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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

#91

Post by alisonkisk »

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…

Maybe companies hire MBAs as a perk/morale-booster for the engineers, so they have someone to unite in their hate against and not fight with each other over their failures.

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

#92

Post by aerosmile »

bob33212 wrote: post #52
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…

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.

It's easy to be critical of executives. A naive narrative could sound like this: "Bob was hired to turn the company around, and 3 months later the company is still bleeding money. Bob sucks." But it's important to understand the two difficult tasks that Bob is facing:

1) Identify all mistakes made by the previous management and come up with a plan to correct them.

2) Get buy-in for your plan and execute it.

It might appear that 1) is harder than 2). But it turns out that the company's interests are not always aligned with each and every individual in the company, and implementing change always results in winners and losers. Getting the buy in from losers can understandably be quite hard. And then you also have the winners who sympathize with the losers and don't realize that they will also lose their jobs if the plan is not implemented.

When you're running a startup, a CEO can single-handedly turn things around. In a larger corporation, a CEO is going to rely on a chain of command to get things done. When you factor in the misaligned incentives or loyalty for people who are at risk of losing their jobs, it's easy to see how information channels can stop working and neither 1) nor 2) can be accomplished successfully.

I agree that brining in a 3rd party like McKinsey feels like a lazy shortcut to addressing the fundamental organizational challenges, but the more I see, the more I am starting to understand the upside of that option.

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

#93

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

The war on drugs is responsible for the opioid crisis.

Companies psychopathically seek out profits, and need to be kept in check, but that does not diminish the fact that US (and Canadian) drug policy bears direct responsibility for opioid deaths.

This kind of news story, while maybe satisfying, is a red herring. As long as addiction is criminalized, and legal drug supplies dont exist, it doesn't matter how many Purdues or McKinseys we punish, the problem does not go away.

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

#94

Post by nus07 »

klmadfejno wrote: post #75
tclancy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

Can you give me a couple of examples where McKinsey’s work was helpful to a society ? Jobs were saved, lives were saved , poverty was eradicated ?

Everywhere I look it’s just strategies to increase sales ,lay-off lower level employees and boost executive and shareholder profit .

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

#95

Post by alisonkisk »

IMTDb wrote: post #27
alexpetralia wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.…

Your complaints apply exactly as well to the internal employees.

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

#96

Post by klmadfejno »

bob33212 wrote: post #52
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…

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.

> clients have incompetent executives

Nope. I don't agree with this at all. I'm saying, 100% clarity, that business is really hard. Working with a large organization is really hard. Many cultures are very rigid.

People are quick to comment about the intricacies of team dynamics, but hand wave the larger org stuff. There's a tough doublethink whereby I might say its not that hard to play the role of an upper level executive, because you can mostly just ride the tide and be fine, but effectively identifying a problem, a solution, and implementing it in a large org? Extremely tough.

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

#97

Post by CapmCrackaWaka »

asjldkfin wrote: post #15

It's funny reading comment here saying how "Consulting is useless BS" whilst also condemning them for "turbocharging Opioid sales"

The story doesn't end there though, does it? The recommendations _did_ result in massive public backlash, hefty fines and a whole load of other shit for both McKinsey and their client. I wonder if these companies think this route was worth it.

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

#98

Post by refurb »

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.

This is a bad take on McK. The 26-year old isn’t in charge of projects, the 45-year old McK partner with a few decades of experience is.

Also, McK is more about organizing change and getting buy in. That’s their value. Some Director could come up with a strategy but no one would follow it.

Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for having hired McK. There is value in that.

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

#99

Post by alisonkisk »

MisterTea wrote: post #21
alexpetralia wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

Its a people problem. Actually solving problems takes a particular kind of mind. A degree is just a piece of paper which certifies the fact that you sat through lectures on subjects and you successfully regurgitated said lecture material on another piece of paper from memory. The issue with the MBA field is that it tends to attract power hungry narcissists/psychopaths who enjoy holding power over others. Engineers li…

Posting this comment on a website dedicated to self-promotion of engineers who want to get rich quickly is an interesting choice.

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

#100

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Terretta wrote: post #64
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/de…

I suspect too few people understand this.

The CEO works for the board. The CEO can be fired at will just like any other employee.

They will get an incredibly generous pay-off, unless they have fucked up to a world-beating historic extent. (And sometimes even then.)

But as soon as the CEO loses the confidence of the board, they're on their way out.

And most boards are only really interested in the financials. They don't care about culture, reputation, product range, or any of those other things. That's detail stuff, and it doesn't interest them.

This is a cozy arrangement because no one is personally responsible for anything the company does. The CEO and the board are covered by limited liability, and they won't be going to jail for common crimes - like poisoning water sources, or setting fire to forests.

They may go to jail if they fuck with the financials. Extreme fraud can be a showstopper.

But having a national monopoly on pushing highly addictive drugs isn't. That's a regrettable offence which deserves a medium-ish fine. And - you know - let's say no more about it.

Consultants - like auditors - exist to add another level of deferred responsibility. They're not there to make decisions, they're there to provide legal air cover for decisions that have already been made which need someone else's signature.

The meetings, reports, the hasmter-on-a-wheel super-keen grad cadres and the rest are just theatre.

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