Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 572 posts

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

#141

Post by csciutto »

How your classmate became a con artist:

"It’s a choice that’s laden with power. Unlike a bank or a traditional business, consultancies have little capital apart from the graduates they hire. A consultancy is a machine for prestige, and you are the source of their prestige, the smoke that obscures the truth of a business that subsists on the crudity of cutting and selling. They purchased your transcript, and they purchased your diploma, but you have the power to take them away. Without you, a firm has no more weight than the shells through which it is paid.

So withhold your labor, withhold your prestige, and watch as the façade begins tumbling down."

https://stanfordsphere.com/2020/01/30/how-your-classmate-bec...

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

#142

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

elliekelly wrote: post #104
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.

You know in cop shows like "the wire" when the police commissioner says he wants to see "drugs on the table" showing off what they seized from the gangs, but the detectives know it's a hollow victory that just panders to public opinion but does nothing to address the root of the problem? This is like that.

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

#143

Post by ashtonkem »

frankbreetz wrote: post #88
sharkweek wrote: post #10

The 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’…

>>As part of the settlement, McKinsey admits to no wrongdoing. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/04/963864747/consulting-giant-mc...

That’s incredibly normal. It’s a regularly negotiated term that’s used to shield the wrongdoer from continued civil liability.

Frankly, I think it’s such transparent bullshit that we should abolish it. Really, you admit to no wrong doing but you’re willing to fork over half a billion because ...?

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

#144

Post by mumblemumble »

frankbreetz wrote: post #88
sharkweek wrote: post #10

The 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’…

>>As part of the settlement, McKinsey admits to no wrongdoing. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/04/963864747/consulting-giant-mc...

That's a pretty standard part of settlements, and very nearly semantically void.

The more salient facts for someone who's looking to this as an instructive story are: they advised a company to do some things that had some pretty hefty consequences, those consequences came back to bite them, and it cost them $573M plus legal fees and damaged reputation.

$573M is $573M, regardless of whether a court orders you to pay it, or whether it's the amount you're paying to avoid having to find out how much the court would order you to pay. The fact that no ruling went onto the books is small consolation.

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

#145

Post by Cthulhu_ »

klmadfejno wrote: post #120
jancsika wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, et…

I guess I'm glad you enjoyed my prose so much. All I'm trying to convey is that my day to day is listening to client problems, looking at data, talking to employees, and presenting findings. It's neither a conspiracy, nor a scheme, nor a world of wealthy indulgence. I make a healthy wage, but its likely lower than I could get in tech. Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company.

Consultancy sounds fancy, but when it comes down to it it's fairly mundane.

I used to be in consultancy as a software dev, it's basically same job, higher cost. But these companies use consultants because they have tons of money but aren't sexy enough to attract internal employees that do the same thing.

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

#146

Post by ativzzz »

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.

How are you going to suggest to the people paying you to replace them?

At the end of the day, someone is your boss and pays you, and you are gonna do what they want

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

#147

Post by a3n »

raesene9 wrote: post #25
samizdis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be keen to see the specifics wrt advice given on how to "turbocharge" said sales. Reuters article doesn't give any examples/detail.

Articles like https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/business/mckinsey-purdue-... have some details. A quote from that shows some details :- " In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they so…

So, they recommended paying distributors to kill people.

Because, in addition to the profit distributors would make by merely being in business, they would make even more money for each related death.

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

#148

Post by Terretta »

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #43
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 a lot more than that. It's about further enabling power structures at the client organization while diminishing employee and other "lower classes" negotiation and influence possibilities. In essence, it's a turbo-charged manager service, where you pay a flat fee to someone to represent your interest. The fee is high, but for it you buy more loyalty, a deadline to the relationship and avoid labor disputes, employ…

As I read your comment I was thinking “this!” then I saw your book recommendation and chuckled, “Of course!”

What an important book.

Here’s a purchase link (non-affiliate but the URL that donates to your selected cause):

https://smile.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-...

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

#149

Post by omalleyt »

dia80 wrote: post #118

The opinions on consultants in the thread is largely negative and it's suggested hiring them is a sign of organisational dysfunction. If you can find information on consulting spend in annual reports you could create a "consultant factor" for stocks and see if big spenders underperform.

There’s a level of dysfunction that causes a company to acknowledge the issue and hire consultants. And then there’s a level of dysfunction that causes the company to not acknowledge the issue and not hire consultants. The latter level is higher

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

#150

Post by geodel »

volta83 wrote: post #122
mola wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to believe they have a bullshit job. So we usually tell our selves nice little fairy tales to overcome this cognitive dissonance. Truth is, McK and the like, are there just to give mediocre leaders an extremely expensive psychological crutch needed when human beings face uncertainties. Now that these consulting agencies are the behemoth they are, it's mainly corrupt leaders that are being "pursuaded" to…

> Oh and ppl like you are just cheap "brains" to give the optics of credentials for this sordid affair. 100% whataboutism, and I'm not defending the OP or McK, but I wonder what you think of the PhD "brains" hired at Google that end up being in charge of implementing a menu in Google Carplay. What are they?

At Google many PhDs may end up working on compilers, language runtimes, vulnerability research data center power saving/cooling and so on. And yeah most importantly implementing menu in Google carplay.

So I guess difference is Google has many types of work whereas at McKinsey it is slick MBAs facing fools looking to part with their money.

Post reply on HN