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Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

economist.com

101–110 of 197 posts

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#101

With labor becoming fungible in the eyes of c-suites, the holders of institutional knowledge are the libraries of the consulting firms. Consulting firms also have tech talent that traditional businesses had no access to in the past, so any large scale data driven related project is done with consultants. However: 1. The costs are insane and probably we reached the point where the benefits do not justify the prices th…

Traditional mfg companies don’t understand tech. They don’t like that tech employees demand higher wages and benefits and hire bottom tier talent or try to convert existing non tech employees into programmers.

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's by design. They have few verticals that they focus on and have templates for every situation that might arise. (Former McK SW engineer here)

Would you say McK is the consulting equiv of SAP? Where they push the business into the vertical template vs do the actual legwork to improve the org in the vertical in question?

In many cases, yes. But I wouldn't say it's not valuable if you're in these few verticals they care a lot about (one of them is mining, as an example). They won't provide you the data directly, but they do have it and it's central to everything they do - from across the industry, large and small clients, at all stages of life, and they stayed with many of them through significant transitions. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into custom internal tools to make the data and derived analysis accessible to consultants. Where you have theories, experiments and anecdotes, they have statistics. And nobody has better than they do.

Don't fall into thinking they just want to make some easy money and don't care about your situation. They most probably saw hundreds or thousands of clients like you, and know that unless you're a unicorn, the "standardized" approach will be better for you - they synthetized it from thousands of engagements to be as simple and as idiot proof as possible. And here I mean idiots on both sides - consultants as well as the client. If you were an unicorn, you wouldn't need to hire McKinsey. Remember, most of us aren't Gates/Jobs/... This is just like tech startups thinking they're an unicorn and spending an absurd amount of effort (and thus money - also opportunity cost) on reinventing the wheel and building for infinite scalability, instead of simply doing what works well for everybody else.

Not saying they don't want money, but their approach to making easy bucks is to add a zero to their quotes, not by not doing anything worthwhile. The quotes seem crazy to us mere mortals, but the clients are usually happy - what's a few million dollars when they helped you save tens or hundreds of millions. You don't care how simple was what they did - you probably tried many times yourself before hiring them, and if they made a stupid thing work, you're grateful.

Sometimes it's really stupid - like a consultant randomly noticing that the client buys protective earplugs from 20 different suppliers while drinking coffee in the common area of 5th branch they're visiting; acting on it and making a much better deal (money and services-wise) with just one or two suppliers globally, and similar kinds of random ad hoc but monetarily significant optimization. That's where the templates come in - if you hire McKinsey they just ask "how do you do X?" - and if you say '"well we don't have a global process for that, each location handles it themselves", their reaction is to implement a template process - and I think that's good. Yes, the branches will scream bloody murder, but the corporate doesn't care - it's not their business to create cultural centers for adults. Create a lifestyle business for yourself if you want that.

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#103
post #99

The big firms just need to be big and known. There value delivered isn’t in the PowerPoint explaining that cutting costs and increasing revenue will increase profits. The value added is that companies buy a stamp from a famous firm when they deliver staff cuts, reorganizations or other controversial news. As such it doesn’t really hurt to go for scale. They’re a standards org for headcount reduction.

Why though? Why a company with a board, which is already independent, would need some consulting? Isn't the board to convey ideas to CEO?

The board is neither independent nor objective or often really in touch with the business. Therefore they need cover from a big name firm

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#104
post #34

Let me propose an alternate theory: fines and enforcement have become too small, so-as to become just a cost of doing business . Many of these employees are so-incentivized by fiscal profit that they fail to see the immorality, just seeing opportunity. Maybe if our regulators weren't in bed with so many of the major funds... "If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem." —George Carlin (Conan O'brien…

Fines are trivial.

It Usally costs more to process the fine internally then the nominal value of the fine

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#105

Obligatory John Oliver video on the topic: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=anI1_FKkDM4oDI1M

Nothing about John Oliver is obligatory

Agreed. I watched an a show on something I knew a lot about and was appalled out how much he missed the mark and/or had an agenda. I always liked his show and tended to agree with his take until then. Great rehtoric, Im just concerned that people might be eating his shit and forming "informed" opinions on things because Oliver's team "already did all the research."

Keep some salt handy.

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nobody left, old enough, to remember that the last project with that consulting firm failed.

Are we living in middle ages that electronic records don't exist of what happened in the past engagement. Maybe one can locate the last McKinsey dossier on OneDrive? The problem is and always was of incentives of people involved.

Generally there Firms prize "first principles" thinking and don't put a ton of effort into leveraging previous engagements. Think of it like how engineers will throw out a solution and rebuild it rather than understand and build upon it.

It is also quite difficult to surface useful information amongst all the noise in the giant archive of documents

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#107

It was a really interesting place to work at a Software Engineer. It made me understand the business. It made me understand that doing the right thing isn't valued. You do the thing that has the shortest ROI. It also made me realize that it is horrible to build software with people who expect short term deliveries like the usual McKinsey engagement. People who expect that the automation of an Excel file takes the sam…

I had a hard time working for an ex-McKinsey/Deloitte/MBA type a while ago for similar reasons: it was always favourable to push a quick hack to resolve an immediate issue, and literally nothing else mattered.

If you had to fight fires all hours day, night and weekend to keep on top of it, then so what? That’s the job. Getting heart palpitations because the red circle came up on the Slack icon on your screen? That’s the job.

Even with a clear path to a mid-term or even sustainable solution, it was like you weren’t building software but in a constant race to keep ARR ahead of churn, like in Wallace and Gromit where Gromit is frantically laying down track to keep his train going. Does the software even work? Who cares… it’s the $$$ that count.

I wasn’t really built for that, I felt like I was at odds with my own passion and I didn’t really want to put my name to the work I was doing.

Re: Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

#108
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of organizations can't do this on their own . Which is why they hire a consultancy. Information is siloed, teams compete rather than cooperate, any team's own dossier is going to be seen as biased and unobjective. There's real value in hiring a neutral, competent vendor to come in, assemble the relevant information using best practices, and present a "dossier" with common-sense conclusions. Then the…

> teams compete rather than cooperate [...] political cover for taking the necessary actions they wanted to in the first place That looks like three deeper problems than the consultants were tasked to solve. (Not only do you have counterproductive, misaligned culture; but even the CEO can't/won't fix it; and the CEO even has to play political games, just to work around the bad culture, for smaller goals.)

> That looks like three deeper problems than the consultants were tasked to solve.

No, this is exactly the reason the consultants were hired. Not to solve the cultural problems, but to work the broken process. It's not really in the consultants interest to solve the cultural problems anyway, because it drives repeat business.

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