McKinsey Under Criminal Investigation over Opioid-Related Consulting | Hacker News Reader

McKinsey Under Criminal Investigation over Opioid-Related Consulting

wsj.com

418 pointsimpish9208158 comments

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for McKinsey. They’ve gone from scandal to scandal over the last 10 years or so and their once vaunted reputation is now in shambles. They deserve whatever is coming to them here. There are certainly some decent folks that have passed through McKinsey but the firm is, ironically, in desperate need of some good advice on how to run a company.

Enron didn't kill Arthur Anderson. Nothing is going to kill McKinsey. They're too intertwined with powerful people.

What? Enron DID kill Arthur Anderson. They completely collapsed in mid 2002, right after Enron. They were also big players in the WorldCom collapse, so that contributed as well.

The corporate entity collapsed, but the consulting business continued at Accenture (and notably BearingPoint, among others), and substantial portions of the accounting business survives to this day as Andersen Tax and a few spinoff firms founded by ex-partners.

The only reason we haven't "another Enron" is because of Sarbanes-Oxley, not because Arthur Andersen was sufficiently destroyed.

Your chronology is incorrect.

- Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting split in 1989. It was an acrimonious divorce, with a long arbitration settlement finally concluding on 1 Jan 2000.

- That settlement gave AA exclusive use of the Andersen name. So Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture on 1 Jan 2000.

- Enron collapsed in 2001 and Arthur Andersen went out of business in 2002.

So it's not accurate to say that AA's consulting business continued at Accenture; the split happened a decade earlier.

Nah, they are now Accenture

Nope, Accenture split from Arthur Andersen 13 years earlier, in 1989.

See my other comment.

This is fundamentally different. Arthur Anderson was an auditing firm and did accounting. Their selling point was to be the "source of truth" for their client's books. What's that confidence is lost, then no one would hire them for their work. McKinsey, as a management consultancy, doesn't have to be a "source of truth" and offers perspective, which can be neither right or wrong. Management makes decisions on if they want to take McKinsey's advice or not.

Nop. That's not going to happen. They will continue to thrive. And such criminal investigations mean more businesses will avail their services. Recently, RedHat hired McKinsey to streamline Techies jobs: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/red_hat_hires_mckinse...

Yeah, I wasn't at Red Hat for overly long, but you could feel Big Blue's MBAs slowly tightening their grip, bringing in McKinsey wasn't RH culture, but it is IBM culture.

Poor Hashicorp

Indeed.

They're meta-managers; if the C-suite has a high-stakes business decision they can't afford to screw up, they call McKinsey. Or Bain. Or BCG.

The big draw isn't McKinsey's perfection; it's the C-suite anxiety and absence of anything better. If you want to drive a stake through the heart of management consulting, knock the C-suite down a peg so they lose their god complex, or come up with a business model better than McKinsey's for enabling business outcomes. Neither has happened in 50 years, or will, so no, it's not the end for Mckinsey. Nor is it business as usual.

In my experience, this rationale is absolutely not why McKinsey is hired.

One of the most important roles that McKinsey can take is a third party willing to provide cover. E.g. often times a CEO hires McKinsey to rubber stamp a decision he's already made. Let's say the CEO wants to have a big layoff to boost profits (at least in the short term). Hiring McKinsey basically provides a veneer of objectivity, and within the org, McKinsey can help deflect some of the blame ("Man this sucks, can you believe that McKinsey!")

Mostly this - McKinsey isn't hired to bring in a unique perspective, they're hired to paper up a decision that the person hiring McKinsey wants to make. They charge a pound of flesh and give you a pile of research saying this is how to accomplish your goal, not here are the goals you should have considered.

Yes, I've seen the silly caricature videos. The consultant strenuously begging the CEO for the preferred answer at the start of the engagement.

But ask yourself-- how does seeking confidential advice, disclosed to no one outside the C-suite accomplish a supposed blame-avoidance function?No, a simpler explanation is that the executives spotted a key business decision coming up and to get the decision right they call their figurative B-school professors for advice. Their genuine advice, which you can of course criticize on the merits.

In a world that earned your personal experience, where this instead was a cynical exercise in posturing, first, what an odd way to kick off a cost-cutting initiative, and second, where are all the news release announcing that McKinsey told businesses X, Y and Z to conduct layoffs to boost profits? I just googled it-- the only announcents are McKinsey's own layoffs. The engagements certainly don't appear designed to shift blame. That leaves the uncomfortable possibility that the recipients of this advice, for reasons you don't understand actually value it and want to know what the management consultants have to say.

> how does seeking confidential advice, disclosed to no one outside the C-suite accomplish a supposed blame-avoidance function?

Why do you seem to think this is the norm?

Well ...

"For 92 years, the firm has held fast to the dictum of never disclosing names of clients or the advice it gives. We were intrigued by a company that seemed to be everywhere — and nowhere at the same time."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/reader-center/mckinsey-he...

What makes you think the firm would allow clients to advertise its name or advice in any way?

> What makes you think the firm would allow clients to advertise its name or advice in any way?

You've got it backwards. McKinsey itself doesn't disclose their clients or their advice, but their clients are, AFAIK, under no such obligation. More to the point, it's not so much about broadcasting to the rest of the world, it's about giving cover internally within a huge enterpise that "hey, we're just following McKinsey's advice", and certainly nearly everyone internally knows that McKinsey is involved.

Criminal case? Been there, done that. - McKinsey, probably.

2022 - McKinsey Charged in South African Corruption Case

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/world/africa/mckinsey-cor...

On the contrary, this just affirms their value-add.

As a decision maker, the reason you would outsource decision-making to 23-year old PowerPoint kids is so you aren’t responsible for the consequences of your actions.

“Darn, that strategy ended up killing people?? Too bad evil McKinsey told me to do that! I’m just a lowly corporate officer. I wouldn’t have killed all those people if they didn’t show us those PowerPoint slides! I got duped like the rest of you!”

[goes home and counts money]

And it's even easier to displace or misplace blame when you control the state-funded media in Canada - like CBC getting $1.6 billion annually, and the other popular channels getting $600 million annually distributed amongst them.

As much as I'd love you to be wrong, you're not. There's this common saying among executives: "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM". Here IBM can be replaced by any of the big five and it'll still work.

In management consulting it's big 3 (Bain, BCG, McK) but same sentiment

Reminds me of "What people really want from the automated adding machine is not more accurate sums, but a box into which they may place their responsibility."

So McKinsey is the first company replaced by AI. Exchanging a few billion dollars of bad advice with a ChatGPT subscription.

The problem with that is ChatGPT has some safety constraints. McKinsey is scum of the earth and has no morals or ethics.

On the contrary, McKinsey can also service as an abstraction between the customer and AI. The customer gets two layers of removal from any real responsibility for the price of one.

That service is being provided by “AI” now. “It was't us, the AI made that decision!”

Their attribution on that? Love to know if there were shades of this realization in Babbage's time.

Reminds me of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schie%C3%9Fbefehl

We already have all the tools we need to attack and destroy any corporate officer who does such a thing. But we also have a rigged, corrupt legal system.

It’s exactly the same phenomena at play like after S.A.C. was found guilty of insider trading / or trading with a black edge Point72 (the successor brand) is more popular than ever with capital allocators. Funny how the world works.

McKinsey is also very involved in french scandals. There's many investigations in France about corruption with Macron and his close associates. More recently, the Atos scandal (going from 7B€ valuation to 230m€ in a few years) also has McKinsey involved: french newspaper Blast claims they received over 150M€ in consulting fees.

I just read their "Controversies" section on Wikipedia and i still can't believe you can go to jail for selling weed and these people walk free (and rich):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey#Controversies

Their Alumni have infested many big corps now, including Sundar Pichai who rules Google.

Having known a McKinsey consultant in the past, my general heuristic is that everything negative reported in the media about it is completely true, along with a heap of insider trading and conflict of interest that doesn’t get reported in the media.

100%

Anecdata: the two ex-McKinsey people I've worked with were both decent.

I have skepticism of management consulting in general, and concern about the opioid thing, but I don't want people lumped in with that undeservedly.

Nah at this point, if you are willing to sign on with a company like McKinsey it suggests you have absolutely no moral compass. What they do is very well understood.

I'm guessing that, today, the opioid thing might've really changed how people think of it, and maybe even the undergrads who get targeted for recruitment will have heard of it.

That's fairly recent, though.

How about being called out for targeting the brutal murder of Jamāl Aḥmad Khāshqujī?

They play ball with all sorts of shitty regimes (including the united states) McKinsey has way more crimes than the opioid epidemic.

The Wikipedia article on McKinsey is over half just discussing various controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver...

This is a company that has fueled (among other things) the Enron scandals, opioid epidemic, Saudi repression of dissidents.

Some of this is--as a big consulting company--it has its hands in a lot of things, so some of those things are bound to be unpleasant. But it's also clear that there doesn't appear to be much of an ethical filter for what work it takes on. I honestly would be more surprised at this point if McKinsey hasn't helped plan out a genocide.

> ex-McKinsey

so the ones that left?

McKinsey's MO is to have consultants work for a few years and then become "Alumni" who work for real companies and/or become secretaries of transportation where they can hire McKinsey to screw more things up. This is the reason the consultants are almost entirely in their mid-20s.

"are almost entirely in their mid-20s"

Probably a lot easier to keep their salaries relatively low as well?

The entry-level McKinsey consultants that I know began at $250,000/year; they didn't have other places they could get those size offers. Maybe $180-200 at most, if they could wrangle a high-value position at a startup. I'm sure the salaries have only increased since then.

My own anecdata: the (also two) ex-McKinsey people I've known seemed reasonably decent people at heart, but both possessed a toxic combination of:

(1) being absolutely intoxicated by their own old-money-fueled prestige academic/career path, which gave them a

(2) vastly overrated sense of their own knowledge, ability, wisdom, capability, importance, and general superiority to anyone not in possession of these stellar academic/prestige institutional credentials which was

(3) completely unfounded in every way.

I'm no longer impressed by Ivy League or any of these prestige institutional credentials.

I worked hard and got into one of these prestigious universities for my Masters, but grew up lower-middle class, on the countryside, in a not very healthy environment.

Having seen it first-hand, I can only agree. There's so much privilege at these institutions, it's almost sickening sometimes. I don't want to throw everyone in one pot, there's certainly genuine, decent people there. But there is so much self-importance and arrogance floating around, and just this casual and unquestioned attitude of superiority.

What I do want to say is that pretty much everyone I met there had a base-level above average smartness and/or work ethic. But I also mostly hung out with STEM people. Didn't get to know many managerial or related types.

Sorta like tech companies these days.

There’s some agreement among historians that education above a bachelors was started as a payola scheme between the church and landed gentry to buy their kids “advanced” credentials so they could be middle managers still not worker class.

We do love to keep our historical memes alive despite the economy having nothing to do with them. Physical statistics are what keep enough TP and food on shelves so the people do not riot.

Not an endorsement for Mentava, but there’s an indictment of our education system when their program is resulting in kids being fluent in AP math by 5th grade (or so they claim): http://mentava.com

Where are they claiming AP math by 5th grade? I seem them saying algebra by 5th grade, which is a far cry from, say, AP Precalculus let alone AP Calculus AB or AP Statistics.

My daughter was considering a McKinsey gig. A friend from Booth said "You can maintain your integrity at McKinsey, but McKinsey won't help."

I hear their pay is pretty well. Integrity and ethics are fair weather phenomenon even at the most respected of world's companies. I am not saying integrity is not important, but it's not what makes the economy and humans tick.

Speak for yourself.

I work there. One thing I appreciate is full leeway to decline any work assignment for ethical reasons. I was asked to do something in Saudi Arabia. I said no. Perfectly fine.

I sure wish the rest of the firm made the same choice. But it’s a decentralized company with partners doing their own thing in their own corners. If you want to work on green energy, are you accountable for the folks doing Chinese mining? Or German agriculture? Or American pharma? I’d say it’s ambiguous at best. It’s not like working for a tech product where, say, the QA team for Facebook is still actively enabling Facebook.

> but are these numbers better than a human driver

so how many unethical projects can you decline before they fire you? Also hypothetically, what would they do if every one refused (eg:projects like the opiod one)?

An example of this is MarketDial vs. APT (Applied Predictive Technologies). Apparently APT brought in McKinsey for something and one of the McKinsey consultants quit to start MarketDial, which is a direct competitor to APT. That said, from what I have seen all of the court cases against MarketDial have been dismissed, so who knows what the truth is.

> McKinsey also advised Purdue and Endo on how to target the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for sales of their products, according to documents made public through the firm’s settlements with state and local governments. This advisory work occurred while McKinsey was simultaneously working as a consultant for the VA itself. McKinsey has said that it advised the VA on matters unrelated to opioid procurement.

Conflicts of interest are rife in utilising these consulting companies for government services.

Australia has an ongoing saga with a similar theme[1], where a consulting company, PwC, played both sides to the advantage of corporate friends, and got caught.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal

The VA and VA healthcare are somewhat separate but they are in a unique position to be able to detect something along the lines of, "Given an increase in opioid prescriptions what is the relative increase in homelessness and substance use disorder services saught by members."

I also have a somewhat petty comment to make while juxtaposing this with this: https://www.publichealth.va.gov/marijuana.asp

It’s a federal law and the VA is a federal agency. What would you propose? VA offers multiple “edgy” therapies like ketamine therapy but there’s just no room for that for MJ.

Don’t like the law? Lobby to change it.

Also, frankly I’ve worked in states with legal and not legal status and nobody really cares. Maybe the pencil pushers and disability raters are different. Don’t know.

This discussion is much larger than these comments but ultimately my point is the VA should absolutely never ever ever decide to become a legislative branch. God help us if the VA becomes some quasi chevron deference pretend legislative arm of the federal government and decides to interpret and/or disregard federal laws.

Kind of an aside, but it takes a lot of energy to respond to rants like this. Maybe that's on me, but if you're a vet then I'd assume you'd know how difficult it is to get anything changed at the VA much less lobbying to change an incorrectly scheduled drug.

What my point was is that it's incredibly hypocritical for the VA to have a history of denying veterans medical care over marijuana and then they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar with McKinsey about opioids - an epidemic that they had plenty of data on from the DOD. When I got out in 2012 the DOD base hospitals were chalk full of addicts that their hospital system had created due to over prescription and then subsequently processing people out. I postured whether they had an even bigger picture because it's also the VAs job to track people when they get out; the exception I made was that healthcare and the VA are somewhat separate but related entities.

I do realize the marijuana policy has changed drastically, but it's not reason to forget the last decade.

It's a dirty secret in a lot of governments that internal expertise has been systematically swapped out for consultants to ever increasing levels for decades. They allow governments to "move quickly" and "act strategically", which pretty much always means ignore those pesky regulations or people who are employed in a specific way to not face political reprisal for telling politicians that their idea/plan is bad or wrong-headed. The Canadian government has had bad PR lately for the same reasons. Whole parts of the civil service are infested with consultants who have produced not much of anything useful, yet extracted enormous fees.

I strongly suspect that weaseling their way into government agencies and then using that to launder influence over the bureaucracy is a key selling point for management consultants.

Regulatory capture as a service.

Serving both sides is expected by all parties. Failure to implement internal firewalls like in this PWC example is a serious failure of internal controls.

Exactly. It's the risk management system that a company implements. Tech companies also serve customers who are in competition with each other. No company is above this. It's all about how you handle these tricky situations. I have yet to see concrete evidences saying that the internal firewall was breached. I'll wait and see.

Highly recommend reading “When McKinsey Comes to Town” for a close look at decade after decade of malfeasance.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...

Another related case in Pennysylvania:

https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/ag-shapiro-put...

Quote from the website:

"The complaint, filed along with the settlement, details how McKinsey advised Purdue and other opioid manufacturers on how to maximize profits from its opioid products, including targeting high-volume opioid prescribers, using specific messaging to get physicians to prescribe more OxyContin to more patients, and circumventing pharmacy restrictions in order to deliver high-dose prescriptions. When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue."

> When states began to sue Purdue’s directors for their implementation of McKinsey’s marketing schemes, McKinsey partners began emailing about deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue.

Isn't that the assumption of guilt and if the documents are lost the worst can be taken from them?

Considering they have already paid out close to $1B to settle various other claims…

>McKinsey previously paid $641.5 million to resolve claims by state attorneys general and another $230 million to resolve claims by local governments. It has also settled cases by Native American tribes.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/mckinsey-pay-78-million-us-opi...

… I’m going to assume this won’t go well for them either.

I hope this leads to an expanded investigation against all the other harmful advice they’ve unleashed on the world. This firm should not be sitting in the trusted position they are in.

> trusted position they are in.

Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South? "We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defence we did specifically check with McKinsey and they said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us".

No one ever got fired for hiring a consulting firm to check if a potentially risky strategy will make them money.

If it pays off, the fee doesn't matter because we made more money. If it lost money, well we did our due diligence so we were just unfortunate.

But why do we respect that name as a sign off?

What if a CEO said, “We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defense we did specifically check with the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ kid and he said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us".

I don’t find McKinsey any more credible than a child sticking his fingers in the mouth of a baby who is surprised when he gets bit.

It makes me ill writing this, but I believe it is due to the big consulting firms recruiting from elite academic institutions. Our primitive brains ascribe incredible value to institutions of any sort. Not that the universities are bad themselves of course, but that there is a belief in the general public that those graduates are smarter or better.

I think the issue there is that these new grads parachute into companies to advise top level executives, while have no real world experience on how business or people actually are in the real world. A lot of things sound great on paper when learning in the classroom, but don’t play out well in real life.

A consultant position should be one a person earns after spending 20 years in the industry, it is not something anyone should start out as.

Most of the big consultancies are also big accounting firms, where there is a fair amount of incentive for sign-offs to mean something, or at least have some serious risk if that sign-off isn't impartial or well researched.

I believe they try to project some of that earned trust to customers for the consulting side of the house. Though there is little, er, "accountability" for sign offs there.

> Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South?

It's both. There's some expectation that they aren't actively self-dealing... Besides the obvious expectation that they'd love to sell you further services. That's normal and expected, whereas them shilling for their other clients is not.

Sounds like “Poor McKinzey, they have been scammed by their customers!”. No, they have not.

I feel like it's more joint enterprise in scamming everyone else. McKinsey says in writing what the client wants to hear ("poisioning people is just business"), the client gets to claim they were reliably told that poisoning a few million people was very legal and very cool.

"Scapegoat as a service" is my favorite turn of phrase for that.

The problem investigating companies like that is that each law syit only looks at a tiny slice of the committed crimes and can't go look for anything else that's not the topic of the lawsuit. So you basically have to start all over again and hope enough will leak so you can start making a case...

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mckinsey-faces-criminal-probe-o...

https://archive.md/7Fk72

From 2021 when the story got a lot of attention: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/responsibility-clawbacks-mck...

To get quickly up to speed on McKinsey, I would recommend to watch an episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight on the subject: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ

To quickly get up to speed you suggest I watch a 26-minute video?

We have different definitions of the word “quickly.”

Watch it at 1.5x speed then. LWT episodes usually include interview clips and other pieces of media to tell the story. I'd rather see that an zero citation op-ed screed that would be a 5-minute read.

I have no more to say than… good. I’ve been witness first hand of their consulting practices and the aftermath on people’s lives.

The ride never ends.

https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters...

One think I did appreciate about McKinsey is how they will advise anyone. Left-wing dictators, right-wing dictators, normal governments, big tech small tech, banks, you name it.

There is something freeing with "it's just money"... you don't question their political loyalties or how they are affiliated - they don't care, they just want cash.

Unfortunately actually working with them made me realize they are kind of useless and their main value is that they can produce a lot of powerpoint presentations, and eat an infinite amount of money per slide.

In my opinion/experience they are not evil, they are just useless. But YMMV

The core of their mission is making people in responsibility unaccountable. Some government will pay McKinsey to advise them on some brain-dead policy, and when the policy inevitably fails they can say "we consulted the experts and followed their advice", doubled with "every other government followed the same expert advice".

Typical "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM / Microsoft" mindset.

They will pay a fine, which will a miniscule percentage of the profit they got from the work they did regarding OxyContin, nobody will be fired never mind go to prison.

I would be absolutely shocked, if anything other than that happens.

It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that the fines / settlements outweigh the consulting revenue of one project, which was probably staffing 7ish people for several months. I would wager the costs here are over 10-100x the associated revenues.

I guess they were just leveraging synergies between pharma company and pharma regulator. Isn't this all Ivy league management education about.

Every single time I’ve had a frustrating, anti-user experience with a product, it’s tied to some bottomline boosting “optimization” dreamed up by an MBA

MBAs are the worst thing to happen to capitalism, and McKinsey has been at its very forefront

McKinsey should be under criminal investigation for basically everything they do.

It couldn't happen to nicer people. McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate.

> McKinsey resembles a cancer on the body corporate.

So a cancer on a cancer?

Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants.

The losers are only

(a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures.

(b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc.

We should all get MBAs and enjoy the gravy train.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that corporations are an elaborate scheme to provide some people with money and status without them actually providing value to society. Mainly the MBA class. "You know what this rowboat with two people rowing and six managing needs? Another management layer." Leeches like McKinsey are right at the heart of it.

If you add enough indirection and shared responsibility, the most atrocious outcomes become palatable.

Another way to view them, is as slow AIs directly driving the sixth mass extinction event.

As someone who works at McKinsey I get kind of irritated by this meme. It is objectively and obviously not true for external blame because all work by McKinsey is NDA’d. you’re almost never allowed to share that McKinsey helped on anything because we want to maintain firewalls between teams working for competitors / vendors / customers internally and externally as much as possible.

I don’t really buy it for internal blame either.

I thought the advice was NDA'd to hide the fact that exactly the same advice was being sold to different organisations?

No, not at all. It should not surprise anyone that hiring the same people to solve the same problem at different places will result in similar outcomes frequently.

Having the same project name and having pretty much the same materials with different customer names was apparently a bit of a give away...

I’m not clear what you mean by project name. Perhaps you mean “product” name? In which case… well yeah. Of course.

I have several decades of experience as a software engineer and have worked at several different companies that hired management consultants to rubber stamp decisions they had clearly already made. In each case, the company proceeded to deflect blame to the consultants internally, when employees got mad about the decisions. I have heard similar stories from friends and colleagues. So at least your skepticism about internal blame is unfounded.

I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.

Are you sure your experience really maps to McKinsey? There are countless garden-variety Office Space bean counter management consultancies that are called in as RIF shock troops etc. My experience with McKinsey is them being strategic consultants to C-suite where nobody is looking to "shift blame" or a docile rubber stamp. They're far too expensive if that's what you're looking for.

I don't recall if my experiences involved McKinsey or not. I do understand that not everyone looking for a rubber stamp needs to involve a firm as expensive as McKinsey, however I disagree with the general assertion that they're always too expensive for this.

If there are very large amounts of money or very risky behavior involved (e.g. behavior that could trigger an investigation by a government agency), it's sometimes worth paying for the best of the best, so you can avoid any questions along the lines of "why did you use JoeSchmoe's RubberStampsRUs Consulting, when you could have used one of the big firms?"

I can’t guarantee that my experience scales to the entire firm but this doesn’t really resonate. I’ve never come into a project with a day one answer. I think the archetypal example of what you describe is organizing layoffs, in which case the company needs to shed heads and needs to know where it can do so. Which is sort of a day one answer. I’ve never touched this sort of thing Personally.

I’m not sure who the rubber stamp would be for either. Your subordinates I guess? But that seems not particularly important tbh.

I'll just reiterate what I said above, I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.

I’d rather work on something I believe to be good at a big decentralized company like McKinsey than something like what many / most large tech companies do. There’s basically no relationship to the other parts of the firm

Sure, I get that it's a big company and that not everything it does involves selling people dangerous drugs that ruined their lives [1], while simultaneously consulting for the government regulators that regulated those drug companies [2], or aiding government corruption [3], or assisting dictators with their assassinations of pesky journalists [4]. But it's all the same company. I wouldn't want to work for big tech either, but to imply that McKinsey can be better than them in _any way_ is completely laughable.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/25/politics/mckinsey-justice-dep...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1126202801/mckinsey-consultin...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/world/africa/mckinsey-cor...

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-...

When I worked with McKinsey folks (in a group directly under a C-suite who was ex-McKinsey themselves), it seemed pretty clear that for mega-large companies, external consultants can call shots and "get things done" because they don't have to "play politics" and are thus "objective" and thereby, weirdly, more loyal to the company's mission ... than its own employees.

It's pretty wild to watch the McKinsey folks break out their lexicon of mental tools and jargon, "design thinking" etc, and often pretty nauseating. But ultimately, it's the fault of big organizations being pathetically ineffective that they write the big checks to McKinsey and others.

McKinsey in particular seems to have done a good job projecting themselves as the "strategic" folks in these strategy groups that advise the top brass, pilot innovation groups etc. The other big consultancies seem to specialize differently, for instance Accenture I associate with big ERP integrations and such.

Mostly accurate. Big expensive C suite mandated consulting group can make things happen when the org is so shibari’d in its own red tape that it can’t do anything. That is the number one reason to hire a consulting team.

The projecting thing is, imo, not about optics. It’s just a different product. Accenture is a body shop. McKinsey is mostly just getting a strategy done. It’s transparent in both firms marketing and proposals.

Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

The suspicions of the working man's least favorite firm appear to in the process of confirmation. Now the naked ambition of capitalism's worst impulses must fester elsewhere.

Good.

I think wsj started blocking anyone that uses bypass paywall, anyone got archives of this yet?

Also, previously on HN:

> Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

WTF YIKES

Wow, that explains a lot

Ah. Explains why Google quietly dropped their "Don't be evil" I guess..

I am fairly certain Google never truly took that motto to heart to begin with.

Not only this opiod thing but this McKinsey outfit has singlehandedly responsible for Canada's recent immigration policy which many regard as failure with a strangely generous contract awarded by Trudeau

It's rather bizarre to hand off key policies such as immigration to a foreign consulting company, one which is controversial enough.

Quick search..

Trudeau government had spent $66 million on sole-sourced McKinsey contracts since coming to power in 2015... under the Liberals McKinsey contracts have “exploded” by a factor of 30, according to Radio-Canada. This is particularly true at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, where insiders have fingered McKinsey with designing the Trudeau government’s policy of dramatically ramping up immigration to unprecedented levels.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-the-la...

8M per year is not very much

People commit murder over far far less

… sure? But my point is that this is not a lot of work.

I find the claim that it had exploded 30x to be almost impossible. Because you will struggle to do a single McKinsey project for 1/30th of 8M.

You took the 66M and ammortized it annually, which backed you into the "You can't hire McKinsey for 1/30th of $8M" corner. The orignal source is trivial to find, and makes the calculation using total amounts during the respective terms.

> In the nine years of the Harper government, McKinsey was awarded $2.2 million in federal contracts. During Trudeau's seven years in office, the company has received $66 million from the federal government.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1946212/the-value-of...

Ok sure. Shrug. It’s still not a very large figure. 8M per year is small.

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