Comment by mckthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mckthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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There are a few things you are missing.

1. McKinsey has the best corporate leadership training in the world. McKinsey consultants are very polished in terms of how speak, break down problems etc, navigate the business world etc. McKinsey has the kind of money to host trainings year round in extremely expensive locations e.g. Cambridge College or a lodge in the swiss alps. Consultants get the very best. 2. McKinsey has an "up-or-out" structure. This means that at each "level" in McKinsey you have a certain time period to make it to the next level, before you are kicked out. 3. McKinsey has an immense alumni network that gets "kicked out" of the mothership, or otherwise leave. Many people that kicked out go straight to managing Fortune 500 profit/loss sheets. Guess which consulting firm ex-mckinsey consultants prefer to hire?

In terms of specialist consulting, over time McKinsey consultants tend to specialize in certain industries e.g. automotive. The results from novel previous consulting engagements are saved as "playbooks", which any McKinsey consultant can reference. McKinsey has experts in every industry on every continent and every significant country. Some consultants/partners are brought in from outside when McKinsey tries to break into a new area.

Afaik all the consulting firms operate the same way, but since McKinsey is perceived as the cream of the crop, things work the best for McKinsey.

I never witnessed any unethical behavior while there.

> McKinsey has the best corporate leadership training in the world. McKinsey consultants are very polished in terms of how speak, break down problems etc, navigate the business world etc.

FWIW my spouse worked for a former McK consultant for a while. She (the former consultant) was hired out of a top-three US professional school and promoted w/in the firm once (this is relevant to what follows), then left (presumably not promoted the second time).

From working up close w/ her for more than a year, my wife was unimpressed. This woman was tasked w/ estimating market sizes at the firm where they both worked. There was ample public data about this topic (health-related).

Whenever the woman didn't like the way the numbers looked (for god only knows what reason), she would just make them up! She would literally pull them out of thin air.

Specific example: If we open a clinic to treat X (or develop a drug), we can expect that there are Y total patients annually in our metro area (or patients w/ the condition nationally). [For many conditions, Y is something you can easily track or find out in a variety of data sources, many public.]

This woman would decide that Y was "too small". She was always interested in wildly exaggerating the size of the potential patient population to make her proposals look more appealing to the management.

I bet not all consultants are like that (this one was not promoted after all), but the hiring process cannot be that good and the training w/in the firm cannot be that good, if this person made it through, got hired, and then got promoted!

N=1 here and YMMV w/ consultants, of course, but this is my frame of reference.

>McKinsey consultants are very polished in terms of how speak, break down problems etc, navigate the business world etc. McKinsey has the kind of money to host trainings year round in extremely expensive location

Can you share some of your top takeaways or lessons learned from your colleagues?

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