McKinsey makes something like 10 billion annually in revenue. This is a slap on the wrist. People need to be held accountable for these misdeeds.
Unlike in a tech company where the whole company is building a product, consulting companies are thousands of teams doing projects in a small isolated bubble.
What generates that? How much of it is consulting?
Let's assume 2,000 working hours per year, 80% utilization at $150/hr, and 40,000 employees (worldwide) — that's $9.6B.
- Executives want to do cross-functional changes. (E.g., introduce new ERP software)
- External ruthless assessment of head count and subsequent slashing.
- Body leasing. (quasi-employees that are not on the books as employees)
Mostly in medium-sized and larger orgs where there’s too much cruft.
"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].
More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.