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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

#131

Post by RandomLensman »

pm90 wrote: post #70
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…

> 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” thei…

I suppose, it could also have been a bunch of 20 somethings pushed to the brink of total exhaustion forced to come up with ways to "mitigate" certain "business risks" and "enhance" positioning. The "cancer" is not that there is demand and willing buyers for consulting services, but shareholders, executives, media etc. running a very self-referential and reinforcing environment. Effectively, you will present "solutions" (for a lack of a better word) that you know that the a company knows that you expect the company to expect to see... (institutional isomorphism is a strong force)

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

#132

Post by kabouseng »

nsomaru wrote: post #90
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 reputation of your country is thoroughly ruined in South Africa. Paying the money back (as was agreed, and even then my understanding is that not all of it will be repaid, no interest was offered and no criminal charges have been proffered) will never cover for the gutting of essential skills in key state owned enterprises under the cover of a McK “restructuring”. South Africa is in a perfect storm right now and…

Absolutely agree. But to be fair, the problems started with the appointment of useless political cronies as heads of these organisation's, who then used the consultants to help themselves with paybacks, commissions and corrupt deals.

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

#133

Post by cambalache »

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…

As a person you are surely good, as an employee of that organization you are a tool to extract as much money as possible from your client and most often than not the person who hired you guys should be fired for having done so. As a 20-something year old generalist you are in no position to be giving "advice" (especially at the rate you charge) considering that "business is hard".

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

#134

Post by spaetzleesser »

It's really tiring to constantly hear how people or organizations with deep pockets can "settle" things by handing over money. Nothing will ever change until either some high level people go to jail or the company goes to jail (as in suspending its business for a while). Or make the fines outrageously high so it really hurts the company and not just as a small part of their profits.

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

#135

Post by breck »

"get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is the way to go." (CEO of Purdue, 1996)

There will be another Purdue, except 10x worse, if we don't abolish the http://uspto.gov/.

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

#136

Post by olsonjeffery »

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…

"We can never criticize something unless we can contemplate the totality of it" isn't constructive or helpful and has (from my interpretation) the net effect of stating the the status quo is fine. Is that what you're contending?

Firms like McKinsey, for reasons of trade secrets, confidentiality wrt their client book, discretion because of the nature of their work, etc don't have data available about the completeness of their outcomes. In fact, their white papers focus exclusively on successes. What about instances where their contribution has a not-zero impact (we could even include and offset the cost of their consultations against the total impact of advise offered, assuming it's followed)? Do you have a proposal for how to conduct such an analysis?

Furthermore, I would offer that much of the nature of their impacts isn't something we can know with mathematical precision and exists in the realms of the social sciences (a broad domain known to have major skew problems when measurements are taken, if at all).

So we are left with optics and moral/ethical assessments of the work they have done. Taking this into account, I am content with this approach and the conclusions I have arrived at.

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

#137

Post by heavenlyblue »

refurb wrote: post #108
cochne wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can be effective at selling opiates to people, but then end up in an investigation for selling them illegally and thus neutralising any of the revenue you had initially brought with fines for doing so illegally. Here's no effect.

Of course a lot of brutal strategies work well in environments which do not expect them. However trusted environments are often more efficient.

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

#138

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

> That's not evidence of abuse, that's evidence that your org isn't working well

Mostly fuelled by management consultancy firms' marketing and sales teams, of course.

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

#139

Post by spaetzleesser »

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…

You don't have to choose one or the other. Even if the war on drugs got ended these companies find other unethical ways to make money.

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

#140

Post by ativzzz »

8ytecoder wrote: post #109
klmadfejno wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, the business can't actually do those things without them for some reason (well often can't do it with consultants either). Large groups of people have weird dynamics.
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