Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower

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74 pointsmeany23 comments

This article wasn't what I was expecting. His complaints are primarily about ICE. His work was to put together a hiring plan to hire more ICE agents, but that was never actually put into place.

He pulls some examples of poor McKinsey behavior from other stories that he wasn't part of, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of McKinsey whistleblowing in this article.

> A senior partner once told a writer, “There is no institution on the planet that has more integrity than McKinsey"

Perhaps a well meaning individual who wanted to make it entirely clear that whatever they said on the company's behalf should not be taken even half way seriously ?

I'm probably on the opposite side from this person on ICE so their moral concerns with McKinsey don't matter to me, but I do appreciate the perspective of someone seeing that for every issue you do personal activism on, there are institutions full of people going to work every day making sure the opposite keeps happening. You have to do more than change opinions to win.

Still, I'm glad they left the company. I think it's better to have institutions you can aim at goals without the people inside it working against you.

I don't get how such companies exist. At best they are clowns, at worst criminals. Why would one hire them?

> Why would one hire them?

Mostly for the executive who hired them to be able to say: the very expensive management consultants recommended we do X, Y, Z, so we should do X, Y, Z.

Because what they give you is priceless:

1) If it worked then it's all thanks to your impeccable ability to get the right tools to get the job done

2) If it fizzles out it's all still OK because you've tried best and hired the best consultancy

3) If it goes catastrophically bad you're OK because it is clearly the fault of the consulting company

Basically you buy "heads I win, tails you lose".

And to add some context, given a couple of lifes ago I was rubbing shoulders with those people:

Please don't go over to either extreme of the spectrum (of opinion).

Those companies make the obscene amounts of money because they do generally _work_. They are like dietary supplements: as long as they don't kill anyone they don't really need to do anything useful to sell well.

So in most cases the outcome is somewhere between "good enough" and "meh", and any occasional great success is appropriately used for marketing purposes.

The "catastrophically bad" cases are rare because they do directly impact their future business opportunities. They try really hard not to make things _worse_.

TL;DR: These companies exist because they do fill a real need ("of doing something without taking responsibility if it doesn't work out") and at the very least they generally do no harm.

> and at the very least they generally do no harm.

Except taking money from whoever hired them. Fine if CEOs of private companies want to lose money, but at least public entities should be forbidden from spending public money into those jokes.

> doing something without taking responsibility

Also CEOs tend to get a very high salary because of their "responsibilities", so I don't like the idea that they get the high salary but have a way to not get the responsibilities. Probably they should just not get the indecent salary in the first place.

My personal opinion is that I would very much prefer all those smart and hard-working people be doing _more useful stuff_. So I think we're at the same sentiment here.

As for CEOs of public companies I do not know but my _impression_ still is that those consultancies are usually hired at lower levels - where the "responsibility buyout" is precisely _against_ such a CEO. Sort'a like the old "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM".

And indeed I think the root is at the top (no pun intended): in most large(er) organization the incentives at the top are such that "having a sustained business" is _the worst possible choice_ - when you have a golden parachute deal it's better for you to literally bankrupt the company than to play it safe and say, ensure all the employees are not only well-treated but also well-compensated.

> when you have a golden parachute deal it's better for you to literally bankrupt the company than to play it safe

Never thought about it this way, but yeah, it makes sense to me!

But by the end of that summer, I had grown to like many of the people running Rikers, bonding with the jail’s most senior uniformed officer over our mutual love of Led Zeppelin. It was an early lesson that interpersonal kindness is not the same as actual goodness.

Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality...

> In the end, the city spent $27.5 million on McKinsey’s services, with precious little to show for it. McKinsey, on the other hand, collected its money and moved right along.

Speechless.

All comes down to incentives. No doubt the person who made that decision would have got a lot more pushback if they'd wanted to spend $3 million hiring or developing internal expertise.

The old “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft” argument.

Didn't that use to be IBM?

Yes, back before Microsoft became a household word.

McKinsey wants you to believe they can measure the productivity of SWEs.

Measure their productivity and they vehemently deny it and will sick lawyers on you. In the land of free speech.

The US is run by people with mafia mentality.

It's not the US, it's in any system that control is sought after by those that seek power. This is why democratising power is so important, regardless of system. Those seeking power will always find methods aligned with the system to do so. In an advanced capitalist society, it's methods like McKinsey, in a kleptocracy, it's whoever is the biggest crime boss.

> This is why democratising power is so important, regardless of system.

What makes you think that some form of democracy will help with whatever you diagnose here?

It's the only way to systematically distribute power.

No? What makes you think so?

For a counter example: if everyone decides for themselves what they want to do with themselves, that's not democratic at all. Doesn't involve any voting etc. But it's systematically distributed power.

And that kind of arrangement is common for most aspects of life in most places.

Eg you can decide for yourself what you want for breakfast or whether you want any breakfast at all. Throughout most of history you could also decide for yourself what kind of substances you want to put into your body.

Though in the last hundred-and-something years there has been a lot of democratic (or autocratic..) control over that in many places. Cannabis and alcohol make for interesting example of how (democratic or not) government control waxes and vanes.

In most countries, where you go for a holiday is up to you. But eg Americans' democratically decided that they can't go to Cuba without a special license. (By the way, I would call this the opposite of distributing power. They centralised the decision.) In the bad old days, people living in the German Democratic Republic famously were really restricted in their holiday-abroad choices. (But whether one wants to call their regime 'democratic' is rather debatable.)

But the right solution to East Germany's travel restriction wasn't to put every citizens travel plans under democratic control (eg up to a vote by all the citizens). The Right Thing to do was to just lift travel restrictions, and that's what they did when they joined the Federal Republic of Germany.

It's cute to see you taking your first steps with big concepts like freedom and democracy, but serious, read a book or ten to discover what we have learned past dictionary definitions.

Thanks for ignoring my argument.

What do _you_ mean by 'systematically distributing power' then? Anything that's not begging the question?

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