McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by GreeniFi » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

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…

I found this very insightful, thank you.

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

#102

Post by jcomis » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

klmadfejno wrote: post #42

oaiey wrote: post #6

I 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.

Not really. This likely will not effect partner comp. It will effect the firm, but partners will spin it as the guilty parties are gone and the leaders need to be retained (through comp!) to right the organization. The low levels will absorb it through lower comp. I've worked in consulting for years and no matter what happens, EVER, partner comp is NEVER effected. They will hem and haw about it, discuss it, maybe make it seem like they are reducing their comp (really just pushing bonuses to more opportune time), but they always get made whole.

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

#103

Post by klmadfejno » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #67

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…

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-…

ICE was very bad. A lot of internal strife and change over those (and opiods).

Enron and china I'm not really familiar with. The Saudi one is, in my opinion, not a an accurate portrayal. My understanding is McKinsey did not create a report for the Saudi gov't on it and that it was someone who chose a deeply unfortunate example to demo some social network analysis stuff, internally, and not intended to be shared.

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

#104

Post by elliekelly » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #93

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 Purd…

Why do you see it as mutually exclusive? I don’t think it’s really an either/or situation. It’s both.

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

#105

Post by tgb » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

gnu8 wrote: post #12

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.

It’s Scientology for businesses.

Scientology literally has a business consulting front.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Management

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

#106

Post by jancsika » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

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…

Whether this is a bona fide comment or a troll, I love this comment:

* quick witted aikido-move-of-a-sentence to accept OP's insult, thereby disarming it

* enormous paragraph made up of short, frank, vague sentences with an compelling rhythm of overarching claims that frame the 20-something haircut's ostensible work in a positive light. It's the wrong generation but I'm reading them in Ari Fleischer's no-nonsense, eternally dismissive voice.

* anticipating the accusation of happy talk, a final, single sentence to cover one of the many troubling associations McKinsey has had with shithole companies. Even spelled the industry wrong!

I'm not being sarcastic or snooty. This is the HN-post version of the pharma commercial pattern of showing heartwarming images of happy people on swings while the narrator enumerates horrific side-effects. Reliably distracting an audience from a topic is a skill, and that reliability is valuable to companies.

So to all those naive respondents who want to say that McKinsey is some kind of corporate leech that provides no value-- this very comment is proof that you have no idea what you're talking about.

And some at McKinsey, I assume, are just run of the mill consultents.

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

#107

Post by Terretta » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

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…

The price is higher because the logo on the report is better insurance than another logo. In particular, the logo is better because of “The McKinsey Way”. McKinsey figured out how to repeatably and reliably manufacture strategic decision support.

Much like McDonalds means every burger everywhere no matter who owns and runs that franchise is predictably decent, the principles of The McKinsey Way and frameworks like 7S and MECE mean every wet-behind-the-ears graduate is going to produce work of sufficient logic, data, and quality to plausibly support the position McK was hired to support.

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

#108

Post by refurb » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

cochne wrote: post #40

asjldkfin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the point; you can't say their advice is ineffective, while also condemning them for being effective. The top comment derisively states: "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" In the context of fining the company $500MM for being too effective. At least in the US, where the punishment is…

To play devil's advocate, they could be both ineffective and harmful. Just because they succeeded in getting the company to do something, that not mean it was the right thing. The sale of the drugs could have produced a net loss as well as harmed the people who bought them.

Ineffective = “having no effect”

Harmful = “having a negative effect”

How can they be both?

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

#109

Post by 8ytecoder » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

klmadfejno wrote: post #85

andreilys wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

I hear this one pretty often. I'm sure it happens to some extent. But flip the perspective there. You're talking about a a company that is so dysfunctional its leaders can't make decisions on their own. Getting stuff done there sounds pretty difficult to begin with. If stuff gets done, that's valuable. That's part of what I'm saying. Business is hard.

They parrot back exactly what the business wants to do. I’ve seen it in action. Rarely do they ever say anything that’s truly business changing.

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

#110

Post by GreeniFi » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #86

olsonjeffery wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine stating that engineers from non-elite schools are just as well equipped for the tasks you describe, but that wasn't the GP's contention. The point is that McKinsey make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes. Their fingerprints are all over numerous bad decisions in business and government in the past few decades[0]. These are the bare minimum, because there are quite likely many negative ou…

Cherry picking bad examples is not how to evaluate how often McKinsey "make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes". Any company the size of McKinsey around as long as McKinsey will have success and failure stories. The proper way to evalaute is to take all things McKinsey did, normalize for background, and see how it performs compared to other methods of solving the same problems. Cherry picking to…

Great comment. I might go further and say that cherry-picking is either an attempt to deceive the listener or oneself. I’d put it on the same pedestal as lying.