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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

#241

Post by wayoutthere »

refurb wrote: post #98
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.

This is a bad take on McK. The 26-year old isn’t in charge of projects, the 45-year old McK partner with a few decades of experience is. Also, McK is more about organizing change and getting buy in. That’s their value. Some Director could come up with a strategy but no one would follow it. Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for having hired McK. There is value in that.

> Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for having hired McK. There is value in that.

This is it right here. A shocking percentage of corporate boardrooms are McKinsey alumni — by hiring McKinsey to develop or even just validate your strategy, you buy credibility from the people who sign the checks because they know and trust senior people at McKinsey.

Consulting is a relationship business. The other purpose of consulting at the boardroom level is to enable companies to sidestep laws around collusion and insider trading — the SEC occasionally charges somebody, but it’s largely symbolic given how pervasive it is. It’s not unheard of for CEOs of companies that are direct competitors to have regular calls to discuss strategy, all while using consultants to create a paper trail that says the strategy was developed through rigorous analysis.

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

#242

Post by toiletfuneral »

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…

Hey, fuck you & your useless friends

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

#243

Post by stuaxo »

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.

Just because there are ordinary employees at the bottom doing ordinary boring jobs, doesn't mean that this is not a company that has done all sorts of damage.

Most of the huge profits don't go to people like you, but there are huge profits.

The opioid crisis has caused untold suffering and death. The amount of money they were fined is a joke that couldn't make a tiny dent in what fixing this.

It's small enough that it it's unlikely to stop them being involved in something similar in future.

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

#244

Post by klmadfejno »

cryoshon wrote: post #208
klmadfejno wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atte…

I believe what I'm writing, and it's not the company line. I'm explicitly not giving the company a pass. I strongly disagree that providing approval for unethical or unpalatable decisions are what the company does. I would not work for McKinsey to serve, e.g. an oil and gas company personally, no matter the topic. But I feel good about what I do.

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

#246

Post by BryanBeshore »

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…

I'll add one more point to this. Some business executives bring in consultants as a CYA for their boards, employees, etc.

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

#247

Post by mola »

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. They have a choice, they are privileged enough to be able to choose where they work. If they choose to prefer more money over not making more teens depressed. (If that's a thing, I have no idea), then they are responsible.

Generally, most of us in software can choose where to work. If we don't make this choice according to morals (whatever they may be) then we are less moral than ppl who don't have a choice, and those who have a choice and do consider it.

Is that a bad thing? Depending on which morality you subscribe to I guess....

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

#248

Post by btilly »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #214
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).…

As the Stanley Milgram experiments show, most people will do horrible things to others when they can tell themselves that someone else is responsible Turns out this isn't accurate. See https://theconversation.com/milgram-was-wrong-we-dont-obey-a... But as my detective work in the Yale Archives has revealed, in the filmed version of the experiment 65% of participants disobeyed. Yet Milgram edited his film to show the…

Given the many replications of variations of Milgram's experiments, any flaws in his original experiment don't detract from the overall result.

See https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-m... for some of that replication data.

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

#249

Post by toiletfuneral »

ghaff wrote: post #184
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…

As someone who worked with McKinsey consultants in a past life, this seems pretty spot on. The partner and one of their associates were sharp. The other associate mostly got arrogant. They were brought in around a new product line I was the product manager of. Yes, they spent lots of time interviewing us and basically validated what we told them. That said, they presumably gave executive management some warm and fuzz…

My friends pour concrete & frame homes. In an hour they generate more for the world the you will in your entire empty life but huge congrats on your degrees and wealth

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

#250

Post by Retric »

abduhl wrote: post #221
ves wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If we were to rank large companies based on how horrible they are to society then certainly McKinsey is indeed “far from a normal company.” They’re far lower than the normal company, in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say they’re not even in the top 75%. Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking have caused objectively (and subjectively) orders of magnitude more harm to our society than a bunch of…

Having worked at a large management consulting company, the harm isn’t direct but it’s still there. These companies have incredible leverage, but it’s from credentials not competence. Economic harm isn’t as obvious as say water pollution, but diffuse harm is still harm.

Anyway, the average company does all the stuff you don’t really think about like making pots, windows, staplers, hearing aids etc. It’s the extreme outliers that people talk about not the dozen small factories making decorative concrete flagstones, etc.

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