This really bothers me. I understand the point of the article is that they're charging a lot of money for an inexperienced consultant and no bias (discrimination) was meant, however, age is irrelevant. There are a lot of very "experienced" 23 year olds, as long as you're asking them about the work they've done. There are a lot of people in their 50s with very little experience (as their actual experience is irrelevant to the topic at hand or their actual experience has been very repetitive).
I think we need to be a bit more conscious of unconscious bias towards age (in either direction).
If you know anyone personally who works at McKinsey, you know them to be brilliant, humble, hardworking, and unfailingly likeable. Think Pete Buttigieg. It's hard to square this with the company's public reputation in anti-establishment screeds.
There's a lot to unpack here, but the general gist is that McKinsey is overpaid for mediocre services. It's hard to argue against that, and McK in particular does have some insanely unjustifiable rates, but I do think the author has a bit of a misunderstanding of why consultancies are hired in the first place. To be clear, when a consultancy like McK puts a 23 year old analyst on a project, the $50k/week bill isn't j…
It seems like people do really well for themselves after they leave McKinsey, do you think this is mostly a function of the cache having McKinsey on your resume brings? What skills are really developed as a management consultant?
If you know anyone personally who works at McKinsey, you know them to be brilliant, humble, hardworking, and unfailingly likeable. Think Pete Buttigieg. It's hard to square this with the company's public reputation in anti-establishment screeds.
I guess you meant this to be sarcastic, right? Doltish, vainglorious, lazy and unfailingly boorish is what comes to my mind when I review the McKinsey people I've met.
I'm sorry but no case is made to support the idea that taxpayers are buying generic advice. Let's agree that the service buys a fresh college grad assigned full time. The grad might be a customer contact collecting and organizing customer issues before presenting them to internal subject matter experts, and then presenting those findings back to the client. I'd like to hear evidence to support how the service is fres…
> The grad might be a customer contact collecting and organizing customer issues before presenting them to internal subject matter experts, and then presenting those findings back to the client This might describe how technical consulting is done at big firms where the output is a product, but when the output is strategic documents... this is grunt work done by the front line analysts with a generic playbook. There i…
Respectfully do you work in the field, can you talk more to how you are able to do the work all on your own? Or is this an educated guess? If so, I doubt the service contract they were able to write was done by a fresh grad, I guess they are sourcing an internal legal team, and I suspect they have more internal experts to call on. It's common in legal and financial consulting to have junior staff do on-prem time consuming low value work that is a big waste of time for experts, who can be called in to join meetings remotely etc.
> ... Work of a 23-Year Old This really bothers me. I understand the point of the article is that they're charging a lot of money for an inexperienced consultant and no bias (discrimination) was meant, however, age is irrelevant. There are a lot of very "experienced" 23 year olds, as long as you're asking them about the work they've done. There are a lot of people in their 50s with very little experience (as their ac…
I fully agree and believe it would be much stronger to say that this is a consultant with "x months of experience" than "23 years old" which could mean anything from 'worked in this field since I was 16' to 'hired yesterday'.
If you know anyone personally who works at McKinsey, you know them to be brilliant, humble, hardworking, and unfailingly likeable. Think Pete Buttigieg. It's hard to square this with the company's public reputation in anti-establishment screeds.
These qualities are not incompatible with being hatchet-men or giving shitty advice.
I was a technical project management consultant for a long time. The value that most orgs get from a consultant isn't really in the advice the consultant gives them, it's the political cover to make changes they knew they should make all along, but didn't have the social capital or the focus to make those changes until they had a person in a chair across from them.
This !
In france, its a classic move by big companies to have mbb formalize what they already know: a need to restructure which unfortunately involves firing people. Its easier to justify restructuring because mbb said so than because the company says so for some reason ^^
McKinsey have messed up government policies all over the world when it comes to McDonaldization of Society. They are using simple measurements to model how complex societies should work, unfortunately this is only works for McKinsey and their partners.
From the linked article[1]: I find it absolutely INSANE that highly specialized organizations like the NSA rely on McKinsey to direct their future operations. These people have intimate knowledge of their organization and culture, shaped and hardened by years of challenges and learned experiences. What can they possibly think bringing an outsider in to do a complete overhaul will solve!? Why can they not apply their…
The organization may not need them, but the (at some level appointed) leadership may want to do something despite the organization...