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Comment by dlytle | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of mention in the article about "McKinsey"; looks like that's a management consulting firm. The impression I get is that they have a bad reputation, but I have no idea why. Anyone have any insight on this?

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I think consulting firms have a bad rep with tech people because the demand for consulting firms is due to political problems in an organisation. my experience is that someone brings in consultants into an organisation because they want to carry out a plan but another group in the organisation is blocking them so they bring in consultants to bless the plan. consultants are glorified yes men.

I didn't take that they had a bad reputation; quite the reverse, that people have left their relatively prestigious job there which would look great on a CV, and now that's going to be slightly tarnished by an apparent failure at Groupon.

Aha, gotcha; I didn't get that part. Thanks for the clarification!

On the contrary, McKinsey is very well respected within the management consulting industry. It is part of the big 3 consulting firms: namely McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. The Mckinsey brand is probably the best known out of the 3.

McKinsey is certainly one of the best-known management consulting firms. As such there's plenty, positive and negative, that's been said about them (1). To cite but the best-known instance of the negative, there's their heavy involvement with Enron. Jeffrey Skilling, who used to work for McKinsey, is now in jail for his actions as CEO of Enron (2), and McKinsey consultants were heavily involved in running the company (3).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company, especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Criticism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling [3] http://faculty.msb.edu/bodurthj/teaching/ENRON/McKinsey%27s%...

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