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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

#51

Post by peteretep »

arethuza wrote: post #32
curiousllama wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you can show negligence

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

#52

Post by bob33212 »

klmadfejno wrote: post #39
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…

In other words your clients have incompetent executives and instead of suggesting those people be replaced you do their work for them since they are the ones paying your fees.

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

#53

Post by asjldkfin »

tyingq wrote: post #49
asjldkfin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not how justice works; damning quotes determine guilt; not the magnitude of guilt.

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

#56

Post by kumarvvr »

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 heard somewhere that one of the reasons consultants are brought in, even if the business owners know what to do, is to shift the blame to them. As in, its their idea, we are following the experts.

Not sure how right it is.

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

#57

Post by Terretta »

klmadfejno wrote: post #39
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…

You at your years-of-experience most likely don’t yet find it painful to learn.

The folks with one to three decades more time at bat who are hiring you most likely do find learning and change literally painful. Not because of age, but because of “number of trials” at the change experiment, where often someone gets burned.

Reading, learning, thinking differently, hurts the ego, as it makes clear you were less informed before, and puts you on unknown ground where you don’t know if you’re failing or not. This is hard for a lot of people, ironically especially hard for folks who started out as high performers in spaces with “known knowns” knowledge available (aka, school and textbooks, where learning isn’t an ego problem, it’s expected that you didn’t know).

You haven’t yet developed the instinct to yank your hand off the stove, and you don’t have to stick around long to see if your hand gets burned anyway, so you’re valuable to these folks.

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

#58

Post by andreilys »

klmadfejno wrote: post #39
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…

”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”

It seems more likely that it’s a politically expedient way to get cover for a decision (in other words CYA insurance). If the plan fails, blame the consultants. If it works, take credit for having brought them in. It also puts more pressure on exec to make a decision (we just spent $10M on this strategy plan, are we really going to it on it?). It’s genius, if it didn’t highlight the utter dysfunction of a firm.

McKinsey scandals also aren’t confined to Opiod work. It’s also been involved with Enron, corruption in Africa, peddling of mortgage backed securities during ‘07-‘08 crisis and I’m sure many more that they’ve done a great job at hiding from the public.

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

#59

Post by tfehring »

tclancy wrote: post #48
klmadfejno wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Honestly my impression is that management consultants don’t need to be above average to add value, they (or more accurately, the people who implement their recommendations) just need to be empowered to actually do stuff. The recruiting from top schools is primarily because the people hiring them want to think their problems are hard and unique (that’s why they need consultants!) and therefore necessitate the best and brightest.

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

#60

Post by Terretta »

andreilys wrote: post #58
klmadfejno wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

”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” It seems more likely that it’s a politically expedient way to get cover for a decision (in other words CYA insurance). If the plan fails, blame the consultants. If it works, take credit for having brought them in. It also puts more pressure on e…

Exactly. I called this “decision insurance” elsewhere in this comments section.
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