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Comment by PheonixPharts | Hacker News Reader

At all levels the true service that McKinsey provides is responsibility diffusion. Whether it's a manager that doesn't want the bad rap for a stupid or unpopular decision to profiting from creating the opioid crisis, the role of McKinsey is to come in, tell you what you wanted to hear, and then walk away bearing a good chunk of the blame for whatever happens.

The blame is meaningless to them and has zero negative consequences (in fact it has positive consequences), they just perform the part of "evil" management consults. It's an important part in making sure no one takes too big of a responsibility hit.

This is what makes McKinsey so vile. It's not that they actually put these ideas in the heads of their clients, but that they perform a necessary part in making sure that even the most banal of evil actions to the most horrendous can remain ultimately consequence free.

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> The blame is meaningless to them and has zero negative consequences

I would imagine this many government ties helps a little bit when it comes to consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_employees_of_Mc...

This I think is the reality of it all. There's a subtle hint of extortion in their work. A tone of "oh, you need to lay off thousands of workers because your business isn't doing as well as it sounds? That's a shame. That sounds a lot like securities fraud to me. We have the commissioner's daughter on our payroll, so if you let us advise on the layoffs, maybe you can avoid charges."

No, it’s not nor is it solely responsibility diffusion. The real trick of McKinsey is being everywhere. If you are a corporate strategist, you can try to do the best you can with what your analysts tell you and your own data. But if you hire McKinsey you are sure their advice will be at least as good as the one they are giving your competitors. Of course they don’t make it obvious. They have internal shielding, privacy protection, the whole shebang. But you might get invited to be part of the benchmark which matters and their internal documentation pulls cleverly from all their cases. It’s subtle but hiring them is the closest you can get to a cartel without crossing the line. That’s why they are so expensive.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I have never heard of a single instance where they provided actual, useful, cutting edge actionable advise. I however have seen them payroll dozens of unremarkable yet politically connected people. You are repeating the narrative they pitch out loud, but whenever they make this pitch, they also make sure you hear the extortion angle as well.

In the instance of this very article, what makes more sense? McK offered competitive advise that sold more product. Or, given that at all the companies they advised, employees knowingly murdered hundreds of thousands of people and escaped any legal culpability, that the fees went to paying off politicians to protect them from investigation/prosecution?

> the role of McKinsey is to come in, tell you what you wanted to hear, and then walk away bearing a good chunk of the blame for whatever happens

This is the role of nearly all consultants.

It is a small step between enabling pill mills and helping herd undesirables into the showers. It truly is time that we demand better of corporations, and time to prosecute immoral and unethical management.

The "undesirables" comment is a little harsh. You're taking about people who are foolish enough to trust that doctors have their best interests at heart, and get addicted.

No, I am not. You might recall the adage “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

Here’s some light reading for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

The parallels should now be obvious.

Maybe I'm confused. Are you calling the addicts undesirables?

You're confused. They're not calling the addicts undesirables.

McKinley advising and assisting Purdue is not entirely unlike IBM advising and assisting Germany’s 1933 NSDAP government in its execution of a thorough ethnic census of its peoples, and then “facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for … military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.”

I see upon reading my OP that I did not identify IBM as a co-guilty party paralleling McKinley. My apologies.

another side to this is -- now that your eyes are open, you have a unique choice, to build social systems that thrive from mutual benefit and actually implementing those, and to bear witness to that. Profit is useful for force certainly, but not the only factor for making change over time. The ugly spectacle of Big Pharma here is not the only path forward.

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