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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

#321

Post by yowlingcat »

haltingproblem wrote: post #284
maybelsyrup wrote: post #280

One of my first jobs out of college was at small management consulting firm founded by an formerly very high level McKinsey guy. In a bigger firm, I wouldn't have had much contact with this person, but since we were tiny, he would often be out in the field with the junior people. One week I found myself with him in some faraway city. We were a bit lost (this was before smartphones) and late for our next appointment.…

While amusing, this attempts to humanize them and somewhat whitewash their abominable actions. They are sitting at the top of the power matrix making lives miserable and dangerous for the ones with least power - paycheck to paycheck workers, those with addictions, inmates in Rikers, dissidents. The fact that they are aware of their own lack of usefulness makes the whole enterprise even more cynical and shady.

> The fact that they are aware of their own lack of usefulness makes the whole enterprise even more cynical and shady.

Some would say this was the origin of charity and corporate social responsibility. It was born as a financial optimization to hedge against optics risk, to engage in moral licensing. And it does its job very well there -- not in spite of, but because it directly humanizes the company and its executives.

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

#322

Post by throwawaysea »

McKinsey is a firm that simply does not do good work. I am unclear on what value their clients derive from them and why it has the reputation of being a good place to work at or have on your resume. They're basically opinion guns for hire, who can parallel construct their way to whatever conclusion you want, granting the goals of [your company or government agency] a sheen of legitimacy. They manage to avoid oversight regularly (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/sunday-review/mckinsey-ic...). They have a history of of corrupt leaders and fingerprints on numerous fiscal disasters (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-fea...).

They are also very careful to play the PR game well. A good example of their incompetency intersecting with their PR efforts is their spurious claims on diversity (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...). The "Diversity Matters" report here has been quoted by virtually everyone - from the Harvard Business Review to corporate HR teams. And it is remarkably deceptive, because it has been bandied about as evidence that more diversity = better outcomes. Their own study at the link above admits there is no casual link here. It states this in an incredibly misleading way:

> While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful.

And now here we are, with corporations normalizing discriminatory practices relating to hiring, promotion, and so forth.

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

#323

Post by Calamity »

Terretta wrote: post #57
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…

You at your years-of-experience most likely don’t yet find it painful to learn. The folks with one to three decades more time at bat who are hiring you most likely do find learning and change literally painful. Not because of age, but because of “number of trials” at the change experiment, where often someone gets burned. Reading, learning, thinking differently, hurts the ego, as it makes clear you were less informed…

Maybe it is because I'm still not there yet, but I feel that there is a nugget of wisdom in here that I still can't wrap my head around completely.

Is this pointing to the same idea behind "the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken"? I concede I may not be as quick to learn as I was when I was in my late teens/early 20s, but I hope that I'll still be able to learn new things and able to recognize the error in my judgement well into my old age - despite having been a classically high performer in school (although grad school did pummel me down).

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

#324

Post by AmericanChopper »

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…

I would say the FDA who approved the use of these drugs, and the doctors who set up businesses specifically to give bogus prescriptions to abusers are the most culpable in all of this. The people who end up paying these big settlements are targeted because they have the most money, not because they're the most culpable. The big evil company narrative is also a fantastic way to distract from the fact that regulatory failure caused a decades long epidemic of opioid deaths. "We investigated ourselves and found McKinsey were to blame".

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

#326

Post by crumbshot »

This is far too low. A fine large enough to destroy the company (as was effectively done to Purdue) would have been the only palatable outcome. And even more importantly, legal repercussions for all their employees who were personally responsible for this.

All this settlement achieves is 'a cost of doing business', as they say. It's not punishment or deterrence. McKinsey and other companies like them will do similar in the future, and simply pay it off, again.

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

#327

Post by arbitrary_name »

throwawaysea wrote: post #322

McKinsey is a firm that simply does not do good work. I am unclear on what value their clients derive from them and why it has the reputation of being a good place to work at or have on your resume. They're basically opinion guns for hire, who can parallel construct their way to whatever conclusion you want, granting the goals of [your company or government agency] a sheen of legitimacy. They manage to avoid oversigh…

I've worked with them and helped implement some of their recommendations. They do brilliant work and have some very clever people. They also do some very awful things and have some dumb people.

Your starting line is overly reductive and not based in fact.

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

#329

Post by beckman466 »

samstave wrote: post #293
Retric wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

EXACTLY Look at it in tech: Some FB engineers are INCREDIBLY smart and good - but the, as you say, "diffuse harm" they do is still *harm* FFS when I was at Lockheed and we got audited for SOX the execs were stealing stocks from the newer employees and giving those stocks to the execs and the auditors, I think it was PWC, gave use a green passing grade and employees got fucked. Some of the execs went on to Solyndra an…

> Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....

Jesus. Hackernews is one hell of a website

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

#330

Post by klmadfejno »

safog wrote: post #259
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…

Man, you're really getting the short end of the stick here - it's actually pretty surprising because even though the forum is tech heavy, you wouldn't expect this much hate on consulting as a business model. Outliers like the Opioid stuff aside, I do think most day to day typical things that consultants do is valuable work for companies. Say you're launching a new product and want to figure out cost based / value bas…

People have a natural aversion to consultants. They're expensive and accomplish things that feel like they should be easy but in practice are hard. It's also difficult because the opioids work is bad, and there have been other things that are just bad. I don't think its especially representative of the work most people do but its still there and the harm is real. A piece of bad work is probably 12ish people doing their own thing that the majority would tell them not to do. I feel good about the work that I do, not just in that it doesn't harm anyone but in that I think it has positive side effects for society. The opioids work doesn't really affect me, and was hardly financially relevant for the company (before the fine). To give a throwaway fictitious answer, if my job was aiding COVID vaccines or helping education in poor countries, things that I don't have direct knowledge of, but would probably guess McK is involved in without any particular knowledge, I don't know how many "bad" actors or incidents it would take in other unrelated aspects of the firm to get me to not want to work there anymore.

There's no big picture. I can't say my work "enables" others to do other work that I may disagree with. On the whole of it by my personal set of values, I enjoy being able to make the contributions I do and would be wary of loosing that. So long as the tone at the top of the org is condemning of things I consider bad (and it is), I think it deserves a level of understanding for how difficult it is to run a network of thousands of partners and avoid things like this. I'm optimistic that the newly enforced sets of checks and balances will prevent such at least some of these kinds of studies from happening again. For now at least, it feels less like "McKinsey" did the bad thing and more like "a group of people who work here" did. Others will disagree, and I get it. I know a couple folks who left on ethical grounds and they retained the support of all their colleagues.

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