they reached
| that number for a reason.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Personally I don't know too much about this case. But courts
| can find corporations liable, even if they did a terrible job.
| It's the same logic as putting the getaway driver in jail for
| attempted robbery, even if they dropped the clutch and stalled
| the car. McKinsey could have done a terrible job but also been
| liable according to courts (who probably just assume white-shoe
| consultants did a good job anyway).
| asjldkfin wrote:
| There's a difference between a criminal and civil case.
|
| Crimes are boolean, civil is proportional in terms of
| punishment. Nobody is going to jail, so this is a civil case.
|
| If you break your neighbour's car, you pay more if it's a BMW
| than if it were a Kia.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Crimes are proportional in terms of punishment. It's called
| aggravating and mitigating factors.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| Slinging dope isn't exactly rocket science.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| Interesting that you think the two are mutually exclusive.
| Personally, I'd consider consulting advice to systematically
| hook an entire country onto opioids to be "useless BS" much in
| the same way I'd consider schemes to fix bread prices as
| "useless BS". Both are cases of rather obvious approaches that
| are not only legally and ethically bankrupt, but more
| importantly fundamentally unsound and unsustainable as growth
| strategies.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Mcks wasn't asked for advice on ethics, they were asked
| advice on increasing sales.
|
| If you go to a Tattoo artist and ask for a portrait tattooed
| on your face, it might be gauche as hell, but that didn't
| change the fact the artist might've done a great job.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| Not even close to a comparable analogy. A better analogy
| would be yours, but where the ink disappears after 1 day
| and the person getting the tattoo dies a day later.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| No, it's a perfect analogy, because it illustrates that
| efficacy is independent of moral perspective.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| Morality has nothing to do with it. If consulting advice
| literally bankrupts your company, the advice is trash,
| full stop.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| No, the advice Purdue asked for bankrupted the company.
|
| Just like how asking a programmer to build a garbage
| program doesn't mean the programmer is trash, it just
| means the specs are.
| carapace wrote:
| Programmers who build garbage are part of the problem,
| no?
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Not if they build garbage well, the quality of the code
| and the quality of the product are independent.
| carapace wrote:
| But isn't building garbage a problem? What's the point of
| automatic garbage?
| frostburg wrote:
| You don't need to do much to be wrong, especially in the
| context of selling highly addictive drugs.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| That's not the point; you can't say their advice is
| ineffective, while also condemning them for being effective.
|
| The top comment derisively states:
|
| _" The whole business is a scam built around sending in some
| 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to
| regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR"_
|
| In the context of fining the company $500MM for being too
| effective.
|
| At least in the US, where the punishment is relative to the
| crime; the court clearly agrees about their efficacy.
| cochne wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, they could be both ineffective
| and harmful. Just because they succeeded in getting the
| company to do something, that not mean it was the right
| thing. The sale of the drugs could have produced a net loss
| as well as harmed the people who bought them.
| some_random wrote:
| Sure, but I would think generating significant amounts of
| revenue would tilt the probabilities towards "consultants
| do actually do something".
| refurb wrote:
| Ineffective = "having no effect"
|
| Harmful = "having a negative effect"
|
| How can they be both?
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| You can be effective at selling opiates to people, but
| then end up in an investigation for selling them
| illegally and thus neutralising any of the revenue you
| had initially brought with fines for doing so illegally.
| Here's no effect.
|
| Of course a lot of brutal strategies work well in
| environments which do not expect them. However trusted
| environments are often more efficient.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| With a comma? Ineffective doesn't mean no-effect, it
| means 'not the intended effect'.
|
| I.E. "McKinsey worked with Purdue to implement an
| ineffective business strategy that resulted in bankruptcy
| for the business, due the harmful nature of the product
| and the predatory nature of the strategy."
| frostburg wrote:
| You don't need groundbreaking innovation in sales from your
| consultants to keep selling too much opioids, a product
| that mostly sells itself. Better consultants should
| probably try to stop you, however.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I'm not sure there is that much dissonance. In the opioid
| case, they gave effective advice, but it wasn't necessarily
| of very high quality - the reason you wouldn't do what
| McKinsey suggests isn't because you didn't think of it but
| because you would find immoral and illegal.
|
| The reason McKinsey was being sued isn't because they were
| giving effective advice, but because it was likely illegal.
|
| Because of this I'd understand that both can be the case.
| That said, I'm not sure McKinsey is always as ineffective
| as the top comment suggests.
| some1else wrote:
| Their advice was highly effective in bringing the company
| to bankruptcy, if that's the metric you were aiming for.
| Aside from destruction of private and public equity.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| The story doesn't end there though, does it? The
| recommendations _did_ result in massive public backlash, hefty
| fines and a whole load of other shit for both McKinsey and
| their client. I wonder if these companies think this route was
| worth it.
| [deleted]
| minikites wrote:
| Less than 5% of their revenue. I'm sure they learned their
| lesson.
| sschueller wrote:
| Almost as if crime does pay.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| The war on drugs is responsible for the opioid crisis.
|
| Companies psychopathically seek out profits, and need to be kept
| in check, but that does not diminish the fact that US (and
| Canadian) drug policy bears direct responsibility for opioid
| deaths.
|
| This kind of news story, while maybe satisfying, is a red
| herring. As long as addiction is criminalized, and legal drug
| supplies dont exist, it doesn't matter how many Purdues or
| McKinseys we punish, the problem does not go away.
| steve76 wrote:
| BREAKING NEWS:
|
| Through budget reconciliation, House Democrats legalized
| fentanyl in the food supply and elevated junkies to protected
| class status.
|
| We now expect everyone to turn into Lycurgus of Sparta.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| You don't have to choose one or the other. Even if the war on
| drugs got ended these companies find other unethical ways to
| make money.
| tokai wrote:
| The opioid epidemic was started by over prescription of legal
| opioids. The war on drugs is an inhumane disaster. But the
| opioid issue is on the US health system.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No. Addicts (after being tricked into addiction by the
| Sacklers and McKinseys of the world) without the war on drugs
| could continue to consume legal, clean opiates, which would
| fail to lead to fent overdoses, and fail to push users into
| grinding poverty and crime. Being a opiate addict would be
| like being an asthmatic, just without the high mortality rate
| that asthma brings.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Why do you see it as mutually exclusive? I don't think it's
| really an either/or situation. It's both.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| You know in cop shows like "the wire" when the police
| commissioner says he wants to see "drugs on the table"
| showing off what they seized from the gangs, but the
| detectives know it's a hollow victory that just panders to
| public opinion but does nothing to address the root of the
| problem? This is like that.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| The opioid crisis would have happened _without_ the war on
| drugs. The fundamental driver of it is Oxycontin 's dosing
| schedule, which was optimized for causing addiction. Marketing
| for Oxycontin is all about how it "lasts twelve hours", when it
| often _doesn 't_. Doctors were trained and pressured to
| increase the prescribed dose when patients complained of pain
| in the hours before their next scheduled dose, rather than
| switching to something like an every-eight-hours schedule.
|
| The end result is a medication profile with a pronounced
| sawtooth pattern. On a daily basis, patients get relief from
| pain, suffer waiting for their next dose through a few hours of
| agony, and then get relief again. If they try to fix this
| problem and complain of untreated pain, the doctor ups their
| dosage and makes the sawtooth even _worse_.
|
| What the war on drugs does is add inflexibility and a criminal
| dimension to the newly-minted opioid addict's interaction with
| society. Run out because you accelerated your dosing schedule
| in order to avoid hours of daily agony? You're not allowed to
| refill early for any reason whatsoever, and it may get you a
| drug-seeking label that kicks you out of the official reason
| entirely.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| That undersells their liability and (i think) evil behavior.
|
| The original Dr. Sackler invented modern marketing of drugs
| directly to consumers, starting with getting millions
| addicted to Valium - which BTW was totally gross sexism. the
| very Mad Men 60s style marketing /r/oldschool ridiculous
| keeping women in the house and dealing with their 'emotions
| and feelings' with downers etc.
|
| The Netflix doc the Pharmacist is really good I highly
| recommend. Purdue gave direct $ bonus' to their sales people,
| using prescriber data to knowingly target Drs. prescribing
| insane amounts of opiates. On purpose because they identified
| it as the most profitable.
|
| They also basically bribed doctors to attend conferences and
| put their name on BS 'research.' they spent millions to
| induce an earth shaking change in pain management - opiates
| weren't widely used long term before their 'investment.'
|
| Plus the first baseline research they use to justify this was
| total overstated from one Drs opinion.
|
| It's also the pharmacies, Walmart optimized profits and kept
| pharmacists from questioning scripts.
|
| And now last I checked the Sacklers still have their billions
| and are using the same playbook with a new company in the
| developing world/India.
|
| I'm also totally against the war on drugs and believe we need
| to fundamentally change attitudes and pretty much remove
| possession laws.
|
| Personally I would go so far as to provide free
| prescriptions/handouts for addicts of opiates/stims that are
| pure, clear doses, and safer to inject or use. Make it
| mandatory to interact with mental health professionals to get
| the drugs and offer free treatment (medication focused) when
| the user is ready themselves to attempt to get clean.
|
| It's also gross that it's a good amount harder for a doctor
| to prescribe suboxone than it is opiates.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/27/india-
| opioids-...
| strbean wrote:
| > On a daily basis, patients get relief from pain
|
| In fact they get a dosage in excess of what they need for
| relief from pain. So, on a daily basis, they are just
| straight up getting high on opiates, and then withdrawing.
| foolinaround wrote:
| since we are addressing the root cause in this sub-thread, i
| submit that we need to go one layer deeper than just the 'war
| on drugs'
|
| what causes individuals to seek drugs or other harmful
| substances? Surely,similar substances existed throughout
| history? (maybe not as lethal, but still...)
|
| I think it is the despair and lack of spiritual fulfillment for
| a person, and i think this coincides with what has been a
| failure in religions to make a relevant impact in individuals
| lives.
|
| they have often made the situation worse by being judgemental
| further pushing said individual into this trap.
| strbean wrote:
| I think drug prohibition is the lower-hanging fruit here, but
| it's certainly important not to overlook the deeper causes.
| Spiritual malaise, a feeling of disenfranchisement and lack
| of buy-in to society, poverty, and desperation are all
| tightly intertwined root causes for so many big problems we
| face today.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I would say the FDA who approved the use of these drugs, and
| the doctors who set up businesses specifically to give bogus
| prescriptions to abusers are the most culpable in all of this.
| The people who end up paying these big settlements are targeted
| because they have the most money, not because they're the most
| culpable. The big evil company narrative is also a fantastic
| way to distract from the fact that regulatory failure caused a
| decades long epidemic of opioid deaths. "We investigated
| ourselves and found McKinsey were to blame".
| pessimizer wrote:
| The same people working in the industry are regulating the
| industry. It's not a scapegoating of McKinsey, it's the
| giving of a small fine to an abstract entity that can easily
| absorb it while every actual person involved got rich,
| including at McKinsey.
| 0goel0 wrote:
| Maybe ethics and morals should be mandatory trainings?
| ativzzz wrote:
| The only training in the end is that everything is for sale if
| the price is high enough.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think "training" is a misnomer, as its not actually the case
| the people doing shady stuff will change their moral compass
| based off of clicking through a few slides.
|
| However, if the "training" includes explaining how employees
| breaking these rules will be held accountable and how it will
| affect their continued employment, it could influence behavior
| of potential bad actors.
| minikites wrote:
| Ethics and morals get in the way of increasing shareholder
| value.
| zests wrote:
| I am unconvinced that any mandatory training is useful
| (ignoring the fact that the act of implementing the training
| itself is useful to the people who implement the training.)
| slumslum wrote:
| Ex McK-Intern here: From my short-term experience, I'd say there
| are folks who genuinely want to help their clients while others
| are mostly in for the prestige and the money. The business model
| of staffing young graduates alongside more experienced people is
| actually quite reasonable as the experts could steer the overall
| project while the juniors would do the number crunching and info
| gathering. I personally see their value for a broader circle in
| the sense that if the consultants can make a client $$$ or reduce
| costs, this can either lead to overall improvement of business
| and thus increase employment or - in case people need to be fired
| - save the rest of the employees from their whole company going
| out of business in the worst case. Just to briefly touch the most
| common criticisms.
|
| Nevertheless, I decided not to take their offer afterwards,
| partly due to exactly those shady practices that went well beyond
| even my quite relaxed sense of business ethics.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I've worked with all of the big five and I can assure you there
| is little to no value that they bring to the table. It's all
| smoke and mirrors dressed up in suits and sprinkled with corpo-
| talk that makes no sense if you're a domain expert.
|
| Also, deploying clueless but well dressed junior people and
| only sending the seasoned specialists to extinguish fires is
| not a reasonable model. I mean it is if your sole goal is to
| rip off your client with delivering minimum value.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's really tiring to constantly hear how people or organizations
| with deep pockets can "settle" things by handing over money.
| Nothing will ever change until either some high level people go
| to jail or the company goes to jail (as in suspending its
| business for a while). Or make the fines outrageously high so it
| really hurts the company and not just as a small part of their
| profits.
| sct202 wrote:
| I'm a little more hopeful. They've never been punished like
| this before for their work. In the future, they'll probably be
| more careful about who they work with and what they recommend.
| Not to mention, Purdue Pharma is already taking on the lion
| share of the blame for these deaths, and paid a $8b settlement
| and also turned into a public beneficiary company.
| breck wrote:
| "get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are
| feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some
| excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is the way to
| go." (CEO of Purdue, 1996)
|
| There will be another Purdue, except 10x worse, if we don't
| abolish the http://uspto.gov/.
| froidpink wrote:
| One of the Mckinsey decks that got leaked can be found here in
| case anyone's curious
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/consulting/comments/k2c8ku/mckinsey...
| neurotech1 wrote:
| Let's not forget, these are the same consultants that did work
| for Enron, work leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.[0]
| McKinsey is also advising various government agencies on
| optimizing their Covid-19 response[1], generating revenue of
| $100m and counting.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver...
|
| [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-mckinsey-is-
| making-10...
| majani wrote:
| This type of scenario is probably the primary reason for the
| existence of management consulting firms: to have someone to
| point the finger to when risky decisions go tits up.
| cycomanic wrote:
| That and to push through unpopular decisions: "look we don't
| want to fire 30% of our workforce, but the consultants told
| us we need to to maintain our profit margin"
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Worse. Most of Enron management was directly sourced from
| McKinsey and McKinsey was intricately involved in its strategy
| and accounting. One day the story will be told of how they got
| away with it but Andersen took the whole blame.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-fea...
| nickff wrote:
| "The Smartest Guys in the Room" told that story, and the
| short version is that Andersen was the auditor which was
| supposed to be ferreting out accounting issues (and has
| certain legal responsibilities). McKinsey was a recruiting
| ground and consultant.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| That is not what this article says:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/mar/24/enron.theo
| b...
|
| McKinsey was integral to designing Enron's asset light
| strategy and also creating the stock borrow structure,
| their internal talent marketplace, etc. etc. Seems like
| where Enron stopped and McKinsey started is hard to place.
| hikerclimber wrote:
| they should pay all the money they have.
| mathattack wrote:
| This is a significant hit for a private company. If McK has 2,000
| partners, that's almost $300k per partner. (Yes - they are very
| well compensated, and this is probably just a fraction of their
| pension plan)
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| Well, considering the damage they caused this is nothing. They
| advised on /got and got paid for how to "turbocharge" opioid
| sales and that tuned out to be an illegal and immoral thing.
| samizdis wrote:
| I'd be keen to see the specifics wrt advice given on how to
| "turbocharge" said sales. Reuters article doesn't give any
| examples/detail.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Many details have been published in the media. For
| instance: "Documents filed in U.S. courts last year
| outlined how McKinsey discussed ways for Purdue to
| "turbocharge" sales of its drug OxyContin, including paying
| Purdue's distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose
| attributable to pills they sold."
|
| source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-
| mckinsey-is...
| raesene9 wrote:
| Articles like
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/business/mckinsey-
| purdue-... have some details.
|
| A quote from that shows some details :-
|
| " In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which
| were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys
| general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up
| sales. One was to give Purdue's distributors a rebate for
| every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.
|
| The presentation estimated how many customers of companies
| including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that
| in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have
| an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of
| $14,810 per "event" meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8
| million that year. "
| samizdis wrote:
| Many thanks; an informative read. FWIW I've just come
| across a related piece in Jacobin from December 2020:
|
| https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/mckinsey-consulting-firm-
| opio...
| sjg007 wrote:
| I mean that logic is just sick and heartless.
| a3n wrote:
| So, they recommended paying distributors to kill people.
|
| Because, in addition to the profit distributors would
| make by merely being in business, they would make even
| _more_ money for each related death.
| rn086 wrote:
| an article I saw said they targeted outreach at doctors who
| were more likely to write Rxs
|
| edit: beaten w/ the article
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| It's peanuts. This likely will be covered by some form of
| insurance, and very little will change.
| csciutto wrote:
| How your classmate became a con artist:
|
| "It's a choice that's laden with power. Unlike a bank or a
| traditional business, consultancies have little capital apart
| from the graduates they hire. A consultancy is a machine for
| prestige, and you are the source of their prestige, the smoke
| that obscures the truth of a business that subsists on the
| crudity of cutting and selling. They purchased your transcript,
| and they purchased your diploma, but you have the power to take
| them away. Without you, a firm has no more weight than the shells
| through which it is paid.
|
| So withhold your labor, withhold your prestige, and watch as the
| facade begins tumbling down."
|
| https://stanfordsphere.com/2020/01/30/how-your-classmate-bec...
| idclip wrote:
| Heh. Sure ... really? How high were the health costs of that
| crises and how high were their profits during that period?
|
| Aaaah. What a world...
| hikerclimber wrote:
| hopefully covid kills everyone on earth and the virus keeps
| mutating every second and there is no cure.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| McKinsey is a firm that simply does not do good work. I am
| unclear on what value their clients derive from them and why it
| has the reputation of being a good place to work at or have on
| your resume. They're basically opinion guns for hire, who can
| parallel construct their way to whatever conclusion you want,
| granting the goals of [your company or government agency] a sheen
| of legitimacy. They manage to avoid oversight regularly
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-
| ic...). They have a history of of corrupt leaders and
| fingerprints on numerous fiscal disasters
| (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-
| fea...).
|
| They are also very careful to play the PR game well. A good
| example of their incompetency intersecting with their PR efforts
| is their spurious claims on diversity
| (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-
| functions/organization/our...). The "Diversity Matters" report
| here has been quoted by virtually everyone - from the Harvard
| Business Review to corporate HR teams. And it is remarkably
| deceptive, because it has been bandied about as evidence that
| more diversity = better outcomes. Their own study at the link
| above admits there is no casual link here. It states this in an
| incredibly misleading way:
|
| > While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and
| ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn't automatically
| translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that
| when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are
| more successful.
|
| And now here we are, with corporations normalizing discriminatory
| practices relating to hiring, promotion, and so forth.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| I've worked with them and helped implement some of their
| recommendations. They do brilliant work and have some very
| clever people. They also do some very awful things and have
| some dumb people.
|
| Your starting line is overly reductive and not based in fact.
| tharne wrote:
| Too bad they can't be sued for ruining countless businesses with
| mindless self-serving "advice" meant to do nothing more than get
| their contracts re-upped.
|
| The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26
| year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to
| regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I'm a 20 something McK consultant with a $10 haircut. Maybe $20
| with tip. Or $0 now, because it's done at home.
|
| I post this fairly frequently, but here we go again. Business
| is hard. Change is hard. Consultants get a lot of shit for
| saying things that someone lower in the org could have told
| them. That's not evidence of abuse, that's evidence that your
| org isn't working well. A lot of the time substantial portions
| of the findings come from interviewing and listening to lower
| ranking experts in the client. Bringing in consultants is,
| among other ways, a way to bring in people who can get shit
| done, moving bricks at lower levels of the org with the
| political mandate of the top. That's quite valuable, because
| otherwise a lot of orgs are just entrenched. A very large
| number of senior leaders don't know how to accomplish X, and
| don't know how to get the information about X from their own
| company. And again, that's not an insult, because business is
| hard. It's great and all for you to say "regurgitate snippets
| from articles in HBR" but I can't say that resembles any work
| I've done, ever.
|
| Opioid work was bad though, let's not avoid that. (edit for
| spelling)
| A12-B wrote:
| > Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to
| bring in people who can get shit done.
|
| I don't think consulting is useless or scammy, but come on,
| you're not rock stars. Consultants advise a business on how
| to get revenue, and the business implements changes that
| generate revenue. This leads to the headline we have before
| us. There's not much more to consulting. Note: my family are
| consultants.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| You could also say that software devs are just technicians
| just translate specs into machine language. And product
| managers are just users who get paid to file feature
| request. And management just coasts on the real workers'
| work.
| iwintermute wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp6_3UQLi2Y
|
| Steve said it best.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| Hey, fuck you & your useless friends
| paxys wrote:
| It's also funny that people can simultaneously say that
| McKinsey is self-serving and does no real work for their
| clients, and also that they caused the opioid crisis with
| their involvement with Purdue. Which one is it?
| mola wrote:
| No one wants to believe they have a bullshit job. So we
| usually tell our selves nice little fairy tales to overcome
| this cognitive dissonance.
|
| Truth is, McK and the like, are there just to give mediocre
| leaders an extremely expensive psychological crutch needed
| when human beings face uncertainties.
|
| Now that these consulting agencies are the behemoth they are,
| it's mainly corrupt leaders that are being "pursuaded" to use
| their services.
|
| Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the
| optics of credentials for this sordid affair.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I don't think I have a bullshit job. Pay's good. Trajectory
| is good. People listen to me. Most of it's just fairly
| arbitrary business decisions. One had a client confirm
| months later that they believe the work directly
| contributed to saving lives. If a CEO point blank asks me
| for my opinion, I think that's more or less the definition
| of not being another cog in the wheel. The archetypal
| bullshit job is the finance/accountant who shifts a couple
| excel cells on a standard template that could have been
| automated in VBA ages ago. I know this, because that was my
| first job.
|
| Contrary to popular belief, a good deal of McK work is not
| just regurgitating a pre-ordained solution. Most of my work
| involves creating original solutions tbh. But sure, you
| probably know my job better than me.
| volta83 wrote:
| > Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the
| optics of credentials for this sordid affair.
|
| 100% whataboutism, and I'm not defending the OP or McK, but
| I wonder what you think of the PhD "brains" hired at Google
| that end up being in charge of implementing a menu in
| Google Carplay.
|
| What are they?
| mola wrote:
| They have bullshit jobs.
|
| I don't get what's the point of your question?
|
| I'm saying the OP has a bullshit job which he fails to
| acknowledge. I'm also saying is that McK only reason for
| hiring ppl like OP is virtue signalling and nothing else.
| And finally that McK is mostly harmful to society.
|
| I never talked about why google hires PhDs. :Shrug:
| geodel wrote:
| At Google many PhDs may end up working on compilers,
| language runtimes, vulnerability research data center
| power saving/cooling and so on. And yeah most importantly
| implementing menu in Google carplay.
|
| So I guess difference is Google has many types of work
| whereas at McKinsey it is slick MBAs facing fools looking
| to part with their money.
| volta83 wrote:
| I know of many CS PhDs working at McK doing MBA-facing
| jobs.
|
| So really, I don't see the difference.
| aisengard wrote:
| If a consultant is being brought in to do a job you think
| you should be doing yourself, then who really has the
| bullshit job in this instance?
| 2112 wrote:
| Context : "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by
| anthropologist David Graeber that argues for the
| existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He
| contends that over half of societal work is pointless,
| which becomes psychologically destructive when paired
| with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.
| Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in
| which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or
| harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct
| tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
| mola wrote:
| First "a consultant" is @ very overloaded term. I was
| talking on the type McK bring to do a little business
| research and give some recommendations.
|
| Software consultants OTH are usually sub-contractors and
| not consultants per se.
|
| Regarding who has the bullshit job, well, probably both
| the mediocre/corrupt leaders, and the consultant.
| munificent wrote:
| Maybe it's bullshit jobs all the way down.
| BryanBeshore wrote:
| I'll add one more point to this. Some business executives
| bring in consultants as a CYA for their boards, employees,
| etc.
| tclancy wrote:
| The problem with this is we don't (and one presumes you don't
| either) know whether you're above or below average. My
| perspective, from running into people from Big Computer
| consultancies back in the '00s was that the business model
| was to hire recent college grads, pump them up with the sheen
| of the company brand and then let them learn on the job at
| smaller companies and "failing upward" until they are
| experienced enough to be loaned out at massive rates based on
| their long track record of . . . success. Whether any
| customer during that process benefited from the consultant's
| journey is mere coincidence.
| tfehring wrote:
| Honestly my impression is that management consultants don't
| need to be above average to add value, they (or more
| accurately, the people who implement their recommendations)
| just need to be empowered to actually do stuff. The
| recruiting from top schools is primarily because the people
| hiring them want to think their problems are hard and
| unique (that's why they need consultants!) and therefore
| necessitate the best and brightest.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I'm not sure what a big computer consultancy is. Is that
| like IBM? Accenture? I don't think where I fall in the
| ranks matters much here.
|
| Loaned out doesn't feel applicable here though. There are
| some consultancies that are primarily just staff
| augmentation. Like, here are some expensive workers for you
| to use for a while. That's not really what McK does. McK is
| doubtlessly very expensive. "pumping people up on the job"
| sounds like a bad faith way to describe training and
| investing in your employees.
|
| I don't have a way to "prove" that the average net impact
| of McK consulting is positive, and for sure sometimes it
| won't be right. My only point is that most if not all of
| the clients I work with are blunt about not knowing how to
| do X on their own, and when we're done with the project
| they say they know how to do X. We do fixed price
| contracts, not per hour, and are incentivized to keep the
| scope fixed. Our prices are generally higher than
| competitors, but we still win bids. I don't need to believe
| McK is the greatest company in the world, but I strongly
| disagree that we're not making a good faith effort to help
| clients do things.
| tclancy wrote:
| Yes, IBM, Oracle, Accenture
|
| >"pumping people up on the job" sounds like a bad faith
| way to describe training and investing in your employees.
|
| That's just it: the _customers_ are investing in your
| employees by letting them learn on their job but never
| reap the benefit of the experience. It 's not a long-term
| recipe for success.
| Terretta wrote:
| That said, an ex-McKinsey consultant often ends up
| getting selected by one of those companies as its CEO.
|
| There's tremendous value in the repeated problem
| exposures the consultant received, combined with the
| rigorous framework thinking.
| nus07 wrote:
| Can you give me a couple of examples where McKinsey's
| work was helpful to a society ? Jobs were saved, lives
| were saved , poverty was eradicated ?
|
| Everywhere I look it's just strategies to increase sales
| ,lay-off lower level employees and boost executive and
| shareholder profit .
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Probably not to a degree that would be satisfying to me
| as a random external stranger. Most work is very secret,
| to avoid conflicts of interest. I don't know what others
| work on. I know of a few high profile things lately that
| have had positive impact on the world, but it's all NDA'd
| as well.
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-
| analyti...
|
| I guess this group is a decent example of our public
| things, doing data science stuff to help human
| trafficking victims and what not. I don't have any
| experience with this group in particular and cannot speak
| to it. For my personal work space all I can say is that
| ~90% of my work felt morally neutral, and 10% felt
| morally positive.
|
| One project was for a similar neutral task in an industry
| I think is detrimental to society so I declined to do it.
| That's also a thing which is encouraged and I think is
| nice. YMMV
| Frondo wrote:
| I have to say it doesn't strengthen your case to say "the
| damaging ones are public, the good ones are private."
|
| That's asking for a lot of trust in an organization with
| a public history of doing damage to societies, like with
| the opioid thing or the Canadian bread price fixing
| agreement.
| Terretta wrote:
| The price is higher because the logo on the report is
| better insurance than another logo. In particular, the
| logo is better because of "The McKinsey Way". McKinsey
| figured out how to repeatably and reliably manufacture
| strategic decision support.
|
| Much like McDonalds means every burger everywhere no
| matter who owns and runs that franchise is predictably
| decent, the principles of The McKinsey Way and frameworks
| like 7S and MECE mean every wet-behind-the-ears graduate
| is going to produce work of sufficient logic, data, and
| quality to plausibly support the position McK was hired
| to support.
| bob33212 wrote:
| In other words your clients have incompetent executives and
| instead of suggesting those people be replaced you do their
| work for them since they are the ones paying your fees.
| aerosmile wrote:
| It's easy to be critical of executives. A naive narrative
| could sound like this: "Bob was hired to turn the company
| around, and 3 months later the company is still bleeding
| money. Bob sucks." But it's important to understand the two
| difficult tasks that Bob is facing:
|
| 1) Identify all mistakes made by the previous management
| and come up with a plan to correct them.
|
| 2) Get buy-in for your plan and execute it.
|
| It might appear that 1) is harder than 2). But it turns out
| that the company's interests are not always aligned with
| each and every individual in the company, and implementing
| change always results in winners and losers. Getting the
| buy in from losers can understandably be quite hard. And
| then you also have the winners who sympathize with the
| losers and don't realize that they will also lose their
| jobs if the plan is not implemented.
|
| When you're running a startup, a CEO can single-handedly
| turn things around. In a larger corporation, a CEO is going
| to rely on a chain of command to get things done. When you
| factor in the misaligned incentives or loyalty for people
| who are at risk of losing their jobs, it's easy to see how
| information channels can stop working and neither 1) nor 2)
| can be accomplished successfully.
|
| I agree that brining in a 3rd party like McKinsey feels
| like a lazy shortcut to addressing the fundamental
| organizational challenges, but the more I see, the more I
| am starting to understand the upside of that option.
| bob33212 wrote:
| It is one thing to bring in some more workers to help you
| with research you don't have the ability to do. It is
| another thing to pay someone to make a report backing up
| a decision you have already made. It is another thing to
| pay someone to make a decision that you don't want to
| make, so they can take the blame. The first example is
| not why management consulting gets a bad name.
| aerosmile wrote:
| This is helpful for understanding why management
| consulting gets a bad name, and I am not pushing back on
| that. The parent comment I responded to was making the
| claim that executives who hire such consultants are
| incompetent, and I think we both agree that this is not
| about their competency.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > clients have incompetent executives
|
| Nope. I don't agree with this at all. I'm saying, 100%
| clarity, that business is really hard. Working with a large
| organization is really hard. Many cultures are very rigid.
|
| People are quick to comment about the intricacies of team
| dynamics, but hand wave the larger org stuff. There's a
| tough doublethink whereby I might say its not that hard to
| play the role of an upper level executive, because you can
| mostly just ride the tide and be fine, but effectively
| identifying a problem, a solution, and implementing it in a
| large org? Extremely tough.
| Terretta wrote:
| Whose fault are all these "hard" negatives you keep
| citing? Why are they not universal?
|
| Try "five whys" and see where you end up.
| ativzzz wrote:
| How are you going to suggest to the people paying you to
| replace them?
|
| At the end of the day, someone is your boss and pays you,
| and you are gonna do what they want
| ok123456 wrote:
| Was the bread price fixing good work?
| andrewem wrote:
| "Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that." Great, so
| let's not avoid that - with your insider perspective:
|
| In what ways do you see McKinsey's actions with Purdue Pharma
| as being bad? In what ways were they typical of McKinsey's
| behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the
| actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What
| factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those
| factors been addressed? How do the events with Purdue show
| what has and hasn't changed since McKinsey's deep involvement
| with Enron?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > In what ways do you see McKinsey's actions with Purdue
| Pharma as being bad?
|
| I think it's mostly self evident.
|
| > In what ways were they typical of McKinsey's behavior
| with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions
| with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors
| allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors
| been addressed?
|
| McK is large and very decentralized, and there's a culture
| of not talking about work to avoid creating conflicts of
| interest, so it's easy for one partner to end up doing
| their own thing in a way that the majority would not agree
| with. The Opioid work had a spin on it with the rebates
| that I recall had a mind towards preventing them, but I
| cannot remember the details so I won't pretend that's
| supposed to be compelling at all.
|
| The work with Opioids, and I would also call out ICE, were
| high profile struggles internally that have been addressed
| numerous times by top level leadership on global calls, in
| a way that I thought was emotionally empathetic to the
| situation. Voicing dissenting opinions is encouraged, and I
| think people were free to voice grievances. They have since
| created a committee whereby other unrelated partners need
| to review proposals for ethics before it gets approved.
|
| If you work for facebook, you build facebook. If you work
| for mckinsey, you may work on improving access to renewable
| energy, automaker margins, oil and gas marketing, or pro
| bono human rights work. Most people will fall into one of
| the neutral categories. To what degree are you accountable
| for a few guys doing something completely different that
| have no particular connection to you? I don't know. It's a
| weird dynamic but I would say "a bit, but less than a more
| traditional centralized company". I feel convinced that top
| level leadership is taking reasonable steps to address
| ethical issues and the the broad general population of the
| firm wants to encourage this. I don't know if it's possible
| to fully prevent bad decisions in the long term. From an
| external perspective, there's always going to be just one
| McKinsey, and that's tough to reconcile.
|
| I can't say I know anything about Enron.
| nsomaru wrote:
| The reputation of your country is thoroughly ruined in South
| Africa.
|
| Paying the money back (as was agreed, and even then my
| understanding is that not all of it will be repaid, no
| interest was offered and no criminal charges have been
| proffered) will never cover for the gutting of essential
| skills in key state owned enterprises under the cover of a
| McK "restructuring".
|
| South Africa is in a perfect storm right now and big
| consultancies and accounting firms all had their fingers in
| the cookie jar. They all had a part to play. It makes me sick
| to think what these consultants might achieve in less
| democratic states as it's evident their reach is global and
| they are legion.
|
| In my university days many bright eyed youth wanted to work
| for these companies. I hope people are waking up!
|
| Edit: For anyone interested "Zondo Comission McKinsey" or
| "McKinsey South Africa Guptas" should get you quite far.
|
| Edit2: I've just given a brief summary. It's enlightening to
| dig into the role of Bain, McKinsey and KPMG especially,
| their relation to Gupta enterprises (common cause) and their
| enabling of deals, cutting really good people at key state
| institutions like SARS (Revenue Service), Eskom
| (electricity), Transnet (commercial rail). And that's only
| what's in the public domain. The scale of the rot is
| enormous. Their executives spin corporate speak at our
| commissions of inquiry (Nugent and Zondo) and do not take any
| accountability!
| kabouseng wrote:
| Absolutely agree. But to be fair, the problems started with
| the appointment of useless political cronies as heads of
| these organisation's, who then used the consultants to help
| themselves with paybacks, commissions and corrupt deals.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| > "Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to
| bring in people who can get shit done, moving bricks at lower
| levels of the org with the political mandate of the top."
|
| Or, to put it another way: You hire a consultant so you can
| avoid responsibility for your decisions.
|
| "I didn't just fire thousands of people, possibly putting
| some out on the streets. Nope. We're just _right-sizing_ the
| company based on the advice of this well-respected consultant
| with a nice haircut. "
|
| Hire a consultant and get a fall guy and the ability to shirk
| responsibility for the detrimental impact your decisions have
| on your workforce.
| cryptica wrote:
| 20 year olds out of university know nothing about business,
| management, finance or the economy. The financial system and
| economy are in a constant state of flux, everything they
| teach in university is already outdated 10 years before you
| even start the degree. As for economics, most of what they
| teach has nothing to do with the real economy; just some
| phony models with fancy math which bear absolutely no
| relationship to the actual current state of the economy. Any
| executive who can benefit from the advice of a 20 year old
| shouldn't be in a leadership position in the first place.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| If it's that obvious, stop to think about a few things.
|
| Why is management consulting a billion dollar industry? Are
| there that many clueless executives running F500 companies
| (pretty much all of them).
|
| Or perhaps your understanding of management consulting
| isn't quite right.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Consultants are not expected to just know the answer.
| They're supposed to figure it out by talking to people in
| the company and looking at data. A 20 year old with full DB
| access and a python script can tell an executive a lot of
| things they don't know.
| orzig wrote:
| Agreed, starting my career as an in-house data analyst at
| a mid-sized public software company, I was able to show
| executives things they didn't know within a few months.
| Not because I was particularly smart, but because there
| was so much low hanging fruit.
|
| While I disagreed with him on this point, here's another
| angle on how low hanging the fruit was: My manager
| _explicitly_ told us to never use statistics, because
| we'd be wasting our time with effects which weren't large
| enough to be obvious.
| Terretta wrote:
| You at your years-of-experience most likely don't yet find it
| painful to learn.
|
| The folks with one to three decades more time at bat who are
| hiring you most likely do find learning and change literally
| painful. Not because of age, but because of "number of
| trials" at the change experiment, where often someone gets
| burned.
|
| Reading, learning, thinking differently, hurts the ego, as it
| makes clear you were less informed before, and puts you on
| unknown ground where you don't know if you're failing or not.
| This is hard for a lot of people, ironically especially hard
| for folks who started out as high performers in spaces with
| "known knowns" knowledge available (aka, school and
| textbooks, where learning isn't an ego problem, it's expected
| that you didn't know).
|
| You haven't yet developed the instinct to yank your hand off
| the stove, and you don't have to stick around long to see if
| your hand gets burned anyway, so you're valuable to these
| folks.
| aabhay wrote:
| Sage wisdom
| [deleted]
| GreeniFi wrote:
| I found this very insightful, thank you.
| Calamity wrote:
| Maybe it is because I'm still not there yet, but I feel
| that there is a nugget of wisdom in here that I still can't
| wrap my head around completely.
|
| Is this pointing to the same idea behind "the chains of
| habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to
| be broken"? I concede I may not be as quick to learn as I
| was when I was in my late teens/early 20s, but I hope that
| I'll still be able to learn new things and able to
| recognize the error in my judgement well into my old age -
| despite having been a classically high performer in school
| (although grad school did pummel me down).
| andreilys wrote:
| _"Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to
| bring in people who can get shit done, moving bricks at lower
| levels of the org with the political mandate of the top"_
|
| It seems more likely that it's a politically expedient way to
| get cover for a decision (in other words CYA insurance). If
| the plan fails, blame the consultants. If it works, take
| credit for having brought them in. It also puts more pressure
| on exec to make a decision (we just spent $10M on this
| strategy plan, are we really going to it on it?). It's
| genius, if it didn't highlight the utter dysfunction of a
| firm.
|
| McKinsey scandals also aren't confined to Opiod work. It's
| also been involved with Enron, corruption in Africa, peddling
| of mortgage backed securities during '07-'08 crisis and I'm
| sure many more that they've done a great job at hiding from
| the public.
| samizdis wrote:
| Some of the main "controversies" re McKinsey are outlined
| in its Wikipedia entry:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controve
| r...
|
| In the interest of balance, here is what McKinsey has to
| say about social responsibility in its "about us" section
| of its corporate website: _Our purpose as a firm is to help
| create positive, enduring change in the world._
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/social-responsibility
| reggieband wrote:
| > It seems more likely that it's a politically expedient
| way to get cover for a decision
|
| I have not doubt that is true in some cases. However, it
| might be a a bit too cynical to see it that way in all
| cases.
|
| I have a developer on my team that is the most senior guy
| on the team. He is a grey beard on a team full of junior
| developers fresh out of startup code bootcamp. Sometimes he
| is thinking about big technical challenges and he just
| wants someone to talk to that can give him some feedback.
|
| One of the things I miss about working in open offices is
| being able to turn around and fire ideas off of a
| colleague. Even if I know I am right, even if I have the
| ability to unilaterally make a decision, often times I just
| want a second opinion. I've even heard people here
| suggesting a paid service so you could get a short amount
| of principal engineer time to bounce ideas off of.
|
| I mean, isn't that more or less what McKinsey is, except
| for business people? When I think of it that way ... it
| doesn't feel as cynical anymore. If I'm a CEO (or any level
| of exec) and I don't have peers that can provide me
| valuable second opinions and I have the budget - why not
| pay someone for that second opinion?
| servercobra wrote:
| Yup, freelance software dev here, and I've been that
| consultant before for a large healthcare company. They had
| a new VP and he wanted to make changes to the app and org
| but needed a report from an external consultant to CYA. He
| already knew what he wanted the report to say and was not
| subtle on it. I talked to a couple people in the org, wrote
| a quick report basically signing off on his plan, and got
| paid handsomely. Thankfully, what he wanted to do was IMO
| correct, but the whole thing was ridiculous. They tried to
| bring me back to lead the dev team but I wasn't super
| interested in dealing with those politics.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I don't think it's ridiculous, it's how things work in
| many companies. People use various methods and tricks
| trying to convince others or get what they want from
| them. Sometimes the CEO is hesitant and needs a push from
| the consultancy,sometimes it's power games and etc. Most
| businesses have these things, it's not unique,even though
| some people would like to believe it.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Taking a step back, McKinsey can exist in it's current
| form, as a nurse for these elderly giants, because of the
| lack of anti-trust.
|
| If we had real competition, there would be more money to be
| made knocking the giants down than trying to keep them in
| their walker.
| exikyut wrote:
| Uhh, I'm not sure what to think of this, but I initially
| took "walker" to mean "baby walker". The comparison
| seemed fair for a second, considering old myths about
| giants and lowered intelligence. Then the "elderly" part
| properly carried across and I realized, oh.
|
| But still. Hmm.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I hear this one pretty often. I'm sure it happens to some
| extent. But flip the perspective there. You're talking
| about a a company that is so dysfunctional its leaders
| can't make decisions on their own. Getting stuff done there
| sounds pretty difficult to begin with. If stuff gets done,
| that's valuable. That's part of what I'm saying. Business
| is hard.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| They parrot back exactly what the business wants to do.
| I've seen it in action. Rarely do they ever say anything
| that's truly business changing.
| exikyut wrote:
| "Business changing" in this context would seem to mean
| "actually getting anything done at all", ie pushing back
| against the bureaucracy. See also "meets expectations" ->
| firing line, "exceeds expectations" -> kept on.
| ativzzz wrote:
| And yet, the business can't actually do those things
| without them for some reason (well often can't do it with
| consultants either). Large groups of people have weird
| dynamics.
| munchbunny wrote:
| _It seems more likely that it's a politically expedient way
| to get cover for a decision_
|
| That's certainly one of the reasons you would bring in
| consultants.
|
| I think critics of consultants are, in general, too quick
| to dismiss the monetary value of political lubrication. If
| it's going to get your management hierarchy to admit
| there's a problem at all, or if it's going to get your
| management hierarchy out of a deadlock, that's worth
| something. If your organization is able to actually focus
| on the problems despite the politics, you are probably not
| a a typical McKinsey/Bain/BCG/etc. customer.
|
| With maybe one exception, none of the consultants I know
| ever fit the mold of a fresh-out-of-college generalist who
| thinks their frameworks and raw intellect will help them
| come up with better answers than a specialist could. They
| mostly all understood that their jobs were to escort
| boring, good enough ideas through the boardroom politics.
| And that was often something they were good at, and they
| were often acutely aware that some people in those
| companies already had the answers but the organization was
| too dysfunctional to recognize the fact.
|
| That's the core of the problem anyway. But naturally
| they'll sell you a lot of other promises and products, and
| those are where I think management consultants are the
| wrong answer. Just hire real specialists.
|
| The other problem I have with management consultants is
| that I feel they, both the companies and many of the
| individuals, are too amoral to be healthy for society, but
| that's not about their competence.
| ska wrote:
| McKinsey is particularly known for obfuscating experience
| level and favoring a funnel of new ivy or ivy-like grad
| (often at graduate level, mind) through an internal
| bootcamp approach and out into the world as "expert".
|
| I think that's what the GP was poking at.
|
| You aren't wildly wrong on the job as a whole, though
| reasonably often it's more to escort boring bad ideas
| through the politics for someones benefit. And on the
| "amoral" front, they know what side their bread is
| buttered on.
| htrp wrote:
| > It seems more likely that it's a politically expedient
| way to get cover for a decision (in other words CYA
| insurance).
|
| This guy consults
| a_brawling_boo wrote:
| I was a consultant for ten years, not at McKinsey, but a
| very small firm that actually was ethical by comparison at
| least, and actually got some good things done, and then
| later, at another small company that was completely
| unethical.
|
| In many cases, there was not any question that your job was
| to justify a decision that had already been made, or attack
| another group within the company on behalf of whoever was
| writing you a check. I was literally told on a number of
| occasions that regardless of what the SOW said, our job was
| to make whoever was writing the check look good.
| Terretta wrote:
| Exactly. I called this "decision insurance" elsewhere in
| this comments section.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > It's also been involved with Enron, corruption in Africa
|
| This is not past tense.
|
| In South Africa there is a commission (a political farce if
| anyone cares) to investigate _state capture_ and
| McKinsey[0] keeps showing up on records and testimonies.
|
| [0](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26
| /worl...)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| So, does this conflict with the "Bad businesses with bad
| models are more likely to want help changing" narrative?
| There's a world in which this squares with McKinsey coming
| in to help those businesses with the change being pushed on
| them.
| pm90 wrote:
| Such business should, you know, bring in leaders who can
| improve their business. Or train their leaders via
| executive MBA programs (there are so many). McK touts as
| being able to transform businesses but all they will do
| is add more costs and send in clueless consultants who
| your employees will somehow have to try and get along
| with.
| salawat wrote:
| The correct term is plausible deniability or indirection of
| accountability. It's an advanced political maneuver.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Can we just keep it real instead of spouting this garbage.
| I've worked alongside and gotten close with consultants on
| the business/management side having been one in software
| myself.
|
| 99% of the consultants who come in are human Powerpoint/Email
| factories who just happen to have the skill/trait of being
| extremely insistent. They push exactly what their client
| wants to hear and are not doing groundbreaking worldchanging
| work.
|
| In fact in almost every case I worked on, most of the team
| had literally NEVER done any work in the clients field
| before, and never performed in the functional role they were
| being assigned to outside of maybe the partner or project
| leader assigned to the case who likely had a PHD/MD of some
| kind in the related field.
|
| As others said, they are there as an insurance policy to
| throw blame.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| A big part of what consultants bring is repeat experience
| -- when you've watched multiple clients make the same
| mistakes, you can credibly speak up.
|
| And for the kind of transformational work that folks like
| McKinsey would come in to assess, there's a huge
| organizational component that's actually more complex than
| the technical components. Building a new technology tool is
| great, but designing the process the tool implements and
| rolling it out to non-technical users is the job our buyers
| hire us to do. We would hire offshore engineers if the
| engineering work were the majority of the work we do -- but
| the coordination overhead is too high.
| cambalache wrote:
| As a person you are surely good, as an employee of that
| organization you are a tool to extract as much money as
| possible from your client and most often than not the person
| who hired you guys should be fired for having done so. As a
| 20-something year old generalist you are in no position to be
| giving "advice" (especially at the rate you charge)
| considering that "business is hard".
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > That's not evidence of abuse, that's evidence that your org
| isn't working well
|
| Mostly fuelled by management consultancy firms' marketing and
| sales teams, of course.
| Vaslo wrote:
| I've worked with McKinsey on 3 different projects at two
| companies. One project was honestly helpful in trying to get
| SAP up and running. The other two were worthless, including a
| strategy deck about CPG food strategy in China. They
| basically just took our data and the results we had already
| provided and had a charismatic speaker (Partner?) who worked
| in China come in and tell the same story. The few original
| slides they brought were probably all the same nonsense
| macroeconomic slides they show to everyone remotely
| interested in Developing markets like China. The CFO was
| unimpressed and though they still use them for things, we
| would never go back for Strategy. For the cost we paid for
| one month of the engagement I could have hired an MBA
| analyst/manager working full time doing much of this in
| house.
|
| I personally will not use a big consulting company until we
| do a better job of forcing consultants to have more skin in
| the outcome. It's really nice to come in, have a flashy
| presentation and then walk out and collect your money. The
| only "getting shit done" I've seen McKinsey do is lining
| their own pockets.
| jancsika wrote:
| Whether this is a bona fide comment or a troll, I love this
| comment:
|
| * quick witted aikido-move-of-a-sentence to accept OP's
| insult, thereby disarming it
|
| * enormous paragraph made up of short, frank, vague sentences
| with an compelling rhythm of overarching claims that frame
| the 20-something haircut's ostensible work in a positive
| light. It's the wrong generation but I'm reading them in Ari
| Fleischer's no-nonsense, eternally dismissive voice.
|
| * anticipating the accusation of happy talk, a final, single
| sentence to cover one of the many troubling associations
| McKinsey has had with shithole companies. Even spelled the
| industry wrong!
|
| I'm not being sarcastic or snooty. This is the HN-post
| version of the pharma commercial pattern of showing
| heartwarming images of happy people on swings while the
| narrator enumerates horrific side-effects. Reliably
| distracting an audience from a topic is a skill, and that
| reliability is valuable to companies.
|
| So to all those naive respondents who want to say that
| McKinsey is some kind of corporate leech that provides no
| value-- _this_ very comment is proof that you have no idea
| what you 're talking about.
|
| And some at McKinsey, I assume, are just run of the mill
| consultents.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I guess I'm glad you enjoyed my prose so much.
|
| All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening
| to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees,
| and presenting findings. It's neither a conspiracy, nor a
| scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. I make a healthy
| wage, but its likely lower than I could get in tech. Like
| almost every company in the world, its a normal company.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Just because there are ordinary employees at the bottom
| doing ordinary boring jobs, doesn't mean that this is not
| a company that has done all sorts of damage.
|
| Most of the huge profits don't go to people like you, but
| there are huge profits.
|
| The opioid crisis has caused untold suffering and death.
| The amount of money they were fined is a joke that
| couldn't make a tiny dent in what fixing this.
|
| It's small enough that it it's unlikely to stop them
| being involved in something similar in future.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| To give some color, the revenue from the perdue work was
| probably (much) less than 10M, profits, less so.
| McKinsey's total revenue (not profit (based on a google
| search)), is like $10B. Losing half a billion is a lot.
| runamok wrote:
| You are probably getting paid less than you could be but
| your billable rate is likely substantially higher.
|
| Not great links but you get the gyst...
|
| https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-
| partn...
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge
| klmadfejno wrote:
| True. I'd note a couple things here though. The per/hour
| rates are for creating the contract. Actual prices are
| fixed. The partner rates aren't likely to be charging
| every day of a project either, and are comparable to
| lawyer rates. They're expensive, no disagreement there.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Everything you buy has a markup to pay for expenses and
| make a profit.
|
| Consultants sell their time, so of course their time is
| marked up.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| There was a discussion on the experiments by Stanley
| Milgram about obedience to authority, and it applies
| here.
|
| When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff
| done", and the result of this is massive profits with a
| secondary effect of death and destruction, then the
| consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that
| second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but
| let me guess nobody goes to jail).
|
| The consultant may have been hired only for the first
| part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been
| much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The
| minute you understand the possible consequences of the
| things that you contribute to, you become partly
| responsible for it.
|
| As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will
| do horrible things to others when they can tell
| themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may
| add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get
| hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial
| crimes, or worse.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| _As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people
| will do horrible things to others when they can tell
| themselves that someone else is responsible_
|
| Turns out this isn't accurate. See
| https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-
| obey-a...
|
| _But as my detective work in the Yale Archives has
| revealed, in the filmed version of the experiment 65% of
| participants disobeyed. Yet Milgram edited his film to
| show the opposite: that two-thirds will do as they're
| told._
| arethuza wrote:
| That still means 35% of people are happy giving others
| serious electric shocks if told to by an authority
| figure?
|
| Not as bad as 65% but still pretty bad!
| btilly wrote:
| Given the many replications of variations of Milgram's
| experiments, any flaws in his original experiment don't
| detract from the overall result.
|
| See https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-
| behave-in-m... for some of that replication data.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| Are Instagram engineers partly responsible for depression
| among teens?
| mola wrote:
| Yes. They have a choice, they are privileged enough to be
| able to choose where they work. If they choose to prefer
| more money over not making more teens depressed. (If
| that's a thing, I have no idea), then they are
| responsible.
|
| Generally, most of us in software can choose where to
| work. If we don't make this choice according to morals
| (whatever they may be) then we are less moral than ppl
| who don't have a choice, and those who have a choice and
| do consider it.
|
| Is that a bad thing? Depending on which morality you
| subscribe to I guess....
| Frondo wrote:
| The Facebook engineers who tweaked the news feed to
| change the ratio of positive to negative news absolutely
| are partly responsible for that.
|
| Remember this one?
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-
| tinke...
|
| > In an academic paper published in conjunction with two
| university researchers, the company reported that, for
| one week in January 2012, it had altered the number of
| positive and negative posts in the news feeds of 689,003
| randomly selected users to see what effect the changes
| had on the tone of the posts the recipients then wrote.
|
| > The researchers found that moods were contagious. The
| people who saw more positive posts responded by writing
| more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative
| content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their
| own posts.
| caddemon wrote:
| I will add they did this experiment partially in response
| to an academic study that found viewing happier posts on
| Facebook made people sadder (explained mostly by FOMO).
|
| FB was trying to refute that, and their study was more
| technically rigorous, but the outcome they were measuring
| doesn't actually refute the original claim at all IMO.
| People writing more happy posts on FB does not indicate
| they are actually happier, it could also be that they
| wish to broadcast more of their happy moments, or perhaps
| even just pretend to be happier, in response to the
| attitude of their feed.
| glitchc wrote:
| Not just partially, but fully. Until then, it's just an
| idea, and like most ideas, isn't worth much.
| Implementation is everything*.
|
| *Not everything, which is a tad extreme, but certainly
| 95%+. But sometimes shocking statements are needed to
| jolt people into the reality that their work has
| positive/negative repercussions in the real world. We
| hold an arms manufacturer responsible for designing
| weapons of mass destruction, there's no doubt in anyone's
| mind that there is culpability.
|
| Engineers who build addictive products fall into the same
| boat. But, but, but paycheque! is not an excuse. Has
| never been before, isn't now, nor will it ever be in the
| future. As builders, we are defined by what we build.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| Asking the question is answering it.
| abduhl wrote:
| Yes. Even more than McKinsey is responsible for the
| opioid crisis. Instagram built the evil product, McKinsey
| just told someone how to better weaponize an already evil
| product.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| This series of threads is difficult to respond to because
| there's three theses floating around
|
| 1) McKinsey is basically fraudulent and pretends to do
| things of value
|
| 2) McKinsey is a very bad and unethical firm
|
| 3) McKinsey masterminds the business world to enable (1)
| and/or (2)
|
| The main bit of the subthread is about (1), but this
| response is about (2). All I have to say is that, yes,
| consultants should be aware that there are consequences
| to their actions like any other. I don't think that's in
| question. I'm not sure the stanley milgram experiments
| are especially relevant but sure.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| In this instance I'm more than happy to bring in Godwins
| rule, but yeah I'm pretty sure there were janitors in the
| Nazi party as well just doing their job.
| Geminidog wrote:
| >It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of
| wealthy indulgence
|
| But it is a crime the company is responsible for that
| caused many people to die and become addicted to opioids.
|
| You think Kim Jong Un walks among the people he starves
| to death on a daily basis in North Korea? No. He's too
| high up. He's in his palace in the capital and he doesn't
| even see the real state of his country. He just hears
| about it in reports and goes to do his day to day job
| like any other person in a company disconnected from the
| consequences of their actions.
|
| Does this mean Kim Jong Un is not guilty? No. Not. at.
| all.
|
| Does this mean McKinsey's is not guilty?
|
| Does this mean you're not guilty?
| smabie wrote:
| Sounds like everyone is guilty? Not a very useful
| perspective imo
| [deleted]
| Geminidog wrote:
| It's very possible for everyone to be guilty. We don't
| live in a world where if something isn't "useful" it
| isn't true.
|
| Your statement ends up reading sort of like "Is every
| Nazi guilty of the holocaust?" Technically maybe not,
| doesn't change the fact that of the matter that overall
| all Nazis are guilty.
|
| You can't run away from this with some garbage statement
| of "Not a very useful perspective." This incident
| literally killed an amount of people that is equivalent
| to a genocide.
|
| Imagine if you were a Nazi and you said that. If you were
| just a mere guard at one of these concentration camps
| could you say what you just said to me to a victim who
| lived through the atrocity? Think about what you should
| say to the parents of a man/woman who died from an opioid
| overdose. Literally, I think you're unaware of the
| magnitude of the crime that was committed here.
|
| Watch these videos:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcKURD_osM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXL3F5HvCr8
| ves wrote:
| > Like almost every company in the world, its a normal
| company.
|
| This in a thread about McKinsey settling for over half a
| billion dollars over its role in causing the opioid
| crisis, which is just one of the many, many arrows in
| McKinsey's "aiding and abetting horrible shit" quiver.
| This was _literally_ a conspiracy and a scheme. On just
| the basis of "harm caused" alone, McKinsey is far from a
| normal company.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| I'm a physician, the biggest culprit in the opioid crisis
| is the government. _They_ are the ones that started
| telling doctors that "pain is the fifth vital sign". They
| are the ones that said they would pay doctors based on
| results of patient surveys - it turns out that addicts
| wanting opiates from doctors give you bad scores if you
| don't give them what they want. And that has _nothing_ to
| do with capitalism - more the opposite, it shows how good
| intentions together with the overwhelming force of the
| government can ruin people's lives. So maybe we shouldn't
| be so quick to encourage the use of government power in
| those cases where we agree with the political party using
| that power?
|
| To everyone in this thread who has this overwhelming
| righteousness indignation about mckinsey - have any of
| you ever asked your elected representative about their
| view of the government's responsibility for the opiate
| crisis? Would you ever vote differently based on the
| answers they give? Did any of the state attorney generals
| who are going after private companies ever do anything to
| stop the (federal) _government_ encouraging the increased
| use of pain medication?
|
| This is a classic example of unintended consequences by
| the government - the companies were just responding to
| the incentives the government created.
| abduhl wrote:
| If we were to rank large companies based on how horrible
| they are to society then certainly McKinsey is indeed
| "far from a normal company." They're far lower than the
| normal company, in my opinion. I'd go so far as to say
| they're not even in the top 75%. Social media, other big
| (and small) tech, pharma, and banking have caused
| objectively (and subjectively) orders of magnitude more
| harm to our society than a bunch of reviled white collar
| consultants whose only real power is to give a voice to
| and action plan for all the bad ideas that a company has.
|
| It's easy to sit here and talk shit about management
| consultants while forgetting that management consultants
| aren't coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn't the
| common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like
| McKinsey do is "parrot back something a lower level grunt
| already knows"? Someone at the company gave them every
| idea they've ever had, or so the argument goes.
|
| They can't both be totally useless mouth pieces while
| also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.
| Retric wrote:
| Having worked at a large management consulting company,
| the harm isn't direct but it's still there. These
| companies have incredible leverage, but it's from
| credentials not competence. Economic harm isn't as
| obvious as say water pollution, but diffuse harm is still
| harm.
|
| Anyway, the average company does all the stuff you don't
| really think about like making pots, windows, staplers,
| hearing aids etc. It's the extreme outliers that people
| talk about not the dozen small factories making
| decorative concrete flagstones, etc.
| abduhl wrote:
| I'm not arguing that the harm isn't there. I'm arguing
| that the harm they cause is second order and smaller.
|
| And just as a small rebuttal: the small companies are
| usually owned by larger companies. So while they may not
| be "the company" people think of, they're still part of
| "that company." The connection is certainly just as
| direct as a McKinsey-client connection.
| samstave wrote:
| EXACTLY
|
| Look at it in tech: Some FB engineers are INCREDIBLY
| smart and good - but the, as you say, "diffuse harm" they
| do is still *harm*
|
| FFS when I was at Lockheed and we got audited for SOX the
| execs were stealing stocks from the newer employees and
| giving those stocks to the execs
|
| and the auditors, I think it was PWC, gave use a green
| passing grade and employees got fucked.
|
| Some of the execs went on to Solyndra and we all know
| about how they stole 700 million from the USG...
|
| (look at the SEC claims for Solyndra, where weeks before
| shutting their employees out without notice, they were
| giving out huge bonuses to execs and certain employees -
| e.g. they gave a $40,000 bonus to the IT manager that
| locked out all the accounts of employees)
|
| Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO
| was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of
| corruption....
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT
| CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of
| corruption....
|
| Jesus. Hackernews is one hell of a website
| jancsika wrote:
| > Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and
| banking
|
| If you're ordering by importance, I 100% agree with
| "social media" being at the top of the list, and this
| almost cannot be emphasized enough.
|
| I say _almost_ because _this_ article is about McKinsey
| and the role it played in the opioid crises. As an
| article it 's also light on details, so I'm let down that
| I come to HN-- which is often great at filling in
| details-- and begin to read low-effort exchanges about
| the implications of someone's hair cut.
|
| What do people know about McKinsey's relationship with
| Purdue in this case of pushing opioids into treatments
| where they didn't belong? I'd like to know more about
| that. And when I can blithely complain about the shit UX
| of a billion dollar company on HN and get a direct
| response from management, I'd expect information from PR
| nerds about McKinsey's role in the opioid crises and the
| ongoing lawsuits against them to flow to HN, too.
|
| It isn't productive if we keep hop-scotching over the
| meat of every article to talk about some _other_ hazard
| to society that isn 't mentioned in the article. If
| that's going to be the flow then the next article that
| pops up about Google's monopolistic practices will
| instantly veer off into whatabout Visa/Mastercard's
| monopolistic practices, as it did before.
|
| Edit: clarification
| tarsinge wrote:
| No, this sub-thread is a response to:
|
| > The whole business is a scam built around sending in
| some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100
| haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.
| silexia wrote:
| There are a lot of scammy consultants, but there are also
| tons of bad employees and whole bad divisions in
| companies. I run a website design and SEO firm that is
| highly successful because we actually do the work of
| building a website and the work of doing the online
| marketing. Many clients have internal IT or online
| marketing divisions that are incapable of even making a
| change to their own website. I find small consulting
| companies that actually do the work are actually much
| more valuable per dollar spent than internal employees
| whose main goal is just to hold on to their job as long
| as possible and do as little work as they can.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It may be unique only in the regard that the impact
| directly affects the US citizens, but multinational
| corporations that work in underdeveloped regions are
| known for their shady practices. You can probably write
| 10 articles on Nestle alone.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Consultancy sounds fancy, but when it comes down to it
| it's fairly mundane.
|
| I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's
| basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use
| consultants because they have tons of money but aren't
| sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the
| same thing.
| arethuza wrote:
| Being a software "consultant" and a management consultant
| are pretty different things.
| [deleted]
| ska wrote:
| Management consulting is a really different thing to
| consulting as a developer or specialist..
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > But these companies use consultants because they have
| tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal
| employees that do the same thing.
|
| Does not sexy mean they are not willing to spend the tons
| of money they have on internal employees?
| Balgair wrote:
| One more piece of the puzzle:
|
| Consultants are easy to fire. Depending on the company's
| policies, local laws, and the internal politics of the
| organization, a 'real' employee may be a lot harder to
| get rid of. Consultants are also time/task limited (in
| theory), while a 'real' employee is not (again, in
| theory).
| Closi wrote:
| I think this is mixing up 'Management Consultants' vs
| 'Engineering Consultants/Contractors'.
|
| I'm a (supply chain) consultant which is similar and have
| a full time contract and full worker protections with my
| employer. Projects are sold on a fixed price basis, so
| there isn't anybody to fire - clients are buying the work
| output or report, not the person or set hours. Some
| projects are time & materials, but if the project gets
| cancelled I'm still getting paid - I have a full time
| contract.
|
| As an example of the value prop - I come with information
| that your company doesn't necessarily have. Let's say you
| need to expand your existing (15 year old) miniload ASRS
| and are locked in with the incumbent provider - I know
| up-to-date market rates for miniloads and racking, and
| will be better able to credibly negotiate it down to
| market rates (particularly as I have probably done a
| project with the vendor before). I will also be better
| able to tell you if there is a better solution to
| expanding the ASRS because, while this is a '1 in 10'
| year activity for the client, _this is what I do every
| day_. Maybe they would be better putting some shuttles in
| a separate ASRS fed by the miniload because the actual
| bottleneck is throughput /accessions instead of storage,
| and their stock profile is different to what it was 15
| years ago? They are better than me at running their
| warehouses, but (hopefully!) I'm better at specifying
| automation.
|
| So that's the value proposition of consulting - you can
| get access to very specific expertise that you don't need
| for long. Most companies don't need a full time expert on
| specifying warehouse automation!
| Workaholic_87 wrote:
| Second this. Supply Chain tech consultant with one of the
| big guys here.
| toong wrote:
| They usually want their tech outcomes to be more like
| Netflix, but they don't want to have a tech-culture. So
| they bring in the consultants to implement "the digital
| transformation"!
| dannyphantom wrote:
| Exactly.
| jancsika wrote:
| > It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of
| wealthy indulgence.
|
| The article points to McKinsey's task to "turbocharge"
| opioid sales, for a company that sold them for "improper
| use." So there are obviously a few outstanding questions
| attorneys general are currently asking about what people
| at McKinsey knew from "listening to client problems,
| looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting
| findings" on that campaign.
|
| If you're simply saying that _your_ day to day isn 't
| that, point taken.
| haberman wrote:
| > 20-something haircut's ostensible work
|
| I read your comment as "I am so emotionally invested in
| this caricature that I cannot tolerate hearing it
| humanized. The caricature must stand, or I lose something."
|
| I know very little about McKinsey, but I don't think that
| the haircut of their consultants tells me very much.
| trhway wrote:
| >the many troubling associations McKinsey has had with
| shithole companies.
|
| not only shithole companies. At the total service of
| shithole governments:
|
| "McKinsey Bans Moscow Staff From Attending Pro-Navalny
| Protest
|
| ...
|
| In line with policy, McKinsey employees must not support
| any political activity either publicly or privately. This
| ban does include posts in social media featuring your
| political views or your attitude to any action with a
| political flavour. This line of conduct is mandatory. "
|
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/23/mckinsey-bans-
| mosc...
| StormyWeather wrote:
| I call bullshit on this email being sent by the firm
| until I see it (though I totally believe it may have been
| sent by someone working at the Moscow office)
|
| Grounds:
|
| - it goes directly against several key employees rights
| policies which we are reminded of by the firm itself
| several times a year
|
| - its formulation is very different from the firm's
| language in across-the-board communications
| klmadfejno wrote:
| That message was genuine, but quickly retracted and
| apologized for. That's not a real policy.
| trhway wrote:
| In Russia everyone knows which of those 2 messages is the
| real one guiding your cushy employment there, and which
| one is just a PR BS which was produced after people like
| Ted Cruz cried foul in the US .
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| > Ari Fleischer
|
| Honestly I got more of a '1 life is a tragedy, 1million
| lives is a statistic' vibe from GP
| towndrunk wrote:
| They are great at making PowerPoint's though.
| samstave wrote:
| >* _This is the HN-post version of the pharma commercial
| pattern of showing heartwarming images of happy people on
| swings while the narrator enumerates horrific side-
| effects.*_
|
| OMG this is the bes sentence I have read in months! Thanks
|
| ---
|
| I worked with a guy who was a previous McKinsey exec and
| now is the "uber of Dubai" founder and a billionaire and he
| is slimy AF.
|
| I have worked with multiple companies such as McKinsey PWC
| and others and their consulting practices are all bullshit.
|
| Now, thats not to say that any large company does not need
| some financial oversight/consulting/auditing - but still
| these consultancies are fucking vultures and are more
| likely to help you "cook your books" than correct your
| books...
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| And don't forget: there's always a bald guy standing by to
| disarm the "$100 haircut" conjecture.
| ivalm wrote:
| It would be hilarious if the grand-grand op went for "I
| am an 80 year old bald McK......"
| exikyut wrote:
| > _...run of the mill consultents._
|
| You spelled consultants wrong :P
|
| (Boring clarification: riffing off of your "spelled
| industry wrong!" bit. Not an actual attack.)
|
| I definitely need to learn lucidity or awareness or
| whatever it is that you springboard off of to be able to
| read something like this and mentally * _hangonaminute*_
| though... I completely went along agreeing with everything,
| and while I still do after having paused and considered,
| this isn 't the first time I've needed another comment to
| help with the initial "you're completely not noticing this
| subtlety here".
| jrs235 wrote:
| >You spelled consultants wrong :P
|
| I assume that was intentional.
| r00fus wrote:
| All valid points, but diluting them a bit by accusing
| others of spelling mistakes when committing them yourself.
|
| s/consultents/consultants/
| zupa-hu wrote:
| That was most certainly a joke. He called out that
| grandparent made a typo in the last sentence and drove
| that home again by also making a typo in the last
| sentence when referencing grandparent's role. I had a
| good laugh.
| wil421 wrote:
| Let's just post these articles here.
|
| > They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as
| well as on medical care and supervision of detainees,
| according to interviews with people who worked on the project
| for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents
| obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit
| under the Freedom of Information Act.[1]
|
| [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/mckinsey-ICE-
| immigrati...
|
| The CEO of Enron was a former McKinsey consultant and helped
| them transition from an Oil and Gas company. Arthur Anderson
| was just the firm left holding the bag at the end. [2]
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
|
| McKinsey helping dictators. [3]
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-
| china...
|
| > On October 20th, the Times reported that the government of
| the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had employed
| operatives to harass dissidents, including the Saudi
| journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly murdered inside
| the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on October 2nd. The article
| included the revelation that McKinsey had prepared a nine-
| page report measuring the public perception of certain Saudi
| economic policies, and cited three individuals who were
| driving much of the largely negative coverage on Twitter: a
| Saudi Arabia-based writer named Khalid al-Alkami, a dissident
| living in Canada named Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous
| writer. After the report was created, Al-Alkami was arrested,
| and Abdulaziz's brothers living in Saudi Arabia were put in
| prison. The anonymous Twitter channel was shut down.[4]
|
| [4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-
| for-...
| klmadfejno wrote:
| ICE was very bad. A lot of internal strife and change over
| those (and opiods).
|
| Enron and china I'm not really familiar with. The Saudi one
| is, in my opinion, not a an accurate portrayal. My
| understanding is McKinsey did not create a report for the
| Saudi gov't on it and that it was someone who chose a
| deeply unfortunate example to demo some social network
| analysis stuff, internally, and not intended to be shared.
| cryoshon wrote:
| when your consultancy keeps doing terrible things over
| and over, it isn't "unfortunate". "unfortunate" implies
| that there was bad luck, which isn't the case.
|
| all of these actions were fully intentional because
| that's mckinsey's business model: providing third-party
| and elite-friendly approval for the unpalatable or
| unethical.
|
| you mention "internal strife and change" after the latest
| trouble. i can tell from your attempt at dissimulation
| that you don't even believe what you're writing. a few
| years from now, we'll have a handful of other stories
| about newly revealed terrible things mckinsey did. you
| will bear some responsibility for these things, and you
| will probably brush it off.
|
| in the meantime, you're up and down this thread, trying
| to make excuses for the inexcusable by parroting the
| company line. it's an easy mistake to make when your
| paycheck depends on it.
|
| you are part of the problem, especially if you don't
| think you are.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I believe what I'm writing, and it's not the company
| line. I'm explicitly not giving the company a pass. I
| strongly disagree that providing approval for unethical
| or unpalatable decisions are what the company does. I
| would not work for McKinsey to serve, e.g. an oil and gas
| company personally, no matter the topic. But I feel good
| about what I do.
| pm90 wrote:
| > Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that.
|
| Sorry that's all you have to say about your employer quite
| literally supercharging the opioids pandemic causing
| unimaginable pain and destruction across America? "It was bad
| though."
|
| Let me tell you some hard truths. If you're 20 something you
| don't know Jack shit about running a business and the only
| reason you're there is because the C Suite wants to "de-risk"
| their decision making, or the board member heard about McK
| during golfing with his buddies.
|
| If Senior Leaders can't do X, they should, you know, get
| training. Go to online schools, get executive MBA training.
| Why don't they do that? _Because that's not really the real
| reason you're there_.
|
| McK and other consultancies have been a cancer on corporate
| America, creating chaos in the name of "digital
| transformation" or whatever buzzword is new. They capitalize
| on most companies' fear of being left behind and get inserted
| into corporations where they make the jobs of regular
| employees (you know, the people who you went to school with
| but decided not to go to McK but get a real job and who are
| familiar with the same types of things that you are)
| incredibly difficult with inane processes from "the manual".
| hindsightbias wrote:
| > creating chaos in the name of digital transformation
|
| I wonder how many at HN make their living on digital
| transformation.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The point is that you can't say that McKinsey are
| incompetent and not worth the money, while at the same time
| saying they are so competent that they created the opiod
| epidemic. It makes you look silly.
|
| Doing good economic work for bad people is a (gigantic)
| ethical flaw, but not a problem with the economic quality
| of the work and skillset.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Opioids pretty much sell themselves. You just need
| permission to sell them more loosely.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Here's a non-contradictory summarisation:
|
| 1. McKinseys advice is for the most part useless , often
| their advice is just politically motivated within the
| clients offices 2. They have zero morals, they will
| advice how to optimize the gas chambers (probably not too
| off the mark, they probably are advising something
| related to uighurs somewhere, maybe how apple can hide
| traces of genocide fueled chips from their product
| lineup) if they can make a couple mills. 3. The
| despots/murderers recruiting them are still going to go
| ahead with their addiction rings/gas chambers
| irrespective of what McKinsey tells them. The argument
| isn't that McKinsey made the opioid problem worse. Maybe
| they did but they probably will conveniently agree with
| us that they were not really consequential. Still doesn't
| mean everyone from McKinsey shouldn't be considered a
| dick though.
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Are consultants something like lawyers, in that they will
| do "good" work for ethical clients and "bad" work for
| unethical ones? Lawyers can point to the higher values of
| truth and justice. What are the higher values of
| consultants, to help them avoid "bad" work?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I suppose, it could also have been a bunch of 20 somethings
| pushed to the brink of total exhaustion forced to come up
| with ways to "mitigate" certain "business risks" and
| "enhance" positioning. The "cancer" is not that there is
| demand and willing buyers for consulting services, but
| shareholders, executives, media etc. running a very self-
| referential and reinforcing environment. Effectively, you
| will present "solutions" (for a lack of a better word) that
| you know that the a company knows that you expect the
| company to expect to see... (institutional isomorphism is a
| strong force)
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Whatever superlative you want to throw on "bad", go ahead.
| It was very bad, I just wanted to throw that onto the end
| of what was otherwise an unrelated point.
|
| There's no expectation that I know how to "run a business".
| That's not how it works.
| safog wrote:
| Man, you're really getting the short end of the stick here -
| it's actually pretty surprising because even though the forum
| is tech heavy, you wouldn't expect this much hate on
| consulting as a business model.
|
| Outliers like the Opioid stuff aside, I do think most day to
| day typical things that consultants do is valuable work for
| companies. Say you're launching a new product and want to
| figure out cost based / value based pricing - it's either a
| single person in the company that does that that might not
| have a lot of experience in that area or a consultant from a
| consulting company that has a good track record at doing
| value based pricing specifically. I know who I'm going to
| pick.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| People have a natural aversion to consultants. They're
| expensive and accomplish things that feel like they should
| be easy but in practice are hard. It's also difficult
| because the opioids work is bad, and there have been other
| things that are just bad. I don't think its especially
| representative of the work most people do but its still
| there and the harm is real. A piece of bad work is probably
| 12ish people doing their own thing that the majority would
| tell them not to do. I feel good about the work that I do,
| not just in that it doesn't harm anyone but in that I think
| it has positive side effects for society. The opioids work
| doesn't really affect me, and was hardly financially
| relevant for the company (before the fine). To give a
| throwaway fictitious answer, if my job was aiding COVID
| vaccines or helping education in poor countries, things
| that I don't have direct knowledge of, but would probably
| guess McK is involved in without any particular knowledge,
| I don't know how many "bad" actors or incidents it would
| take in other unrelated aspects of the firm to get me to
| not want to work there anymore.
|
| There's no big picture. I can't say my work "enables"
| others to do other work that I may disagree with. On the
| whole of it by my personal set of values, I enjoy being
| able to make the contributions I do and would be wary of
| loosing that. So long as the tone at the top of the org is
| condemning of things I consider bad (and it is), I think it
| deserves a level of understanding for how difficult it is
| to run a network of thousands of partners and avoid things
| like this. I'm optimistic that the newly enforced sets of
| checks and balances will prevent such at least some of
| these kinds of studies from happening again. For now at
| least, it feels less like "McKinsey" did the bad thing and
| more like "a group of people who work here" did. Others
| will disagree, and I get it. I know a couple folks who left
| on ethical grounds and they retained the support of all
| their colleagues.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who worked with McKinsey consultants in a past
| life, this seems pretty spot on. The partner and one of their
| associates were sharp. The other associate mostly got
| arrogant. They were brought in around a new product line I
| was the product manager of. Yes, they spent lots of time
| interviewing us and basically validated what we told them.
|
| That said, they presumably gave executive management some
| warm and fuzzies that we weren't smoking weed. Sure, they
| could have just taken our word for what we were telling them,
| but having a second pair of eyes is actually not a terrible
| thing. (And it's part of what I did for clients in a
| subsequent job.) They also gave our business planning people
| some complicated financial modeling spreadsheet which kept
| them busy and mostly out of our hair.)
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| My friends pour concrete & frame homes. In an hour they
| generate more for the world the you will in your entire
| empty life but huge congrats on your degrees and wealth
| [deleted]
| Fiahil wrote:
| I'm not from McKinsey, but from BCG Gamma (speaking from my own
| PoV, of course).
|
| One thing I've learned over time: expensive fees are a feature,
| not a bug.
|
| People will listen more to what you have to say about any topic
| if they're paying a few hundred $K for that. And the same goes
| when you need to deliver a new tool to your client. Being
| expensive means my IT tickets won't be shelved for a week or
| two because some guy didn't like my face. It's often the case
| where a 3 weeks process with a five-people-approval form gets
| shortened to a single zoom meeting plus an email, and I really
| like that :). That's the difference between a 8 weeks project
| being put in production two weeks early and already getting
| traction because the "business people" are more engaged ; and a
| 2 years project going nowhere because the team gets shuffled
| constantly and requirements keeps changing.
|
| PS: It only works if you can deliver what you promised, though
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| It's a lot more than that. It's about further enabling power
| structures at the client organization while diminishing
| employee and other "lower classes" negotiation and influence
| possibilities. In essence, it's a turbo-charged manager
| service, where you pay a flat fee to someone to represent your
| interest. The fee is high, but for it you buy more loyalty, a
| deadline to the relationship and avoid labor disputes, employee
| rights lawsuits, etc.
|
| "Your interest" as in whoever pays the check. This service is
| immensely valuable to stakeholders, otherwise they would not
| continuously pay for it. A career manager at a company will
| have much more complexity in interests and loyalties as opposed
| to a consultant hired by a single, at the end of it, actor
| (whoever controls the signing and payment process).
|
| Let's take a typical employee manager loyalty conundrum, pick
| one: loyal to the CEO, your boss, the shareholders at large, a
| specific shareholder group, the board? They often have
| different interests, and recruit or are looking to recruit
| agents for them. For the consultant? Whoever pays!
|
| I found the book "Confronting managerialism: How the business
| elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance" by
| Locke and Spencer quite useful to understand some of the
| realities at play (not specifically consulting, but the broader
| managerial and by application consulting manager roles).
|
| If leaders keep hiring consultants, there is value for them.
| This does not mean value for the organization. Most certainly,
| not for society at large, as the parent article can
| demonstrate.
| Terretta wrote:
| As I read your comment I was thinking "this!" then I saw your
| book recommendation and chuckled, "Of course!"
|
| What an important book.
|
| Here's a purchase link (non-affiliate but the URL that
| donates to your selected cause):
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-
| Business-...
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| Pleasantly surprised to meet someone else here that has
| read it! My management department at a major university has
| not!
|
| It is somewhat telling that this book mostly gets cited by
| practitioners of CMS, Critical Management Studies, with a
| citation index in the hundreds.
|
| Perhaps the explanation lies, as CMS luminary Alvesson puts
| it, in the basis of mainstream management research seeing
| itself as in the service of industry.
| Terretta wrote:
| I also appreciated this:
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Managerialism-Critique-Ideology-
| T-K...
|
| And much more obscure but a wry delight:
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-
| Livingston/dp/0937...
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-
| Livingston-1990...
| gnu8 wrote:
| It's Scientology for businesses.
| tgb wrote:
| Scientology literally has a business consulting front.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Management
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I heard somewhere that _one_ of the reasons consultants are
| brought in, even if the business owners know what to do, is to
| shift the blame to them. As in, its their idea, we are
| following the experts.
|
| Not sure how right it is.
| SMAAART wrote:
| ORLY?
|
| Sauce?
|
| I have worked in Management Consulting, not with MK, but I have
| worked with MK alumni and in engagements where MK was there
| before us.
|
| TL;DR: I respect their work, take the price tag away since it's
| meaningless. Running a business is hard, Management Consulting
| is also hard. Unbeknown to most people, Consulting companies
| also - often - execute, and there's something to be said about
| an outsider doing the heavy lifting, dirty work, and be the
| garbage person.
|
| If that comes with a fancy label, well.. there's a price for
| that too.
|
| Amen.
| refurb wrote:
| This is a bad take on McK. The 26-year old isn't in charge of
| projects, the 45-year old McK partner with a few decades of
| experience is.
|
| Also, McK is more about organizing change and getting buy in.
| That's their value. Some Director could come up with a strategy
| but no one would follow it.
|
| Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for
| having hired McK. There is value in that.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| > Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for
| having hired McK. There is value in that.
|
| This is it right here. A shocking percentage of corporate
| boardrooms are McKinsey alumni -- by hiring McKinsey to
| develop or even just validate your strategy, you buy
| credibility from the people who sign the checks because they
| know and trust senior people at McKinsey.
|
| Consulting is a relationship business. The _other_ purpose of
| consulting at the boardroom level is to enable companies to
| sidestep laws around collusion and insider trading -- the SEC
| occasionally charges somebody, but it's largely symbolic
| given how pervasive it is. It's not unheard of for CEOs of
| companies that are direct competitors to have regular calls
| to discuss strategy, all while using consultants to create a
| paper trail that says the strategy was developed through
| rigorous analysis.
| xerxesaa wrote:
| This sounds rather dismissive. The company (and others like it)
| has been around for decades. Most of Fortune 500 has leaned on
| their advice multiple times, and their advice doesn't come
| cheap. So your implication is that these companies are being
| scammed into repeatedly wasting their money and are apparently
| not smart enough to figure this out. To me, that feels hard to
| believe.
|
| It's conceivable McK and other actually do offer some value. A
| 26 year-old may not have tons of real world experience, but
| working at McK would allow him/her to have exposure to a global
| team that has worked across many companies in the industry.
| Having an understanding of best practices across multiple
| companies in the industry is valuable. It's also valuable to
| come in with a fresh perspective that is not heavily influenced
| by working at the same company for decades.
| andi999 wrote:
| And some fast food chains sell crappy food. So what? Nobody is
| forced to hire a (bad) consulting firm. Also if management
| accepts and implements the bad advise of a consulting firm,
| that management is even worse, isn't it.
| Terretta wrote:
| Once you realize the game is "management" in collusion on both
| (a) outsourcing the reading of the HBR articles so they don't
| have to, and (b) what I call "decision insurance" ("but our
| consultants confirmed this made sense!") so decision
| accountability is laundered, everything makes much more sense.
|
| In mega enterprises the CEO matters a lot, but the next 3 or 4
| layers often exist primarily to filter and spin bad news,
| diffuse accountability, and occasionally get burned at the
| stake as a witch in league with evil spirits when nobody wants
| to acknowledge the cholera water making the whole village ill.
|
| Given that, the easiest witch to lay hands on is the
| consultant, which is why they bill hazardous duty pay levels.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| > what I call "decision insurance" ("but our consultants
| confirmed this made sense!") so decision accountability is
| laundered, everything makes much more sense.
|
| I hear this all the time but it sounds like an urban myth.
|
| I highly doubt someone is not getting fired because the
| consultants they hired fucked up. They're still responsible
| for the business. I think consultants can help more with the
| "we need to do X, Y, Z" with consultant's report backing it
| up.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _hear this all the time, sounds like an urban myth_
|
| I didn't hear it. I've spent years as an L3 (CEO is L1) of
| one of the largest enterprises in the free world,
| interacting with other enterprises at that level, and
| collaborating with all the top consultancies' teams that
| work at that level.
|
| My take is while not always the case, the higher level the
| _committee_ approving the consulting spend (because even
| that choice /decision is diffused), the more frequently
| this is involved.
|
| At the end of the day, the CEO works for the Board, who are
| external and most definitely do not get paid enough to go
| to jail. _Everyone_ involved needs decision insurance.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| I won't doubt your experience. I'm sure it has happened,
| but I've been in some pretty high up areas as well.
|
| > My take is while not always the case, the higher level
| the committee approving the consulting spend (because
| even that choice/decision is diffused), the more
| frequently this is involved.
|
| It sounds this has more to do with the clout of the
| individual than it does "oh well mckinsey said this."
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I suspect too few people understand this.
|
| _The CEO works for the board._ The CEO can be fired at
| will just like any other employee.
|
| They will get an incredibly generous pay-off, unless they
| have fucked up to a world-beating historic extent. (And
| sometimes even then.)
|
| But as soon as the CEO loses the confidence of the board,
| they're on their way out.
|
| And most boards are only really interested in the
| financials. They don't care about culture, reputation,
| product range, or any of those other things. That's
| detail stuff, and it doesn't interest them.
|
| This is a cozy arrangement because no one is personally
| responsible for anything the company does. The CEO and
| the board are covered by limited liability, and they
| won't be going to jail for common crimes - like poisoning
| water sources, or setting fire to forests.
|
| They _may_ go to jail if they fuck with the financials.
| Extreme fraud can be a showstopper.
|
| But having a national monopoly on pushing highly
| addictive drugs isn't. That's a regrettable offence which
| deserves a medium-ish fine. And - you know - let's say no
| more about it.
|
| Consultants - like auditors - exist to add another level
| of deferred responsibility. They're not there to make
| decisions, they're there to provide legal air cover for
| decisions that have already been made which need someone
| else's signature.
|
| The meetings, reports, the hasmter-on-a-wheel super-keen
| grad cadres and the rest are just theatre.
| orzig wrote:
| I don't know more than is in this podcast, and n=1, but
| the leash isn't always very tight:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/19/538141248/e
| pis...
|
| > They weren't idealists or social activists--just two
| shareholders who thought the CEO was being grossly
| overpaid. And they figured that salary was paid with
| money taken out out of their pockets. So they tried to
| force a pay cut.
| andreilys wrote:
| It depends on how much political clout they have.
|
| Redirecting blame is a lot easier when you have an external
| party. More interestingly though is it forces a
| conversation/decision on a particular problem, since you've
| already spent exorbitant sum of money on the consulting
| fees.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| I mean the entire point is to hire outside consultants to
| provide "proof" that what the executive team wants to do is
| what the organization should do.
|
| McKinsey is hired to provide cover for execs when they make
| terrible decisions. So they can step back and say well it
| wasn't my idea, McKinsey said so as well.
|
| It's just another example of terrible management failing
| upwards.
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _Too bad they can 't be sued for ruining countless
| businesses with mindless self-serving "advice" meant to do
| nothing more than get their contracts re-upped._
|
| A fool and his money...that's their problem TBH. Those that
| hire them aren't grandmas on Social Security or mom-and-pop
| stores, they are supposedly super sophisticated businesses.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I know it's fashionable to hate on MBAs, but I am not entirely
| convinced engineers are any better equipped with skills such
| as: requirements gathering, scoping, presenting, project
| management, competitive research, financial modeling, memo
| writing, and strategic planning. I don't believe these are
| truly vacuous activities, and - loathe as I am to say - MBAs
| may be the best trained to do this.
|
| (Disclosure: I do not have an MBA)
| the8472 wrote:
| This is about a specific consulting company, not MBAs in
| general.
| cowanon22 wrote:
| I agree with this - young engineers typically do not
| appreciate the importance of building the right thing vs
| building it well. However, the OPs point stands. McKinsey and
| these other companies just regurgitate what is printed in the
| trade press and charge you top dollars for it. You meet an
| experienced person once at project kickoff, and then most of
| your contacts are fresh grads with 2-5 years of experience.
| They really specialize in attending meetings and conference
| calls, but are all over the place (from excellent to awful)
| at actually implementing things.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| I'm fine stating that engineers from non-elite schools are
| just as well equipped for the tasks you describe, but that
| wasn't the GP's contention. The point is that McKinsey make
| bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes.
|
| Their fingerprints are all over numerous bad decisions in
| business and government in the past few decades[0]. These are
| the bare minimum, because there are quite likely many
| negative outcomes they have championed in their role as
| consultants that were never publicized or reported on.
|
| Totally separate from the above is their absolutely mercenary
| tendency to work with anyone who will pay them[1][2].
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Cont
| rover... [1] -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-
| china... [2] - https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-
| desk/mckinseys-work-for-...
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Cherry picking bad examples is not how to evaluate how
| often McKinsey "make bad recommendations that have
| demonstrably bad outcomes".
|
| Any company the size of McKinsey around as long as McKinsey
| will have success and failure stories.
|
| The proper way to evalaute is to take all things McKinsey
| did, normalize for background, and see how it performs
| compared to other methods of solving the same problems.
|
| Cherry picking to make a claim is the 2nd worst form of
| evidence, outranked only by outright lying.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| "We can never criticize something unless we can
| contemplate the totality of it" isn't constructive or
| helpful and has (from my interpretation) the net effect
| of stating the the status quo is fine. Is that what
| you're contending?
|
| Firms like McKinsey, for reasons of trade secrets,
| confidentiality wrt their client book, discretion because
| of the nature of their work, etc don't have data
| available about the completeness of their outcomes. In
| fact, their white papers focus exclusively on successes.
| What about instances where their contribution has a not-
| zero impact (we could even include and offset the cost of
| their consultations against the total impact of advise
| offered, assuming it's followed)? Do you have a proposal
| for how to conduct such an analysis?
|
| Furthermore, I would offer that much of the nature of
| their impacts isn't something we can know with
| mathematical precision and exists in the realms of the
| social sciences (a broad domain known to have major skew
| problems when measurements are taken, if at all).
|
| So we are left with optics and moral/ethical assessments
| of the work they have done. Taking this into account, I
| am content with this approach and the conclusions I have
| arrived at.
| GreeniFi wrote:
| Great comment. I might go further and say that cherry-
| picking is either an attempt to deceive the listener or
| oneself. I'd put it on the same pedestal as lying.
| ath92 wrote:
| McKinsey has 27,000 employees. That's the population of an
| entire town. I'm not saying that the things described in
| the links you posted here aren't bad, but I think it's
| important to remember with this many employees, there will
| always be someone doing something that you don't agree
| with.
| _jal wrote:
| This assertion is both true and irrelevant. Try:
|
| "Comcast customer service has a huge number of employees.
| I'm not saying there aren't jerks in there, but..."
|
| Devolving corporate responsibility (for the bad stuff) to
| individuals is of course the corporate preference. But at
| some point you run in to the "only the best people"
| problem - McKinsey hires them, trains them, assigns them
| and pays them, no matter how slippery McKinsey PR is, I
| keep seeing that name, McKinsey.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| To be clear: Is your assertion that, because these
| outcomes aren't a deliberate conspiracy, we have to let
| them happen because of... what, exactly? Whether it's an
| emergent feature of this style of consulting or a firm
| consisting of the worst human beings is besides the
| point.
|
| Elite management consulting firms (McKinsey, Deloitte,
| Bain, etc) exist to enable the worst impulses of
| leadership across the spectrum. The ends certainly
| justify scrutinizing the means.
| hehehaha wrote:
| Getting an MBA right now is a clear signal that you have zero
| skills.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Maybe companies hire MBAs as a perk/morale-booster for the
| engineers, so they have someone to unite in their hate
| against and not fight with each other over their failures.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Its a people problem. Actually solving problems takes a
| particular kind of mind. A degree is just a piece of paper
| which certifies the fact that you sat through lectures on
| subjects and you successfully regurgitated said lecture
| material on another piece of paper from memory.
|
| The issue with the MBA field is that it tends to attract
| power hungry narcissists/psychopaths who enjoy holding power
| over others. Engineers like to tinker with stuff and be left
| alone.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Posting this comment on a website dedicated to self-
| promotion of engineers who want to get rich quickly is an
| interesting choice.
| IMTDb wrote:
| The problem are not MBA's. The problem is that the incentive
| of consulting companies are not aligned with the incentive of
| their clients.
|
| Take a big construction project. In the like of the Berlin
| airport. What do you think is more profitable for the
| consulting companies :
|
| a) A well thought project, done in budget and in time. Where
| the consulting company gets the whole contract + all the
| bonuses associated with it.
|
| b) A poorly managed project, that gets refinanced multiple
| times and that ends up being pushed back decades.
|
| It's actually B. Consulting companies _love_ long projects,
| because this allows them to place consultant for extended
| periods of time. And any consultant working for a client is a
| profitable consultant event without bonuses. Consulting
| companies _hate_ projects that end up shorter than expected,
| because any bonus they might get from that project ends up
| being spent on consultant that are waiting for their next
| assignment.
|
| The main KPI of any consulting company is "the %age of time
| you consultant are spending 'on assignment' vs 'on the
| bench'". And long projects where consultant are busy for
| years are the best way to bring that KPI to 100%, even when
| the underlying project is a complete mess. The only thing
| they get from shorter and better managed projects is a better
| image, which is easier and less expensive to get using
| marketing technique and PR.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Yes, and I agree with all the child comments. The
| principal-agent cost with consulting firms is enormous. In
| the most uncharitable light, their business model is a
| wealth transfer insofar as their profit derives directly
| from maximizing this cost.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Your complaints apply exactly as well to the internal
| employees.
| rvwaveren wrote:
| Your point about incentives is exactly the structural
| problem here. I've been a consultant years ago and on a
| human level we loved projects that ran well. You feel good
| about yourself and your team for helping the client quickly
| and efficiently.
|
| However, zooming out, it's the incentive system that's
| completely broken: there is no skin in the game. Consulting
| firms are too detached from the consequences of their
| advice. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a nice book about this
| phenomenon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)
| Dwolb wrote:
| I'm with ya hear. It's actually one of the reasons I love
| start-ups.
|
| You get to recommend a better approach to an industry or
| technology and then go off and do it all while having
| equity in the company.
| jaredmosley wrote:
| Yet, a consulting company that constantly has overrun
| projects won't get repeat business nearly as much as the
| company that comes in and gets things done. PR and
| marketing may help you land your first project with a
| client, but it's only good work that will keep that client
| coming back to you. Otherwise they'll replace you with
| different consultants.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| This is slightly different (SI/Mgmt consultants vs Strategy
| consultants) but my experience with SI consultancies was
| that mid/lower consultants were rewarded based on chaos and
| fixing chaos not on avoiding chaos.
|
| So if you oversaw the build-out of a system and everything
| went smoothly, good, but nothing to talk about during
| promotions.
|
| On the other hand, if there were difficult issues faced and
| you fire-fought, sent out late emails with decisions to
| clients, came up with memos documenting tricky situations,
| awesome! Promotion material!
|
| Of course, sharp consultants figured this out and the
| sharpest ones looked the other way when design documents
| had landmines -- just so they had known manageable issues
| to "manage" and "save the day" with.
|
| Bad incentives, bad outcomes.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'm fairly sure it's _much_ easier to teach engineers how to
| business than it is to teach MBAs how to engineer.
| [deleted]
| Clubber wrote:
| Sadly, I believe the money that will go to the states will help
| finance the incarceration of those very opioid users.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Why aren't these people in jail?
| choward wrote:
| > U.S. government data resulted in 450,000 overdose deaths from
| 1999 to 2018
|
| They're paying just over $1,000 per life. According to the U.S.
| government a human life is worth $10,000,000. Seems totally fair.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
| oaiey wrote:
| I hope they also fire everyone involved and substract the money
| directly from each partner compensation. That will maybe teach a
| lesson to a whole generation.
|
| Okay, naive, wishful thinking.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| That is, by the nature of a partnership, how it affects partner
| compensation.
| jcomis wrote:
| Not really. This likely will not effect partner comp. It will
| effect the firm, but partners will spin it as the guilty
| parties are gone and the leaders need to be retained (through
| comp!) to right the organization. The low levels will absorb
| it through lower comp. I've worked in consulting for years
| and no matter what happens, EVER, partner comp is NEVER
| effected. They will hem and haw about it, discuss it, maybe
| make it seem like they are reducing their comp (really just
| pushing bonuses to more opportune time), but they always get
| made whole.
| a3n wrote:
| Nit:
|
| "Effect" is an Entity, a noun. They both start with "E."
|
| "Affect" is an Action, a verb. They both start with "A."
|
| Effect is sometimes used as a verb, especially in
| bureaucratese, but not in the way you're using it.
|
| With apologies.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/326/
| jcomis wrote:
| ha, thank you.
| toby wrote:
| Since you went there...
|
| "Affect" can also be a noun, referring to behavioral
| characteristics :)
| StormyWeather wrote:
| That's not how things work at McKinsey (current employee
| speaking). It's a partnership and partners take the hit
| when there is one to take. As a recent example (2020), in
| response to the difficulties stemming from the COVID 19
| crisis partners compensation was massively reduced, but no
| one else's comp at the firm was affected.
|
| As for the consequences of the current opioid-related
| debacle, it has been communicated to the firm members today
| that any economical consequence would be borne out of
| Partner's comp, as is usual.
| StormyWeather wrote:
| The responsible parties have been terminated
|
| "We said we would have no tolerance for those who violate our
| professional standards. In this case, after a thorough
| investigation, two partners have been terminated for violating
| our Firm's professional standards.""
|
| Source: https://www.mckinseyopioidfacts.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/...
| hospadar wrote:
| I wonder what McKinsey's profit on this gig was - if >= $573M,
| then this is just the cost of doing business, no problem, do it
| again and make some more $$.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Profit for a study like this is likely on the order of $1M
| aneil wrote:
| A slap on the hand.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| One of my first jobs out of college was at small management
| consulting firm founded by an formerly very high level McKinsey
| guy. In a bigger firm, I wouldn't have had much contact with this
| person, but since we were tiny, he would often be out in the
| field with the junior people.
|
| One week I found myself with him in some faraway city. We were a
| bit lost (this was before smartphones) and late for our next
| appointment. He was frustrated about it because we couldn't get a
| cab to save our lives. As the minutes ticked by, he'd get more
| and more irritated, muttering to himself about losing the fucking
| clients, etc. You can imagine one of these master-of-the-universe
| types when they get indignant; it's just like the movies.
|
| At some point in all the running around, he notices how he's
| acting and tries to summon some perspective on it all, get out of
| his frustration. _" You know," he said, "when the plague comes,
| society's not gonna need management consultants, nor is anyone
| gonna miss us. We'll get to the meeting when we get to the
| meeting; no one's gonna die because we're not there."_
|
| From a guy who I'd only known as this very hard-charging white
| collar business guru, a guy who fell out of a Tom Wolfe novel,
| this was unexpected and funny to young, naive, impressionable me.
| I got the impression that while he may not have completely rid
| himself of being annoyed at being late, he was also sincere. I
| think about this moment a few times a year, actually, something I
| wouldn't have predicted.
|
| Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure that at the highest levels,
| these people know that they're not giving civilization all that
| much, and that this is never very far from their minds.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| While amusing, this attempts to humanize them and somewhat
| whitewash their abominable actions. They are sitting at the top
| of the power matrix making lives miserable and dangerous for
| the ones with least power - paycheck to paycheck workers, those
| with addictions, inmates in Rikers, dissidents.
|
| The fact that they are aware of their own lack of usefulness
| makes the whole enterprise even more cynical and shady.
| xgb84j wrote:
| It just shows that I, you and the average person is much
| closer to them than we think.
|
| If you put enough money on the table I'm sure many more
| people would do the same thing as those currently in power.
| It's just that most people don't have the opportunity to sell
| out.
|
| That's the scary truth I think.
| ridaj wrote:
| Hate the game, don't hate the player
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| To the extent that telling you all this story was an attempt
| to humanize these guys and "whitewash" their behavior (it
| wasn't), I have some bad news for you: they're human.
|
| It does nothing against evil to pretend that the world is
| composed of a small number of monsters and the rest of us
| good ones.
|
| I'm the first one to agree with you: consulting - hell,
| fundamental aspects of capitalism itself - are deeply cynical
| and morally suspect, and result in a lot of unnoticed pain
| and death and ruin. But in my view, ignoring the fact that
| criminals of all types go home and kiss their children at
| night, and mean it, is part of what keeps us locked in the
| status quo.
|
| And by the way: instead of ascribing intentions to me that
| you, as the reader, can't know for sure from the text alone,
| why not just ask me what my intentions are?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The problem is a systemic one - people respond to
| structural incentives. We can't get a better world by
| insisting that people rely entirely on their moral compass
| to resist strong incentives - we need to change the
| incentives themselves. Every time we say "those people are
| just evil" instead of "how can we adjust our social
| structures so moral crime doesn't pay", we strip ourselves
| of the only real path forwards. "personal responsibility"
| is the worst possible doctrine for systemic change.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Firefly quote comes to mind: "They'll swing back to the
| belief that they can make people... better."
| cycomanic wrote:
| This is certainly true. I know Godwin's law, but there are
| some good books and stories (not sure if translated to
| English), of the children of SS officers, concentration
| camp guards etc.. They started asking questions of their
| parents when they got older (or sometimes only after their
| father died) and found out that the loving and caring
| father had been a monster at some point.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Are people downvoting you because they don't want to
| humanize someone they hate? Or am I missing something?
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| You'll have to ask them, I guess, but that's what it
| looks like. (Encouragingly though, way more ups than
| downs.)
| Closi wrote:
| I'm downvoting it because it paints all management
| consultants with a broad brush of 'being evil' which
| clearly isn't accurate.
|
| > While amusing, this attempts to humanize them and
| somewhat whitewash their abominable actions.
|
| Ouch - I'm a supply chain consultant (only one shade
| away!) is the implication that I am less than human and
| totally spineless? I know management consultants and most
| of them _do_ in fact have a spine and are just trying to
| help companies work better.
| leafmeal wrote:
| I was referring to downvotes on maybelsyrup's comment,
| not its ancestor from haltingproblem.
| Closi wrote:
| Ah apologies. That's totally my mistake!
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > The fact that they are aware of their own lack of
| usefulness makes the whole enterprise even more cynical and
| shady.
|
| Some would say this was the origin of charity and corporate
| social responsibility. It was born as a financial
| optimization to hedge against optics risk, to engage in moral
| licensing. And it does its job very well there -- not in
| spite of, but because it directly humanizes the company and
| its executives.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm not sure it's all that different from you or I when we
| are uncaring towards a homeless person asking for money, or
| when we decide we value a latte more than a week's worth of
| meals for a starving child in Africa.
|
| Everyone seems to imagine their actions are "normal" and
| "socially appropriate" but if only they were to break out of
| their lot in life and reach that next rung up, suddenly
| they'd be more generous, more compassionate, not driven by
| the same things, etc.
| TT3351 wrote:
| I have worked for a startup operated by a McKinsey alum; he was
| totally incompetent, throwing buzzwords around constantly
| without understanding what they meant. I have come to realize
| his entire strategy was to purchase the company, dress it up in
| new clothes (without understanding tailoring or fabric) and
| sell it to another rube.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| > when the plague comes
|
| It might have helped to have some mgmt consultants on vaccine
| distribution.
| krrishd wrote:
| Not management consultants specifically, but I get the vague
| sense that it'd go not too different from this Deloitte
| situation: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/101708
| 6/cdc-44-m...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| This is going to sound heavy-handed but what they did was
| terroristic. It undermined individuals, families, and the social
| fabric. It's not a passing event but an endless altering of
| fulfilling lives.
|
| The dollar amount might feel impressive. But keep in mind the
| actual employees who contributed to the "turbochargeing" aren't
| paying that, and they are still walking the streets.
|
| I can't imagine how this is Justice, or even justice.
| crumbshot wrote:
| This is far too low. A fine large enough to destroy the company
| (as was effectively done to Purdue) would have been the only
| palatable outcome. And even more importantly, legal repercussions
| for all their employees who were personally responsible for this.
|
| All this settlement achieves is 'a cost of doing business', as
| they say. It's not punishment or deterrence. McKinsey and other
| companies like them will do similar in the future, and simply pay
| it off, again.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yes, as soon as you put a price on malfeasance, it becomes a
| spreadsheet decision for a corporation.
| tkinom wrote:
| $573M for 450,000 overdose deaths. $1k+ per death.
| minikites wrote:
| If big companies started facing consequences for their actions
| our economy would fall apart.
| omosubi wrote:
| Why? Because people would actually be held accountable for
| their decisions? Shouldn't that be how it works to begin
| with? It would be painful in the short term but in the long
| term i think it would make people better off
| minikites wrote:
| I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but I remember 2008
| and the fact that zero people were punished. The US
| government will protect corporate profits at all costs.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I agree, but I'm not really sure what that has to do with
| this:
|
| > If big companies started facing consequences for their
| actions our economy would fall apart.
| bostonsre wrote:
| If big companies face no consequences, then our society will
| fall apart. They have ruined millions of lives and are
| responsible for a large portion of the 450k overdose deaths
| from 1999 to 2018.
|
| It amounts to literal gambling with people's lives and the
| individuals responsible face almost no risk. The worst thing
| that happens is that their company has to pay a big fine.
| Someone who steals a car will face a multi year federal
| sentence. Who had the biggest negative impact on society, the
| dude that stole a car or the people responsible for hundreds
| of thousands of deaths?
| minikites wrote:
| >If big companies face no consequences, then our society
| will fall apart.
|
| It currently is and I don't see any sign of it stopping.
| The foundation was laid in the 80s, the roof fell in on
| January 6th, and the Democrats don't have enough of a spine
| to actually fix the problem because Republicans keep
| calling them mean names.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The fault in our society is not that one party is bad and
| the other party it's good, it's that both parties think
| that about each other and believe a whole bunch of
| distortions based on the extremes of either party. Rs
| think Ds are destroying our society just as much as Ds
| think Rs are doing the same. Both sides are vilifying Is
| for not taking enough of a stand on The Issues That Will
| End The World TM.
|
| The only way out is to fix that mutual misunderstanding,
| and to stop destroying the neutral space where that
| misunderstanding can be mended.
|
| I'd love it if whenever politics comes up on HN, we
| started brainstorming ways to do that, instead of
| amplifying the us vs. them rhetoric that is too prevalent
| elsewhere.
| omginternets wrote:
| At least be upfront about what this is: preferring the
| justice system to fall apart.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| I don't even know where to begin with this comment.
| minikites wrote:
| Name a big company or C-level executive that has faced any
| meaningful consequences for their misdeeds in the last 15
| years. I can think of Bernie Madoff, but he was punished
| because he swindled rich people. If he swindled poor people
| he'd be on the cover of Fortune magazine.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| I agree that big companies don't face meaningful
| consequences often enough for their misdeeds.
|
| My comment was referring to your statement that if we
| _did_ hold them accountable, the economy would fall
| apart.
| gnulinux wrote:
| So let's allow all big companies to do whatever the fuck they
| want, because otherwise "our economy would fall apart"? This
| is the darkest comment I read on HN.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| This is a common exaggeration used in a variety of ways. A
| Basic Income will destroy the economy (because the US
| economy depends utterly on a slave-labor class?) Or
| electric cars will destroy the economy because whatever.
| Its thrown around here a lot.
| crumbshot wrote:
| I read it as a lament that our economies are so vulnerable
| to the actions of a relatively small number of large
| corporations. Including the idea of certain entities
| purportedly being 'too big to fail'.
|
| Not sure if that was the intended connotation though.
| samstave wrote:
| To whom do the settlement proceeds go?
| hehehaha wrote:
| McKinsey also implicitly involved in the whole Valeant debacle.
| These guys love extracting, no extorting, "value" from thin air.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Lets not forget this episode where McKinsey charged NYC $27
| million for a flawed, nay, doctored analysis which actually
| caused violence to soar at Rikers. The software they delivered
| never worked. The sheer notion of Harvard/Princeton educated
| McKinsey consultants ripping off NYC for millions and putting
| inmates at Rikers at more risk of violence is sickening.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-04 23:01 UTC)