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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

#201

Post by tarsinge »

ves wrote: post #179
klmadfejno wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Like almost every company in the world, its a normal company. This in a thread about McKinsey settling for over half a billion dollars over its role in causing the opioid crisis, which is just one of the many, many arrows in McKinsey’s “aiding and abetting horrible shit” quiver. This was literally a conspiracy and a scheme. On just the basis of “harm caused” alone, McKinsey is far from a normal company.

No, this sub-thread is a response to:

> 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.

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

#202

Post by Terretta »

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #169
Terretta wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Pleasantly surprised to meet someone else here that has read it! My management department at a major university has not! It is somewhat telling that this book mostly gets cited by practitioners of CMS, Critical Management Studies, with a citation index in the hundreds. Perhaps the explanation lies, as CMS luminary Alvesson puts it, in the basis of mainstream management research seeing itself as in the service of indu…

I also appreciated this:

https://smile.amazon.com/Managerialism-Critique-Ideology-T-K...

And much more obscure but a wry delight:

https://smile.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937...

https://smile.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-Livingston-1990...

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

#203

Post by zupa-hu »

r00fus wrote: post #187
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…

All valid points, but diluting them a bit by accusing others of spelling mistakes when committing them yourself. s/consultents/consultants/

That was most certainly a joke. He called out that grandparent made a typo in the last sentence and drove that home again by also making a typo in the last sentence when referencing grandparent's role. I had a good laugh.

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

#204

Post by paxys »

todipa wrote: post #188

$573M will be minimally felt at the organization level. It is less than 5% of global revenues.

5% of total revenue is a MASSIVE charge. Most companies in the world have profit margins lower than that. They will absolutely feel that in their financial statements.

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

#205

Post by arethuza »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #145
klmadfejno wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being a software "consultant" and a management consultant are pretty different things.

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

#206

Post by Maarten88 »

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.

There was a discussion on the experiments by Stanley Milgram about obedience to authority, and it applies here.

When a consultant gets hired for advise or to "get stuff done", and the result of this is massive profits with a secondary effect of death and destruction, then the consultant is (i.m.o.) morally responsible for that second part as well. And, it seems, legally as well (but let me guess nobody goes to jail).

The consultant may have been hired only for the first part, "get stuff done", and the pay may have not been much, but that has nothing to do with responsibility. The minute you understand the possible consequences of the things that you contribute to, you become partly responsible for it.

As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible. And, I may add, at the McKinsey level, consultants may even get hired to take on the authority role, to excuse financial crimes, or worse.

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

#207

Post by paxys »

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…

It's also funny that people can simultaneously say that McKinsey is self-serving and does no real work for their clients, and also that they caused the opioid crisis with their involvement with Purdue. Which one is it?

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

#208

Post by cryoshon »

klmadfejno wrote: post #103
wil421 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

when your consultancy keeps doing terrible things over and over, it isn't "unfortunate". "unfortunate" implies that there was bad luck, which isn't the case.

all of these actions were fully intentional because that's mckinsey's business model: providing third-party and elite-friendly approval for the unpalatable or unethical.

you mention "internal strife and change" after the latest trouble. i can tell from your attempt at dissimulation that you don't even believe what you're writing. a few years from now, we'll have a handful of other stories about newly revealed terrible things mckinsey did. you will bear some responsibility for these things, and you will probably brush it off.

in the meantime, you're up and down this thread, trying to make excuses for the inexcusable by parroting the company line. it's an easy mistake to make when your paycheck depends on it.

you are part of the problem, especially if you don't think you are.

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

#209

Post by _gohp »

There are people here who say that the consultants are too expensive and are often needed by decision makers to tick a box. But many forget how this demand is created. In a startup, things have to happen fast, some technical debt is unavoidable or the lesser evil. So everything is carrying on, people are hired, many management layers are integrated with what I would call human resources debt( managers covers their own, the top level does not know what is happening at the bottom) and suddenly, the demand for an external consultant is created. This is the price you pay for the fast growth and overlooking the little obstacles. Now the top level management will send a corporate detective aka consultant because he does not trust the management layers, they want a neutral party review and a suggestion to fix it, because nobody else did. Makes sense to me and yes, this forum is very capitalism minded, a 100 usd haircut is fine, first impression and all.

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

#210

Post by haberman »

jancsika wrote: post #106
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…

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…

> 20-something haircut's ostensible work

I read your comment as "I am so emotionally invested in this caricature that I cannot tolerate hearing it humanized. The caricature must stand, or I lose something."

I know very little about McKinsey, but I don't think that the haircut of their consultants tells me very much.

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