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McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

reuters.com

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Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#31

Post by hirple »

the_drunkard wrote: post #9

McKinsey or its partners have been directly involved in Enron, Valeant, and now an opioid crisis that's claimed thousands (if not millions of lives). "In for a penny, in for a pound" - this should be McKinsey's new corporate slogan. Valeant article: https://www.ft.com/content/0bb37fd2-ef63-11e5-aff5-19b4e2536... Enron article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/mar/24/enron.theob...

McKinsey are involved in almost every company in the Fortune 500, and have been for decades.

Of course they're going to be around for almost any given corporate failure.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#32

Post by arethuza »

curiousllama wrote: post #23
sharkweek wrote: post #10

The absolutely most fascinating part of this is learning how McKinsey has long argued that making recommendations that businesses may or may not act on does not create legal liability (until this). I’m trying to see that argument applied in any other instance and it becomes totally ridiculous. “You see, your honor, I merely suggested to my client that he kill his neighbor in order to take his land, I didn’t think he’…

Note that the only other place it works like this law. Lawyers are always "providing advice" about complex legal matters, with no actual responsibility for the outcome (with limited exceptions). So the idea that lawyers would apply similar logic to a reasonably-similar circumstance (in terms of complexity, difficulty, potential liability, etc.) is not unreasonable.

I don't know about the US but lawyers in the UK most definitely have liability for what they recommend - if a lawyer gives me advice that ends up causing me £X because it was legally wrong then I'd have a pretty good case for a claim on their professional indemnity insurance.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#33

Post by rn086 »

samizdis wrote: post #14
onetimemanytime wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, considering the damage they caused this is nothing. They advised on /got and got paid for how to "turbocharge" opioid sales and that tuned out to be an illegal and immoral thing.

I'd be keen to see the specifics wrt advice given on how to "turbocharge" said sales. Reuters article doesn't give any examples/detail.

an article I saw said they targeted outreach at doctors who were more likely to write Rxs

edit: beaten w/ the article

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#34

Post by sudosysgen »

asjldkfin wrote: post #20
frostburg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to do much to be wrong, especially in the context of selling highly addictive drugs.

That's not the point; you can't say their advice is ineffective, while also condemning them for being effective. The top comment derisively states: "The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR" In the context of fining the company $500MM for being too effective. At least in the US, where the punishment is…

I'm not sure there is that much dissonance. In the opioid case, they gave effective advice, but it wasn't necessarily of very high quality - the reason you wouldn't do what McKinsey suggests isn't because you didn't think of it but because you would find immoral and illegal.

The reason McKinsey was being sued isn't because they were giving effective advice, but because it was likely illegal.

Because of this I'd understand that both can be the case. That said, I'm not sure McKinsey is always as ineffective as the top comment suggests.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#35

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

Terretta wrote: post #28
tharne wrote: post #4

Too bad they can't be sued for ruining countless businesses with mindless self-serving "advice" meant to do nothing more than get their contracts re-upped. The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.

Once you realize the game is “management” in collusion on both (a) outsourcing the reading of the HBR articles so they don’t have to, and (b) what I call “decision insurance” (“but our consultants confirmed this made sense!”) so decision accountability is laundered, everything makes much more sense. In mega enterprises the CEO matters a lot, but the next 3 or 4 layers often exist primarily to filter and spin bad news…

> what I call “decision insurance” (“but our consultants confirmed this made sense!”) so decision accountability is laundered, everything makes much more sense.

I hear this all the time but it sounds like an urban myth.

I highly doubt someone is not getting fired because the consultants they hired fucked up. They're still responsible for the business. I think consultants can help more with the "we need to do X, Y, Z" with consultant's report backing it up.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#36

Post by some1else »

asjldkfin wrote: post #20
frostburg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to do much to be wrong, especially in the context of selling highly addictive drugs.

That's not the point; you can't say their advice is ineffective, while also condemning them for being effective. The top comment derisively states: "The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR" In the context of fining the company $500MM for being too effective. At least in the US, where the punishment is…

Their advice was highly effective in bringing the company to bankruptcy, if that's the metric you were aiming for. Aside from destruction of private and public equity.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#37

Post by olsonjeffery »

ath92 wrote: post #22
olsonjeffery wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine stating that engineers from non-elite schools are just as well equipped for the tasks you describe, but that wasn't the GP's contention. The point is that McKinsey make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes. Their fingerprints are all over numerous bad decisions in business and government in the past few decades[0]. These are the bare minimum, because there are quite likely many negative ou…

McKinsey has 27,000 employees. That's the population of an entire town. I'm not saying that the things described in the links you posted here aren't bad, but I think it's important to remember with this many employees, there will always be someone doing something that you don't agree with.

To be clear: Is your assertion that, because these outcomes aren't a deliberate conspiracy, we have to let them happen because of... what, exactly? Whether it's an emergent feature of this style of consulting or a firm consisting of the worst human beings is besides the point.

Elite management consulting firms (McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain, etc) exist to enable the worst impulses of leadership across the spectrum. The ends certainly justify scrutinizing the means.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#38

Post by [deleted] »

alexpetralia wrote: post #7
tharne wrote: post #4

Too bad they can't be sued for ruining countless businesses with mindless self-serving "advice" meant to do nothing more than get their contracts re-upped. The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.

I know it's fashionable to hate on MBAs, but I am not entirely convinced engineers are any better equipped with skills such as: requirements gathering, scoping, presenting, project management, competitive research, financial modeling, memo writing, and strategic planning. I don't believe these are truly vacuous activities, and - loathe as I am to say - MBAs may be the best trained to do this. (Disclosure: I do not ha…

[deleted]

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#39

Post by klmadfejno »

tharne wrote: post #4

Too bad they can't be sued for ruining countless businesses with mindless self-serving "advice" meant to do nothing more than get their contracts re-upped. The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.

I'm a 20 something McK consultant with a $10 haircut. Maybe $20 with tip. Or $0 now, because it's done at home.

I post this fairly frequently, but here we go again. Business is hard. Change is hard. Consultants get a lot of shit for saying things that someone lower in the org could have told them. That's not evidence of abuse, that's evidence that your org isn't working well. A lot of the time substantial portions of the findings come from interviewing and listening to lower ranking experts in the client. Bringing in consultants is, among other ways, a way to bring in people who can get shit done, moving bricks at lower levels of the org with the political mandate of the top. That's quite valuable, because otherwise a lot of orgs are just entrenched. A very large number of senior leaders don't know how to accomplish X, and don't know how to get the information about X from their own company. And again, that's not an insult, because business is hard. It's great and all for you to say "regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR" but I can't say that resembles any work I've done, ever.

Opioid work was bad though, let's not avoid that. (edit for spelling)

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#40

Post by cochne »

asjldkfin wrote: post #20
frostburg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to do much to be wrong, especially in the context of selling highly addictive drugs.

That's not the point; you can't say their advice is ineffective, while also condemning them for being effective. The top comment derisively states: "The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR" In the context of fining the company $500MM for being too effective. At least in the US, where the punishment is…

To play devil's advocate, they could be both ineffective and harmful. Just because they succeeded in getting the company to do something, that not mean it was the right thing. The sale of the drugs could have produced a net loss as well as harmed the people who bought them.
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