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Inside McKinsey

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This is how you hit the undo button on a nuclear detonation. If this wasn't buried in FT Magazine, I'd be tempted to cancel my subscription. It's so obviously part of the damage control campaign that it brings the integrity of FT's journalists into question. Extracts:

"... links between key former employees of the world’s best-known, most prestigious, most self-consciously high-minded consulting firm and a corrupt hedge fund boss..."

"...it was a public embarrassment, a private outrage – and even a potential threat to the future of “the Firm”, as McKinseyites call their employer."

"... the older partners were “completely ashen-faced”..."

"The partners’ principal anxiety was summed up in one recurring question: “Why didn’t we pick up on it?”"

"As shocking to them was the fact that they had not previously been made aware of any such activities."

"insiders offered two analogies to help him understand the Firm: the Jesuits, and the tailors of Savile Row, who “unlike fashion houses and designers … are always in the background”."

"Yet McKinsey is arguably better known than either the Catholic religious order or the London suit makers. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, who originally styled its consultants as “management engineers”, McKinsey is to consulting what Goldman Sachs is to banking: it supplies the most prestigious – and perhaps the most expensive – advice that top corporate and government clients can buy."

...and on and on including a lovely historical photo of founder James O. McKinsey.

sounds like another "most self-consciously high-minded" firm - Arthur Andersen.

Consulting firms such as McKinsey are undoubtedly filled with brilliant people. But because specific expertise in an area is worth more than general intelligence/accomplishments when it comes to specific, actionable recommendations, this cynical criticism (as used in the FT comments section) comes to mind:

>..."Consultants are people who charge you a fortune for interviewing you about your organization and then writing a report repeating what you've just told them and what you already knew!"

Realistically speaking, though, this is actually a very useful thing: providing political cover so that an executive can institute an unpopular but needed change. However, this is more indicative of a weakness in an organization's (perhaps unavoidable in all large companies) culture than it is the effectiveness of consultants.

It reminds me of Richard Feynmann's role in the post-Challenger disaster investigation. He's famously known for explaining the O-ring deficiencies during a televised press conference. But he admits in his memoir that the O-ring revelation was passed to him (through another intermediary), from an anonymous source -- most likely from an astronaut who worried about his/her job -- who had said that the O-ring problem was known to NASA's engineers but the bureaucratic managers had chosen to ignore it.

If all it took was a $1,000,000 fee to get in some consulting engineers (or hell, just Dick Feynmann) to spotlight this fixable -- if inconvenient problem -- so that the Challenger wouldn't blow up, I'm sure we'd all agree that would be money well worth spent.

I know people who go to fortune tellers even though they wouldn't put money on their predictions. But most fortune tellers at least can act as the friendly voice who tells their client want he/she needs to hear, whether it has absolute truth or not.

Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

>Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

since 9/11 it's become very popular to hire security consultants whose reports would strongly recommend to fly executives on private jets instead of common carriers. Business continuity, etc... So, there definitely are beneficiaries out there. Profit/efficiencies is in the eyes of beholder.

I don't have the reference for this, but I recall the seals between shuttle booster segments were originally engineered to use asbestos, not rubber as the gasket. The engineery qualities of asbestos for this purpose were perfectly understood, lower tempature lift-offs would not have been an issue, and most importantly, all the expensive live testing had already been performed when higher-ups recognized how politically incorrect asbestos was, even though a program as high-tech as the shuttle program was perfectly capable of handling asbestos perfectly safely. There probably was no $1M engineering fee that would have ever fixed this, because the multi-$M live fire tests were complete. No one considered this relatively minor engineering change (after all, the seal was redesigned to work with rubber) worthy of another round of very expensive tests (which primarily focused on the motor).

In a similar fashion (sorry, also doing this from memory, no reference) sometime in the late 80s or early 90s the main fuel tank insulation was switched-out because foam manufactured with CFC became verboten, so another material, with apparently unknown (or not completely desireable) engineering characteristics, was swapped in. I never recall hearing about ice ripping off big chuncks of fuel tank foam during the boost phase in the 80s. I only remember hearing about this starting in the 90s (or at least after the Challenger accident).

This is certainly tangential to the OP, except that there probably was copious high-priced consulting which provided political cover for both of these mistakes.

Thirty seconds of googling reveals that this is a myth: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_scien...

You're right. A little more googling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank reveals the old foam began to be phased-out in 1996, with complete phase-out in 1997. Tile loss and other damage starting even with the first flight were assumed to be related to foam loss, and the foam loss itself was determined/assumed to be due to anomalies in foam application.

Well, a big share of the work I was involved in as a management consultant resulted in clear measurable $$$ to the client. Typically in the range of 5-10x the fee. One of the teams delivered something like 20x the fee in a project for the government.

And yes, that means that the client who payed 2 million USD to run a team actually got 40 million USD in payoff from this. This is of course an outlier, but it is still true. I have seen the details of this project myself (as it was a public engagement).

Why hasn't anyone heard of this? Because the glory of the successful projects are always given to the client executives/team.

> Has anyone here ever been the beneficiary of a concrete effect from a consultant's work, such as a tangible new idea that resulted in better profits/efficiencies, beyond what is merely CYA?

Absolutely. When I was in the security group for eBay/PayPal, we had a consultant come in for about a month, and at the end he gave us a list of projects to keep us busy for at least a year that made tangible improvements to our security.

OK, call me ignorant, but I think that these highly paid strategy consultants are closer to a placebo than problem solving, i.e. in most cases the management thinks that calling in McKinsey (or Bain, etc.) was "totally worth it" because (i) no one would admit that their decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting was wrong and (ii) the problems do seem like solved, from the high managements POV. The truth, though, is usually different. Most engineers and mid-level management complain that such interventions of cocky consultants, who may be super intelligent (because, you know, they passed the hard McKinsey interview) and knowledgeable, generally understand little of the specifics of the company and try to get the gist of it in a couple of weeks to address deep problems. This is akin to going to cardiologist for a serious brain tumor, because he's a good doctor and expecting him to quickly learn enough to solve your problem.

Paraphrasing Ada, these people do not originate anything! I wonder how many McKinsey alumni sit in the tech startup boards. How many have created startups?

Just a word of advice. McKinsey consultants are potentially worse than just an MBA on your founding team. There's a reason you never hear about McKinsey consultants ever going on to actually start a company that actually matters. They are "value extractors" not creators and generally if you have one on your founding team, I pray for you. They can't do anything on their own. In my experience they do not really understand what it takes to actually create a company and are motivated so much by money and their insecurities as the writer of the FT piece hints at.

"Value extractors". Spot on.

With few if any exceptions they will never add value. Their expertise is in locating value someone else has created and then drinking from that fountain for as long as they can. And they are very good at it.

Their position is similar to lawyers. With very few exceptions if any, they are simply an expense.

They need a client to cling to and sap off of.

And no matter how intelligent they may be, that is how they think.

We can be hard to absorb, that's for sure. I've successfully helped a lot of start-ups, but I (and they) have been careful to ensure that the time I spend there is limited. eBay hired too many MBAs/consultants and stuffed themselves as a result.

But arguing that McKinsey alumni are all-bad is clearly over the top. They can produce results incredibly quickly and are comfortable dealing with very senior levels at corporates. Business development and major deals are a specialty.

Try calling one when it's time to think about major decisions, pricing, figuring out how industries work and just general business advice.

I've successfully helped a lot of start-ups

So what do you make of the grandparent's observation that none of them go on to form vital startups themselves?

Good attempt at a PR puff piece, but I find it extremely hard to think of an organization being pristine throughout with such corruption at the top.

Malcom Gladwell has an interesting article about how McKinsey contributed to the Enron debacle.

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

I'm curious to hear opinions of the "up or out" philosophy at startups. I can conceive of both pros and cons (mostly cons) but a forced philosophy sounds flawed.

I've only heard of "up or out" being used in high-end professional services companies - which are usually very different places to start-ups.

A variation is used in many financial services sales teams, where the bottom 10-20% each year are fired, or if sales don't increase. Similarly was/is used at IBM to remove the bottom 5-10% of under-performing staff each year.

You're referring to the practice made widespread by Jack Welch when he was CEO of GE (20-70-10 aka "differentiation")[1].

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2005-04-1...

It's also used in the military.

Zuckerburg talked about this at a startup school event years ago. No clue if it's actually implemented.

Up or out mirrors natural social behavior- the highest status individuals tend to evaporate to become lower status people in higher status groups, while the lowest status people tend to drop off to become higher status people in lower status groups.

Not accounting for Peter Principle.

Up or out in a growing organization is a lot harder.

It also works best in a professional services firm where your intake is mainly undifferentiated college/professional school graduates, with a clear career progression.

Basically, neither of these apply to (successful) startups. Startups are more likely to rapidly promote people when things are going well, and then to turn into "evaporative cooling hell" once things go badly -- all the good people jump ship to better opportunities, leaving only those who can't or won't leave, accelerating the decline.

In a startup you're much more likely to see roles growing in responsibility or scale faster than some people might be able to adapt, so someone who is hired as head of development in a 3 person team might not be able to be VP Engineering if the company grows to 50-100 engineers. At that point, you have another problem to try to solve -- do you just replace him with another person, or keep him in a smaller role and hire someone above, etc.

I'm not sure it would work at most startups. Firms that use "up or out" policies offer a few things to potential hires:

1) A high salary (to make up for potentially short tenure)

2) Potential for equity shares in profits and control (even though McKinsey is technically a corporation, its run as a partnership with partners being the shareholders)

3) Training backed by a brand they can take to their next job

When someone takes an offer at McKinsey or Cravath or Goldman, they know that they'll be compensated at the top of their field, they'll get a resume line they can take to their next job when they get "or out-ed", and that if they prove to be a super-star they'll get a real stake in the company.

None of these things are true for a startup. That is not to say that startups don't offer their own benefits (I think working at a startup is the best training you can get as a software engineer, but it stings that future employers don't really put much stock in it unless you get lucky and the startup turns into a brand name), but in adopting an "up or out" model you adopt all of the downsides of that model without offering any of the upsides.

If they really can't figure out how Gupta got so far in the firm then they aren't as smart as their PR puff piece says they are.

I'm not at all familiar with consulting, but some of the things I do now (research disparate subjects in-depth) sound related. What kind of questions do consultants answer/what work do they do?

This article does an absolutely terrible job describing work "Inside McKinsey" and seems to be more of a puff-piece for the firm than anything else.

If you are interested in what management consulting is or looking for an interesting read (the background is fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining), I highly recommend the book Lords of Strategy referenced in the article. Here's the WSJ review which gives a good summary: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870486930457510... and a BW interview of Kiechel: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/ca20100...

The origins of management consulting are actually in Frederick Winslow Taylor's work around scientific management, using a stopwatch to cut excess labor on railroads... you could call it hacking labor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

I worked at BCG before coming to FeeFighters, as did our CEO. My 2 roommates worked at McKinsey and Bain, so I have a pretty good perspective on the industry. This article goes way overboard on the prestige associated with working at McKinsey - noone at my school chose an offer from McKinsey if they had one with BCG or Bain (more of a culture/fit decision than anything else at that point). I worked with multiple Rhodes and Baker scholars at BCG... but you don't get to 10,000 employees only hiring the smartest guys in the room. People are generally VERY smart, but you also have partners where you wonder how they got there. There are a few different types of partners... the rainmakers (they can sell), the teachers (awesome to work with, they teach junior people a lot), and the ones that do amazing client work. I hated working for rainmakers.

Working in consulting can be an awesome time... at times, you get to do strategy work that decides how billions of dollars will be deployed (that is when you do pure strategy work). But at other times, you're spending days building gantt charts deciding who will manage a particular document in a new organization (most of the work these firms do now - they had a desire to grow, so they take on shitty operational things that they aren't well suited to, to create an "ongoing relationship" with clients). As for recycling stuff, sure - you are paid for your expertise and part of that expertise was learned at your competitors. It is no different from hiring anyone from a competitor, which happens all the time, even at junior levels. There is a huge chinese wall where you can't get information from someone who serves or has served a competitor.

BTW - there are certainly skills that transfer well from the consulting world to startups... I wrote about some of them (sub consulting for MBA) http://feefighters.com/blog/should-you-hire-mbas-at-your-sta...

As a current BCG consultant, thanks for this. Have been fortunate to work on real strategy work, but have lots of co-workers doing IT diagnostics and other not-so-exciting things.

For a contrary opinion, try Matthew Stewart. His book, "The Management Myth," was nicely excerpted in the Atlantic [1]. He's particularly harsh on Taylor's early experiments, which claimed to be scientific but were anything but.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-mana...

"How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?"

That should be a big sign that Taylorism and scientific management is basically only suitable for industrial manufacturing.

> He's particularly harsh on Taylor's early experiments, which claimed to be scientific but were anything but.

I found it recently of how great an influence Taylorism also had on the 1920s' and 1930s' Soviet industry (which, in retrospect, makes perfect sense).

From here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Soviet_Un...

""" Historian Thomas P. Hughes[23] has detailed the way in which the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s enthusiastically embraced Fordism and Taylorism, importing American experts in both fields as well as American engineering firms to build parts of its new industrial infrastructure. The concepts of the Five Year Plan and the centrally planned economy can be traced directly to the influence of Taylorism on Soviet thinking. Hughes quotes Joseph Stalin:

    American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is impossible.... The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism.[24]

"""

I was an associate and engagement manager at McKinsey during Rajat Gupta's time.

The article rings true.

1: Rajat Gupta was a very straight guy, and the firm was an incredibly straight place. His actions after he left the firm are completely inconsistent with his actions at McKinsey and the expressed beliefs of the firm. Perhaps he was always a bit self-serving and the firm provided the guidance he required. Who knows, but overall this is pretty devastating.

2: While McKinsey, Bain and BCG are recognized as the top tier, McKinsey stands alone in most people's minds. Nobody from my school with multiple offers selected any other consulting firm over McKinsey. (I had 2 other offers). It's like Harvard for MBA schools - we can say what you like if you went to another school (like I did), but Harvard will always be the benchmark for MBAs. The better the firm, the higher the quality of the people around you (I knew only one "hiring mistake" and the support staff were outrageously amazing), the better the clients (I dealt with companies with hundreds of billions at stake) and the better the engagements (though there are still good and bad ones within that). Even so the culture and clients did depend a lot on the office, and on the economic climate at the time. I saw my office go from great to not so great in less than 3 years.

3: Client Impact was critical at McKinsey - we were constantly asked to prove that we were earning our fees. Partners and Directors had to do it all, but making rain was not as important as the quality of the client impact.

I agree that the work can be awesome. McKinsey hires "insecure overachievers" and ensures that they are operating near the edge of their ability. However while your learning curve is amazingly steep, you also need to be able to step out in time. I'd still recommend McKinsey to anyone, there is no better school to learn business.

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