Ah, 2011. I had thought that Blackrock were the new Bond villains.
Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#52McKinsey 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.
Capitalism existed for centuries before the McKinsey, which is an outgrowth of the 20th century movement of “scientific management.”
Not as such it did not.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=capitalism&yea...
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#53Earlier 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…
There's always going to be "management", especially if ownership is diffuse. Where there is management, there will be management consultants (of one style or another).
Decisions will no longer be hidden if the workers all have a say in decision making, that changes the information power asymmetry to being more symmetrical and gives people the power to speak out to regulators.
If managers start hiding things, workers could easily remove the managers. We also should remember that managers are workers too, almost never are they the capital owners
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#54McKinsey’s biggest structural issue is extremely decentralized leadership. Senior partners are not accountable to anyone and there’s limited ethics oversight. 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.
thats the basics of how limited partnerships work
Eh I must not have made my point well. Most similar partnerships (e.g., Goldman, Bain) have more structural oversight
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I understand that, but when the decisions are made by more people there is a greater chance of some of them speaking up and saying "hey, maybe we shouldn't destroy the environment" instead of when decisions are made by a few behind closed doors with consultants being paid to provide cover 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…
The big issue is "stakeholder mismatch".
A worker-owned coal mine has workers who are going to say "keep the place open forever to pay our rent", but also workers who will say "I'm dying of black lung" or "the river my kids like to swim in is purple from runoff" which will help moderate the decision making process. Maybe they stay open, but do a better job of managing emissions, because they're accountable to people who are directly impacted. Maybe they are more directly aware that there's N years of viability left in the coal business and start looking to bootstrap alternatives sooner.
When the stakeholders are predominantly outside investors, there's no reason for them to ask about mitigration or the long term. If they realize that coal is dead in ten years, they personally aren't impacted, they just have to hype the price long enough to sell the asset to some other sucker. Their kids aren't swimming in waste products, so go ahead, funnel it directly into the river.
I always figured the strongest mix was to find a way to manage that represented the worker stakeholders and the consumer stakeholders (the ones who are going to walk away after you shrinkflated the product to death). Solve their needs, and capital will get its money back.
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#56Is there somewhere I can go to understand why McKinsey has almost cult-like status among large corporates? 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 deve…
> Is there somewhere I can go to understand why McKinsey has almost cult-like status among large corporates?
Look into how many CEOs and executives of large corporations are former McKinsey partners.
Re: Is McKinsey and Co. The Root of All Evil? (2011)
#57McKinsey 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…
Once you read this utterly true and appalling state of affairs it changes your frustration to disillusionment around corporate leadership.
Large consultancies have subverted many large organisations with a revolving door hiring system - jump into a consultancy, jump back out and bring your consultancy in to fix the company, years later jump back out to the consultancy in a senior role that's low effort as a reward.
Before I worked with consultants directly at large banks I thought they must have all been geniuses but that's not the case, they're merely people from good universities who follow the instructions of the more senior people inside the consultancy rather than independent thinking. Basically they're bodies.