Same exact scam as the shady mechanic who wants charge you $400 to flush your transmission fluid and convinces you that your car will surely blow up if you don't do it.
McKinsey gets paid ungodly sums in part because they are the archetype of the old boy's club. Their new hires usually come only from top business schools, and likely already have several years under their belt at the types of companies McKinsey gets business from. In addition to that, most banks already have several ex-McKinsey people on staff anyway.
Boston Consulting Group are in the same tier. Back in college, BCG and McKinsey were the holy grail of employers for pretty much all Econ/Finance students who didn't want to go the IB route.
And one of these drones currently runs Google :(
- McKinsey hires a bunch of "top" school grads
- after a few years, some hires clearly have the potential to make partner, and most don't
- McKinsey encourages clients to hire the people who aren't partner material at an attractive wage
- feeling good about making a step up after capping out at McKinsey, most people gladly accept
- McKinsey now has an alumni network at client's which are a good source of future business
- repeat as desired to build up alumni network
A friend of mine who used to work in management at Ernst & Young told me a bit about how this game is played. You need a strategy for getting people out that maintains the relationship, and offering backdoor bribes to lure people away is one way they do that.
I'm sure some arrogant ass somewhere is telling themselves that the great ones become partners at McKinsey & the washouts become CEO of Google. Kind if like that quote "Anyone can aspire to be President of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming president of the Bohemian Club." [1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-26-mn-2818-s...
… who graduated college three years ago and get 50 of those dollars per hour themselves.
This fantastic show really gets at what consultants are doing. It was based on a book by a real management consultant. They all have their MBAs from the good schools. You go to a company, figure out what the ceo wants you to decide and is paying you to 'investigate', and then support them with a complicated opinion with numbers and accounting details (that a lot of people aren't going to investigate too carefully or refute). Offer 80% of what they need at that time, and a continuing contract to figure out the rest.
> All while building the talent and the advanced data-analytics infrastructure required to compete
Guess who, among the top consulting groups is currently investing a lot in data-analysis at the moment? Yes, McKinsey.
[0] https://www.bcg.com/beyond-consulting/bcg-gamma/default.aspx
*current mckinsey data scientist who got an offer from both Gamma and McKinsey, and turned down Gamma despite being offered a higher salary.
We came up with a product internally. So our CEO hired a top-tier consulting company to sell our own idea back to us. That process cost millions.
But they do make real slick presentations and they have higher status than internal staff, and the CEO can say that a top-tier consulting firm recommended we do x, y and z... Blame insurance is right.
Once you hit a certain scale, e.g. where CEO is so stratospherically above rank-and-file in social status that it's not appropriate to speak directly anymore, consultants can act as a social buffer. Among other things they can launder recommendations from regular staff to management and put that objective shine on them.
The downside is that we know for a fact (when they accidentally published an android app to the playstore, I reversed it and it was our code) that collateral, research and demos that we paid for got sold to others.
And all true.