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Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

economist.com

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

#161

Post by wombatpm »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #16
mschuster91 wrote: post #8

Of course they got too big, and especially they got too enmeshed with the auditing business. It's time to break them all up. The "firewall" that should be there from a legal perspective is a joke in practice, and when there are only three to four companies, there is no place for fresh blood and with it fresh ideas to enter the market.

> too enmeshed with the auditing business that's not the issue; consulting pays much more than auditing, which is why the Big4 would probably be fine spinning off their auditing businesses

Said spinoffs would probably start new consulting branches after some period of time

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

#162

Post by napoleongl »

photochemsyn wrote: post #83

Don't all these consulting firms have a really bad record when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects? Some of the worst examples are Ciudad Real International Airport (Spain/McKinsey), Karuma Hydroelectric Project (Uganda/Deloitte), Chongwe River Water Supply Project (Zambia/Boston Consulting Group), Isimba Dam Project (Uganda/McKinsey), Haramain High-Speed Rail Project (Saudi Arabia/Deloitte), and Shoreham…

Nya Kalolinska Hospital in Stocholm was pretty much the work of BGC… most expensive hospital in the world. (In Swedish but GPTs exist nowadays so…) https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/nks

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

#163

Post by FredPret »

wombatpm wrote: post #156
FredPret wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data are you looking at that shows decreasing wages and spending?

Stagnant wages in high inflation is the same as decreasing wages

Show me that data.

Here’s the opposite perspective:

Real disposable income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 Real median personal income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

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

#164

Post by fuzzfactor »

mentalgear wrote: post #82

It's not just that they're too big—it's that they're morally corrupt and largely unregulated. These firms have been involved in everything from tobacco lobbying to the 2008 financial crisis to pushing opioids, and that’s just scratching the surface. Despite their role in these crises, they’ve faced zero accountability and continue to rake in massive profits. As for their supposed value (which comes directly from ex-e…

>Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

Do they still exist?

Then, yes.

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

#165

Post by bitwize »

davidcalloway wrote: post #154
hammock wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green card

Thank you I was literally wondering what garbage collection needs to be paid for.

Garbage collection always needs to be paid for -- in working set size and CPU time. That's why you never see production kernels, databases, video codecs, or high performance games written in GC languages.

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

#166

Post by jncfhnb »

lenerdenator wrote: post #126
jncfhnb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought for sure it was war in Europe, bubbles burst in Chinese real estate, and a general fracturing in the west vs the rest globalization but ok

And we've faced more headwinds than that before. The difference is, before, people had at least some confidence in their ability to make a living. We've whittled down the average person's wages and job security to the bone and when people don't feel secure, they don't spend, or maybe they do, but they put it on the card... which is another problem and story unto itself. And places like McKinsey are a part of the knif…

We’ve faced more headwinds… and experienced vast worse economic conditions too.

The current situation is one of uncertainty that things may get worse. It’s not even a recession.

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

#167

Post by cpeterso »

noleary wrote: post #32

Used to be at BCG. I think it's worth bearing in mind that relatively little consulting revenue -- even at the top strategy shops -- comes from pure strategy work anymore. You can push much, much more volume and absolute impact through by running big merger integrations, digital transformation, and other large scale change projects at big companies. It is basically a better business to become something like a premium…

> You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.

Given this is a common business model and has known bad outcomes, what would a Blub programming language and rapid development environment designed to improve the quality and maintainability of an army of rising junior engineers look like? (I originally wrote “productivity”, but reducing billable hours is not a positive outcome for the consultancy. They surely still want to produce quality software like to reduce customer-impacting bugs and negative headlines.)

Go was supposedly designed for a similar audience, inexperienced engineers at Google, but it is pretty low level and still has its own gotchas. I’m imagining some hybrid of Go, Python, and Visual Basic with strong static typing, strong functional orientation with little shared state (to reduce the blast radius of each junior engineer), easy unit and integration testing, excellent post mortem debugging, big ints by default to avoid integer overflow bugs, FFI for integration with clients’ legacy code, and portability to mobile apps, desktop apps, and web front and back end.

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

#168

Post by rolandog »

datavirtue wrote: post #105
artursapek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you elaborate a bit more? I'm interested to know on which topic did Last Week Tonight miss the mark (and, why do you consider they had a hidden agenda?).

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

#169

Post by davidcalloway »

bitwize wrote: post #165
davidcalloway wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you I was literally wondering what garbage collection needs to be paid for.

Garbage collection always needs to be paid for -- in working set size and CPU time. That's why you never see production kernels, databases, video codecs, or high performance games written in GC languages.

Yes but it would still feel weird for me to thank my employer for that.

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

#170

Post by ljm »

whatever1 wrote: post #113
jumping_frog wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you trust a random soggy doc for which you don't know the person who wrote it and their competence, or the flashy deck from McKinsey? The answer is 99% of the times: McKinsey. Only time that answer is different is when a person in power is still around and they pretty much veto the engagement with a consulting company.

Don’t even need that trust when your org probably has some intensely bureaucratic procurement setup where past performance has zero influence on a new tender, so long as they can undercut the competition.

Their reputation doesn’t come from the quality of their work but their size: they can just muscle their way in.

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