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Comment by Vaslo | Hacker News Reader

The WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a cafe with a McKinsey consultant.

No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out again…

McKinsey is just a group that will rationalize any decision you want to make in the first place. It's management decision laundering, by consultants.

McKinsey had to pay a settlement for their role in the opioid crisis. It’s very possible this will lead to some kind of tragedy related to Bayer medications which will also find McKinsey at fault for their horrible advice.

Theres nothing criminal about bad advice. McKinsey's problem with the opioid crisis was that they were advising Purdue to commit crimes.

Ah yes, McKinsey, notable experts in decentralized organization and anarchist decision-making practices - although I suppose they make it up as they go along with everything else, so why not this, too.

although I suppose they make it up as they go along

Well, that sort of fits with a lack of organization.

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I wonder if it's the same consultant he hired into the company as the organizational coach for this shuffle.

What under if McKinsey will start pushing this at other orgs?

It's basically what tech has been doing for a while. Or at least a derivation of it. Agile, self-managed team, "retrospectives", "scrums".

At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had the same change not long ago.

"This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you want to be innovative like Google?"

Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.

My company just called the managers, “product owners”, and the project managers, “scrum masters”, and said we were now Agile and doing Scrum. Nothing about it was self-managed. We haven’t had a retrospective in 3 years, despite my insistence that we desperately need them.

Huh, my company pushed the Agile/scrum/retrospective thing at the same time as talking about "fit for purpose" teams that would be formed based on need/skills, not the old structure (this team works on this only). Since specific teams were now gone, less need for managers.

The idea was agile/scrum/retros was a way to manage the "fluidity".

This is not at all what Google does, though.

It is, however, what Google tried.

https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

One could also argue that Google by and large doesn't innovate, they mostly acquire the innovative stuff.

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