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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

#231

Post by towndrunk »

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…

They are great at making PowerPoint’s though.

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

#232

Post by wayoutthere »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #196
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…

Can we just keep it real instead of spouting this garbage. I've worked alongside and gotten close with consultants on the business/management side having been one in software myself. 99% of the consultants who come in are human Powerpoint/Email factories who just happen to have the skill/trait of being extremely insistent. They push exactly what their client wants to hear and are not doing groundbreaking worldchangin…

A big part of what consultants bring is repeat experience — when you’ve watched multiple clients make the same mistakes, you can credibly speak up.

And for the kind of transformational work that folks like McKinsey would come in to assess, there’s a huge organizational component that’s actually more complex than the technical components. Building a new technology tool is great, but designing the process the tool implements and rolling it out to non-technical users is the job our buyers hire us to do. We would hire offshore engineers if the engineering work were the majority of the work we do — but the coordination overhead is too high.

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

#233

Post by mola »

aisengard wrote: post #156
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…

If a consultant is being brought in to do a job you think you should be doing yourself, then who really has the bullshit job in this instance?

First "a consultant" is @ very overloaded term. I was talking on the type McK bring to do a little business research and give some recommendations.

Software consultants OTH are usually sub-contractors and not consultants per se.

Regarding who has the bullshit job, well, probably both the mediocre/corrupt leaders, and the consultant.

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

#234

Post by klmadfejno »

runamok wrote: post #226
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.

You are probably getting paid less than you could be but your billable rate is likely substantially higher. Not great links but you get the gyst... https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partn... https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge

True. I'd note a couple things here though. The per/hour rates are for creating the contract. Actual prices are fixed. The partner rates aren't likely to be charging every day of a project either, and are comparable to lawyer rates. They're expensive, no disagreement there.

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

#235

Post by snowwrestler »

runamok wrote: post #226
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.

You are probably getting paid less than you could be but your billable rate is likely substantially higher. Not great links but you get the gyst... https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/revealed-mckinsey-partn... https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-McKinsey-charge

Everything you buy has a markup to pay for expenses and make a profit.

Consultants sell their time, so of course their time is marked up.

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

#237

Post by TuringNYC »

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.…

This is slightly different (SI/Mgmt consultants vs Strategy consultants) but my experience with SI consultancies was that mid/lower consultants were rewarded based on chaos and fixing chaos not on avoiding chaos.

So if you oversaw the build-out of a system and everything went smoothly, good, but nothing to talk about during promotions.

On the other hand, if there were difficult issues faced and you fire-fought, sent out late emails with decisions to clients, came up with memos documenting tricky situations, awesome! Promotion material!

Of course, sharp consultants figured this out and the sharpest ones looked the other way when design documents had landmines -- just so they had known manageable issues to "manage" and "save the day" with.

Bad incentives, bad outcomes.

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

#238

Post by munificent »

aisengard wrote: post #156
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…

If a consultant is being brought in to do a job you think you should be doing yourself, then who really has the bullshit job in this instance?

Maybe it's bullshit jobs all the way down.

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

#239

Post by klmadfejno »

cryptica wrote: post #215
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…

20 year olds out of university know nothing about business, management, finance or the economy. The financial system and economy are in a constant state of flux, everything they teach in university is already outdated 10 years before you even start the degree. As for economics, most of what they teach has nothing to do with the real economy; just some phony models with fancy math which bear absolutely no relationship…

Consultants are not expected to just know the answer. They're supposed to figure it out by talking to people in the company and looking at data. A 20 year old with full DB access and a python script can tell an executive a lot of things they don't know.

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

#240

Post by abduhl »

jankyxenon wrote: post #217
Maarten88 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Are Instagram engineers partly responsible for depression among teens?

Yes. Even more than McKinsey is responsible for the opioid crisis. Instagram built the evil product, McKinsey just told someone how to better weaponize an already evil product.
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