McKinsey and Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners
currentaffairs.org
currentaffairs.org
my favorite part about people from mckinsey has been that they're stunningly incapable. need some quick research done? after a lot of hand-holding, you'll be given an uninsightful and dubiously comprehensive summary of the mainstream view on the topic of your choice and a pivot table you didn't want or need, roughly 10 days after you needed it. you won't need to proofread the report, of course. but that isn't what you cared about anyway.
need something obscure and complex deeply analyzed and fully understood in an insightful way? again, you'll get some flashy combination of excel and powerpoint shit you don't need or ask for, maybe even ahead of schedule, but you'll also get an irrelevant speech about whatever tangentially topical prestigious person/institution the mckinsey person recently bumped elbows with. you'll also realize that the person working on the thing you wanted doesn't really have any understanding of the thing you wanted them to understand at all -- they're just regurgitating whatever they could find without analysis.
however, they've all been imminently presentable people who can articulate themselves clearly and appear to be very serious. this has been my experience with no fewer than 4 former employees -- all of whom were hired to perform tasks exactly like one would expect a business management consultant to be capable of -- but take it with a grain of salt anyway.
it's a real pain, especially when you don't have enough information on an issue to form an opinion yet. you'll get all kinds of probing questions trying to sneakily suss out exactly what you're expecting to see or which way you want them to affirm your opinion on the subject at hand. it seems like their target customer is always someone who wants to add legitimacy to their bad ideas, and they will treat you as such even if you don't want to fit that bill.
they're incapable of being objective regarding facts of reality because their mental model for truth is that something that is "right" or "true" only per the opinion of whichever authority figure is the most salient at the moment. it explains a lot about why they're so amoral. it also explains a lot about why they fit in so well to the world of the elites: they're not ever going to have the moral gumption to speak truth to power... or even to the disempowered.
while working on a project intended for a government institution, a team at mckinsey hired a digital illustrator to create a handful of beautiful scenes from a high middle ages fantasy world.
i have to say, the illustrations weren't relevant to the project, but they really made the powerpoint deck look utterly gorgeous. the content of the powerpoint, intended to be highly insightful and fuel for decisionmakers, had about three paragraphs of written content across ~50 slides.
the rationale for this very light amount of information was that the intended audience of the presentation would have their eyes glaze over if they saw anything with more than one sentence's worth of exposition. the audience -- government decisionmakers -- needed to be drip-fed the content they'd paid for, or else they wouldn't understand it.
at the time, i thought it was incredibly limiting for the client, even if the mckinseyites were correct about the client's poor ability to digest material -- which was no sure bet. of course, in retrospect this entire rationale was just a cover for the utter lack of insightfulness/knowledge/competency brough to the table by the mckinsey team. the project was light on information and heavy on illustration because the team hadn't ever had a clue about the substance of what they were trying to do.
the lesson here -- and there are other anecdotes in this vein too -- is that the mckinseyites are adept at gaslighting both themselves and their clients such that the innumerable shortcomings of their output are slickly presented as features.
I wonder, if one wants to disrupt management consulting, what would it be ? Massive open annonymized datasets ?
What really needs to be disrupted is the governing ideology of the political-economic system itself.
Making the case that needs to be “disrupted” is a tough road you’ve chosen to hoe.
But there are downsides, too -- and the long-term prognosis of what this system holds in store for us... just doesn't look good. And may potentially end quite disastrously, in fact.
Two things to think about
https://psmag.com/magazine/cellphone-revolutionary-objects
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/commun...
I find it very difficult to care what privileged people from capitalist countries have to say about the problems of capitalism. There is a blueprint to prosperity. It involves free markets, property rights, individual freedom, respect for investors, the rule of law, and an abiding skepticism of radicalism or social upheaval. Countries like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, etc., have followed that blueprint to prosperity within the lifetime of people who are around today. Countries like Bangladesh, where my family hails from, are seeing massive development by moving (imperfectly) in that direction. People like “Owen Jones” May be well intentioned, but in their nativity are a threat to the potential for a free and prosperous world.
We’re all on a boat. There are reasonable debates to be had about which way we should steer the boat or how fast to go. But the people espousing socialism (not like Macron welfare capitalist, but as contradistinguished from capitalism) are trying to poke holes in the boat.
So what are the underpriveleged saying about it?
I've never heard this term before, but it's perfect. The implicit assumption that certain capitalist economic theories are literally the real world (rather than limited and imperfect models) is something I've been noticing more and more, but never had a term for.