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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

#61

Post by tyingq »

asjldkfin wrote: post #53
tyingq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a negotiated settlement, there weren't any pre-set rules on how the amount was agreed upon.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

Terretta wrote: post #57
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by Terretta »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #35
Terretta wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> hear this all the time, sounds like an urban myth

I didn’t hear it. I’ve spent years as an L3 (CEO is L1) of one of the largest enterprises in the free world, interacting with other enterprises at that level, and collaborating with all the top consultancies’ teams that work at that level.

My take is while not always the case, the higher level the committee approving the consulting spend (because even that choice/decision is diffused), the more frequently this is involved.

At the end of the day, the CEO works for the Board, who are external and most definitely do not get paid enough to go to jail. Everyone involved needs decision insurance.

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

#65

Post by andreilys »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #35
Terretta wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

It depends on how much political clout they have.

Redirecting blame is a lot easier when you have an external party. More interestingly though is it forces a conversation/decision on a particular problem, since you’ve already spent exorbitant sum of money on the consulting fees.

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

#66

Post by jvanderbot »

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…

So, does this conflict with the "Bad businesses with bad models are more likely to want help changing" narrative? There's a world in which this squares with McKinsey coming in to help those businesses with the change being pushed on them.

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

#67

Post by wil421 »

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…

Let’s just post these articles here.

> They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.[1]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/mckinsey-ICE-immigrati...

The CEO of Enron was a former McKinsey consultant and helped them transition from an Oil and Gas company. Arthur Anderson was just the firm left holding the bag at the end. [2]

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling

McKinsey helping dictators. [3]

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china...

> On October 20th, the Times reported that the government of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had employed operatives to harass dissidents, including the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on October 2nd. The article included the revelation that McKinsey had prepared a nine-page report measuring the public perception of certain Saudi economic policies, and cited three individuals who were driving much of the largely negative coverage on Twitter: a Saudi Arabia-based writer named Khalid al-Alkami, a dissident living in Canada named Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous writer. After the report was created, Al-Alkami was arrested, and Abdulaziz’s brothers living in Saudi Arabia were put in prison. The anonymous Twitter channel was shut down.[4]

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-...

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

#68

Post by zests »

0goel0 wrote: post #55

Maybe ethics and morals should be mandatory trainings?

I am unconvinced that any mandatory training is useful (ignoring the fact that the act of implementing the training itself is useful to the people who implement the training.)

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

#69

Post by salawat »

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…

The correct term is plausible deniability or indirection of accountability. It's an advanced political maneuver.

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

#70

Post by pm90 »

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…

> Opiod work was bad though, let's not avoid that.

Sorry that’s all you have to say about your employer quite literally supercharging the opioids pandemic causing unimaginable pain and destruction across America? “It was bad though.”

Let me tell you some hard truths. If you’re 20 something you don’t know Jack shit about running a business and the only reason you’re there is because the C Suite wants to “de-risk” their decision making, or the board member heard about McK during golfing with his buddies.

If Senior Leaders can’t do X, they should, you know, get training. Go to online schools, get executive MBA training. Why don’t they do that? Because that’s not really the real reason you’re there.

McK and other consultancies have been a cancer on corporate America, creating chaos in the name of “digital transformation” or whatever buzzword is new. They capitalize on most companies’ fear of being left behind and get inserted into corporations where they make the jobs of regular employees (you know, the people who you went to school with but decided not to go to McK but get a real job and who are familiar with the same types of things that you are) incredibly difficult with inane processes from “the manual”.

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