31–40 of 57 posts
Combine that with working with a majority of F500s and governments, and it’s a high risk situation.
Great initial job training though, so no limit to talent pipeline when they get college grads for 2 years.
McKinsey is doing what they're paid to do - take the blame for bad decisions and deflect attention away from the leadership of companies who actually choose to follow their advice. Even from this article you can see they're doing an excellent job. If I were an executive I would absolutely hire them after reading this article since I can just use them to enact unpopular changes I've always wanted, and wouldn't be blam…
Yeah, I rarely see consultants give much advice beyond what the leadership already said they wanted to do - albeit not often directly. What seems to commonly happen is a consultant comes in, listens to leadership, and then regurgitates what leadership already really wants to do. This lets leadership absolve some of the responsibility when it fails ("The consultant told us to do X"). And it makes sense because who kno…
The company pays but the leaders benefit. You can charge a lot when it's other people's money.
McKinsey is doing what they're paid to do - take the blame for bad decisions and deflect attention away from the leadership of companies who actually choose to follow their advice. Even from this article you can see they're doing an excellent job. If I were an executive I would absolutely hire them after reading this article since I can just use them to enact unpopular changes I've always wanted, and wouldn't be blam…
Yeah, I rarely see consultants give much advice beyond what the leadership already said they wanted to do - albeit not often directly. What seems to commonly happen is a consultant comes in, listens to leadership, and then regurgitates what leadership already really wants to do. This lets leadership absolve some of the responsibility when it fails ("The consultant told us to do X"). And it makes sense because who kno…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the thing Capitalism is the system out of which these problems have sprung. People keep shouting about "real" or "pure" capitalism being better but that's all a lie spread by the capital owners through their think-tanks. Its propaganda If we organize corporations to be owned by the workers instead of shareholders, the few with real capital, then the interest of the corporation will shift to that of th…
> If we organize corporations to be owned by the workers instead of shareholders That model isn't a good solution either - it would require for workers to "buy in" into the cooperative in order to have a job. Most cooperatives are founded by a group of people pooling together their individual assets to start operations.
McKinsey is merely a byproduct, if you want to get to the root you have to analyze Capitalism, the system out of which McKinsey-like entities emerged as the best fit for its natural selection.
This is exactly the thing Capitalism is the system out of which these problems have sprung. People keep shouting about "real" or "pure" capitalism being better but that's all a lie spread by the capital owners through their think-tanks. Its propaganda If we organize corporations to be owned by the workers instead of shareholders, the few with real capital, then the interest of the corporation will shift to that of th…
Consider a worker-owned coal mining operation. It will have the same self-preservation drive that works to the detriment of all the rest of us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the thing Capitalism is the system out of which these problems have sprung. People keep shouting about "real" or "pure" capitalism being better but that's all a lie spread by the capital owners through their think-tanks. Its propaganda If we organize corporations to be owned by the workers instead of shareholders, the few with real capital, then the interest of the corporation will shift to that of th…
This is the result of centralization of power, and nothing more. People are people, regardless of what faction you've been brainwashed to believe supports the greater good
Changing the structure and incentives can alter that, it's a systemic effect
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the thing Capitalism is the system out of which these problems have sprung. People keep shouting about "real" or "pure" capitalism being better but that's all a lie spread by the capital owners through their think-tanks. Its propaganda If we organize corporations to be owned by the workers instead of shareholders, the few with real capital, then the interest of the corporation will shift to that of th…
I’m not convinced that worker ownership is necessarily better either, not in a global sense at least, not when we emit into the same beleaguered environment. Consider a worker-owned coal mining operation. It will have the same self-preservation drive that works to the detriment of all the rest of us.
It also allows the workers to have the knowledge of what's going on, in the case that the organization does decide to destroy the environment we then have more people who know the facts behind the decisions and can speak out to regulators
McKinsey is merely a byproduct, if you want to get to the root you have to analyze Capitalism, the system out of which McKinsey-like entities emerged as the best fit for its natural selection.
On a related but unrelated note, the structured McKinsey methods of thinking and analysis have been my go-to for decades now.
Notable frameworks I recommend looking into are: The Pyramid Principle, MECE, 7s, SPC, to mention a few.
I’d love to hate on McKinsey, but this piece is just anger with a few cherry picks. It’s a bad habit to take this seriously. It doesn’t even address the simplest explanation for most of this: big companies that are doing bad contact McKinsey to try and change strategies, so of course many bankruptcies follow hiring them. It’ll be like blaming the fire department for fire deaths because the trucks always seem to be ne…
The author doesn't do a great job making the point, but there's more to it than that. In many cases, McKinsey encouraged strategies that harmed either the company, society, or both: - Shady accounting at Enron - Aggressive denial of claims at Allstate - Aggressive marketing of opioids at Purdue Pharma These strategies were not just one-off misfires, but deeply involved McKinsey's senior leadership over multiple years…
The company that actually advised Enron on how to do its false accounts, Arthur Andersen, was broken up. McKinsey's documented involvement was fluffy stuff on management culture and writing press releases citing Enron as a success story which look pretty funny in hindsight.
Some of the stupidest decisions I've ever witnessed has been driven by multi-million dollar strategies from McKinsey. At a place I worked previously McKinsey advised in-housing software development to spark innovation and digital transformation. Then three years later in 2020 to it was advised that software development be outsourced to cut costs.
Obviously this was a move of utter insanity but for our executives it didn't matter. If McKinsey suggested it, we did it. There was literally no debate on these decisions no matter how hard we tried or how obvious of a mistake it was.
During my time at said company I was working on an innovation project which imo would have been fairly revolutionary for the company's future. For about a year we gathered input across the business and it was understood by every team we spoke to that this technology would be central to the continued success of the company. Importantly, it was understood the importance of us owning the IP and being market leaders in this technology so we could use it as leverage.
The cost of the project was estimated at around £100,000 - which was a fraction of what we were being billed by McKinsey every year. Encouraged by the the overwhelming support we got from every segment of the business and the relatively affordable development costs, we pitched our plan to the executive team.
A couple of weeks later we learnt that the executives deemed the project too expensive and sent us several companies who were suppliers of McKinsey who had built similar solutions. We tried to explain to executive team that the tech we wanted to build didn't yet exist and these solutions from McKinsey's suppliers were no where near ready for rollout, and in most cases these suppliers were actively lying about their tech. But it was an impossible battle. In their eyes we knew nothing despite months of research and McKinsey's word may as well have been gospel.
I left the company shortly after this and have heard things have continued to go down hill. I guess I never understood why the executive team seemed to just defer all of their executive decision making to McKinsey in the first place, especially given the lack of success and costs. Why was our own executive team not better placed to form corporate strategy? Is it common for corporate executive teams to just serve as puppets to large consultancy firms like McKinsey?
The relationship said company had with McKinsey was unlike any I've ever seen before. In my experience suppliers are normally on the backfoot, not calling the shots, yet this doesn't seem to be the case for McKinsey. It seems many corporates are more than willing to follow McKinsey over a cliff and I have no idea why.