A slap on the hand.
McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
71–80 of 572 posts
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#72Too 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…
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Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#73Too 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…
I'm fairly sure it's much easier to teach engineers how to business than it is to teach MBAs how to engineer.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except there is, a negotiation is based on the next best alternative; which is the legal system.
Mcks wouldn’t have settled for that much if they thought they’d fare better in court.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#75Earlier 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…
I'm not sure what a big computer consultancy is. Is that like IBM? Accenture? I don't think where I fall in the ranks matters much here.
Loaned out doesn't feel applicable here though. There are some consultancies that are primarily just staff augmentation. Like, here are some expensive workers for you to use for a while. That's not really what McK does. McK is doubtlessly very expensive. "pumping people up on the job" sounds like a bad faith way to describe training and investing in your employees.
I don't have a way to "prove" that the average net impact of McK consulting is positive, and for sure sometimes it won't be right. My only point is that most if not all of the clients I work with are blunt about not knowing how to do X on their own, and when we're done with the project they say they know how to do X. We do fixed price contracts, not per hour, and are incentivized to keep the scope fixed. Our prices are generally higher than competitors, but we still win bids. I don't need to believe McK is the greatest company in the world, but I strongly disagree that we're not making a good faith effort to help clients do things.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#76Less than 5% of their revenue. I'm sure they learned their lesson.
Almost as if crime does pay.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#77Too 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.
I don't think consulting is useless or scammy, but come on, you're not rock stars. Consultants advise a business on how to get revenue, and the business implements changes that generate revenue. This leads to the headline we have before us. There's not much more to consulting. Note: my family are consultants.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
”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.
Such business should, you know, bring in leaders who can improve their business. Or train their leaders via executive MBA programs (there are so many). McK touts as being able to transform businesses but all they will do is add more costs and send in clueless consultants who your employees will somehow have to try and get along with.
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#79The 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’…
Are they actually legally liable in this case or just paying a settlement to get their name out of the press and get away cleanly from the issue?
Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a negotiated settlement, there weren't any pre-set rules on how the amount was agreed upon.
Except there is, a negotiation is based on the next best alternative; which is the legal system. Mcks wouldn’t have settled for that much if they thought they’d fare better in court.
They didn't want it in court because it would have made a documented legal precedent around liability.
"One former partner called the settlement hugely significant because it shatters the distance that McKinsey — which argues that it only makes recommendations — puts between its advice and its clients’ actions. For decades, the firm has avoided legal liability for high-profile failures of some clients, including the energy company Enron and Swissair, Switzerland’s defunct national airline."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids...