McKinsey’s brand has taken a beating these last few years with the company going from scandal to scandal. The NY Times has been doing a whole string of stories on the firm’s questionable business practices and ethics.

Funny though how it sounds like, per their own admission, McKinsey badly mismanaged running their own internal operation and woke up to realize they need mass layoffs. Sort of causes one to question how much one should listen to these so called “experts” on how to manage a business. Mass layoffs generally don’t follow strong management execution.

I’ve been a customer of management consultants on a few occasions. There were times when some of the input helped but mostly that was essentially just hired hands to do rote organizational work like interviewing 100 people and summarizing what they said in a nice PPT deck delivered to my desk. The “experts” were woefully out of touch with reality. They were more following hype cycles than providing any sort of real valuable strategic advice. Most had never actually run a business or done the thing they were offering up advice on, and it showed.