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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards.

The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife still feels bad for it but still…

Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.

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I don't care if you went to Ivy League and graduated at the top of your class, I really don't get WTF someone whose life experience has been almost exclusively in school really knows running about business.

Get at least a few years work experience and call me. Or alternatively, start your own dang business if you are really that smart.

The whole business is nonsensical. The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain, a recent Harvard grad is useless. From what I've heard, tons of their consultants are young people with minimal real industry experience

You pay for one or two people with real experience and 4 reasonably new hires whose job it is to answer questions posed by the senior team and to build documentation.

You want the senior people focusing on the problems, strategy, and comms and not data aggregation and power point formatting.

Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.

How does this not vindicate their viewpoint? Do you really need a team of ivy grads to make power points or inexperienced people to give unqualified answers?

Modern consulting seems like one of the better deaths inflicted by GenAI. The entire industry is a means to commit corporate espionage legally.

They can do something more useful with that education.

>Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.

It's much easier to feel good about a decision if you can get some McKinsey people to hold your hand and tell you it will be ok while making it.

They have a brutal up or out culture. The idea is that the recent grads are grunts who are ground into the dirt. They actively hope that most of them quit and the few who don't get promoted into positions where they do have the experience, or really, one very specific type of experience that consultancy firms select for. Similar setup to Big Law.

The Partner is the consultant. The 'recent grad' is just extra low-cost apprenticeship for the partner. The customer is (ridiculously over-) paying for the Partner's time and tolerating the apprentices that come along for the ride.

> The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain

This is your mistake. The point of a consultant is to tell the business to do what the business was already planning to do anyway. This way the consultant takes the risk/blame of the decision. It's similar to the classic 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM' "I did what the McKinsey consultant told me" is CYA. The last piece is that since everyone is in on the game, when a decision leads to bad outcomes they don't blame the consultant, but something they could not have foreseen.

This is specifically addressed in the article. At minimum reality seems to be more complicated than this.

It usually is. But simple tropes sell well.

There's a cycle to one's relationship with Mckinsey and the big accounting firms. You start with a lot of attention from the partner, who over time shifts you to more experienced assistants, who over time shift you to new hires. Then you scream at them about the shit quality of their work, and you get the partner's attention again for a year or two.

You don't seem to understand how consulting works.

The person making the recommendations isn't just out of school. They've been at the firm for years, and do have a ton of experience.

The recent grads are there for all of the grunt work -- collecting massive amounts of data and synthesizing it. You don't need years of business experience for that, but getting into a top college and writing lots of research papers in college is actually the perfect background for that.

Having worked at Mck, what I could very well imagine happened behind the scenes here was

1. This BA/Asc was on <4 hours of sleep, maybe many days in a row

2. They walked into that meeting thinking they had completed exactly what the client (your wife) wanted

And after the meeting (this I feel more confident about, as it happens a lot)

1. A conversation happened to see if the BA/Asc wanted to stay on the project

2. They said yes, and the leadership decided that the best way to make this person feel safe was to always have a more experienced person in the room to deal with hiccups (in this case, the perception of low quality work)

Isn't that... good? What else would you expect

Genuinely funny. Had to once interface with a small team from Deloitte on a project, and pushed hard during an early meeting for them to outline the problems and scope. Just complete incompetence... I didn't make anyone cry, but definitely squirm a lot. Just asking questions about their understanding, process to close gap of understanding, and project management plans were enough to make clear to the main executive stakeholder on our end that this was going to be a trainwreck. They were fired shortly after.

> Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.

Why would they fire him after a singe incident?

Sounds like McKinsey is a more companionate organization than you, and that's saying something:)

That's what I thought. Having the partner present seems to be the right way of handling this. The company is responsible for employees well-being and shouldn't let a client bullying them.

Client bullying?

Saying the works sucks isn't bullying, unless you didn't know you were incompetent.

We weren't in the meeting, but if the person cried, there's a possibility that the person was actually bullied. If the work sucks, it can be discussed outside of the meeting with the person's manager for instance. It's not because the person works for McKinsey and is an inexperienced ivy league graduate that it's ok to be mean.

McKinsey employees are people too

Are you genuinely surprised they dis not fired him for a single incident?

McKinsey (or Boston, or any of their peers...) happily recommends firing hundreds or thousands of people for any vague reason each time time are brought for an "optimization process".

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