It's funny reading comment here saying how "Consulting is useless BS" whilst also condemning them for "turbocharging Opioid sales"
There is a less contradictory note of "Consulting is useless BS" and "Shame on them for taking dirty money".
McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
41–50 of 572 posts
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#42I hope they also fire everyone involved and substract the money directly from each partner compensation. That will maybe teach a lesson to a whole generation. Okay, naive, wishful thinking.
That is, by the nature of a partnership, how it affects partner compensation.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#43Too 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.
It's a lot more than that. It's about further enabling power structures at the client organization while diminishing employee and other "lower classes" negotiation and influence possibilities. In essence, it's a turbo-charged manager service, where you pay a flat fee to someone to represent your interest. The fee is high, but for it you buy more loyalty, a deadline to the relationship and avoid labor disputes, employee rights lawsuits, etc.
"Your interest" as in whoever pays the check. This service is immensely valuable to stakeholders, otherwise they would not continuously pay for it. A career manager at a company will have much more complexity in interests and loyalties as opposed to a consultant hired by a single, at the end of it, actor (whoever controls the signing and payment process).
Let's take a typical employee manager loyalty conundrum, pick one: loyal to the CEO, your boss, the shareholders at large, a specific shareholder group, the board? They often have different interests, and recruit or are looking to recruit agents for them. For the consultant? Whoever pays!
I found the book "Confronting managerialism: How the business elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance" by Locke and Spencer quite useful to understand some of the realities at play (not specifically consulting, but the broader managerial and by application consulting manager roles).
If leaders keep hiring consultants, there is value for them. This does not mean value for the organization. Most certainly, not for society at large, as the parent article can demonstrate.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Articles like https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/business/mckinsey-purdue-... have some details. A quote from that shows some details :- " In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they so…
Many thanks; an informative read. FWIW I've just come across a related piece in Jacobin from December 2020:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/mckinsey-consulting-firm-opio...
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#45It's funny reading comment here saying how "Consulting is useless BS" whilst also condemning them for "turbocharging Opioid sales"
There is a less contradictory note of "Consulting is useless BS" and "Shame on them for taking dirty money".
A $500MM fine is a bit beyond "shame on you for taking dirty money".
I doubt any marketing firms working for Purdue was fined $500MM despite contributing to the same outcome. And that's because they didn't have the same impact.
The justice system metes out punishment relative to one's contribution to the crime.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem are not MBA's. The problem is that the incentive of consulting companies are not aligned with the incentive of their clients. Take a big construction project. In the like of the Berlin airport. What do you think is more profitable for the consulting companies : a) A well thought project, done in budget and in time. Where the consulting company gets the whole contract + all the bonuses associated with it.…
Yes, and I agree with all the child comments. The principal-agent cost with consulting firms is enormous. In the most uncharitable light, their business model is a wealth transfer insofar as their profit derives directly from maximizing this cost.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#47It's interesting because McK is a club, not a company. They are a relatively disparate group of people operating on the basis of culture, it's not top down.
Some partners can go way off the reservation compared to others, and they may have little to do with one another.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#48Too 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 problem with this is we don't (and one presumes you don't either) know whether you're above or below average. My perspective, from running into people from Big Computer consultancies back in the '00s was that the business model was to hire recent college grads, pump them up with the sheen of the company brand and then let them learn on the job at smaller companies and "failing upward" until they are experienced enough to be loaned out at massive rates based on their long track record of . . . success. Whether any customer during that process benefited from the consultant's journey is mere coincidence.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a less contradictory note of "Consulting is useless BS" and "Shame on them for taking dirty money".
A $500MM fine is a bit beyond "shame on you for taking dirty money". I doubt any marketing firms working for Purdue was fined $500MM despite contributing to the same outcome. And that's because they didn't have the same impact. The justice system metes out punishment relative to one's contribution to the crime.
The fine seems related to the amount of damning quotes that came from McKinsey produced materials. They left a bigger paper trail than anyone else.
Like this sort of thing:
"One was to give distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold. The slides are notable for their granular detail.
For example, McKinsey estimated that 2,484 CVS customers would overdose or develop an opioid use disorder in 2019 from taking OxyContin. CVS said the plan was never implemented."
Not implemented, so didn't end up being effective. But damn.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#50The 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.
What? Lawyers are absolutely liable. Their only shield is in the most complex realms where the actual legal theory isn't yet tested in court / with a regulator, so you know going in their advice may not pan out, because it's /experimental/.
That's not the vast majority of law, though.