McKinsey and Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

63 25 7 years ago

currentaffairs.org

vsskanth• 7 years ago

Excellent article, thanks for sharing.

I wonder, if one wants to disrupt management consulting, what would it be ? Massive open annonymized datasets ?

GoodJokes• 7 years ago

Honestly, workplace democratization. Management consulting depends on illegitimate hierarchies and elitism that discounts regular worker opinions and elevated opinions of “experts.” Consultants tell you how to read your watch. They are by and large not something to be disrupted, but just eliminated.

vanusa4• 7 years ago

This whole "management consulting" thing is but a symptom of a deeper, underlying problem.

What really needs to be disrupted is the governing ideology of the political-economic system itself.

voisin• 7 years ago

Please expand on the second paragraph.

rayiner2• 7 years ago

I’m sitting here in Tokyo, in a now rich country that was a developing nation when my dad was born, arguing on my magic pocket computer with someone who may we be in the opposite side of the world. All thanks to the current “governing ideology of the political-economic system.”

Making the case that needs to be “disrupted” is a tough road you’ve chosen to hoe.

euroPoor2• 7 years ago

who would have thought that capitalist realism wasn’t the antidote to all of the world’s problems? certainly not thatcherite or reaganite policy building ideologists!

CharlesColeman• 7 years ago

capitalist realism

I've never heard this term before, but it's perfect. The implicit assumption that certain capitalist economic theories are literally the real world (rather than limited and imperfect models) is something I've been noticing more and more, but never had a term for.

mach5• 7 years ago

highly recommend the book: https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...

cryoshon3• 7 years ago

excellent article about the flaws of mckinsey as an establishment. it's true that their grift is inexcusable, amoral, and a burden to humanity -- but the OP covered that. the biggest myth surrounding mckinsey is that they're competent.

my favorite part about people from mckinsey has been that they're stunningly incapable. need some quick research done? after a lot of hand-holding, you'll be given an uninsightful and dubiously comprehensive summary of the mainstream view on the topic of your choice and a pivot table you didn't want or need, roughly 10 days after you needed it. you won't need to proofread the report, of course. but that isn't what you cared about anyway.

need something obscure and complex deeply analyzed and fully understood in an insightful way? again, you'll get some flashy combination of excel and powerpoint shit you don't need or ask for, maybe even ahead of schedule, but you'll also get an irrelevant speech about whatever tangentially topical prestigious person/institution the mckinsey person recently bumped elbows with. you'll also realize that the person working on the thing you wanted doesn't really have any understanding of the thing you wanted them to understand at all -- they're just regurgitating whatever they could find without analysis.

however, they've all been imminently presentable people who can articulate themselves clearly and appear to be very serious. this has been my experience with no fewer than 4 former employees -- all of whom were hired to perform tasks exactly like one would expect a business management consultant to be capable of -- but take it with a grain of salt anyway.

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

Never underestimate the market for some credentialed person who will tell you what you already wanted to hear.

cryoshon3• 7 years ago

ah yeah, i'm glad you mentioned this because that's the one thing i forgot to include in my original comment: former mckinsey people seem to only tell you what they think you want to hear. they're the ultimate sycophants -- and my experience is that they're the best that money can buy for the task of telling you that you're right, especially when you're completely wrong.

it's a real pain, especially when you don't have enough information on an issue to form an opinion yet. you'll get all kinds of probing questions trying to sneakily suss out exactly what you're expecting to see or which way you want them to affirm your opinion on the subject at hand. it seems like their target customer is always someone who wants to add legitimacy to their bad ideas, and they will treat you as such even if you don't want to fit that bill.

they're incapable of being objective regarding facts of reality because their mental model for truth is that something that is "right" or "true" only per the opinion of whichever authority figure is the most salient at the moment. it explains a lot about why they're so amoral. it also explains a lot about why they fit in so well to the world of the elites: they're not ever going to have the moral gumption to speak truth to power... or even to the disempowered.

g_sch• 7 years ago

I think the article makes a pretty persuasive case why competence isn't a core selling point of McKinsey (or many other management consultancies) anyway. What many companies want is for an external party to tell them to do what they've already decided to do anyway, but would rather not take personal accountability for. They're paying for the amorality - if the suggestion comes from someone else, it's not _you_ being amoral, it's a consultancy with a prestigious brand that everyone else listens to, even if this unspecified "everyone else" is hiring McKinsey for the same reason you are: to defer blame for doing something abhorrent.

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

Yes, just so. Criticizing McKinsey-type outfits for being amoral misses the point. For them, amorality is the product.

Maven9112• 7 years ago

My gosh this is incredibly accurate and my experience as well, though I could never clearly articulate it on why until now. Can you give some more stories on specific instances?

cryoshon3• 7 years ago

sure.

while working on a project intended for a government institution, a team at mckinsey hired a digital illustrator to create a handful of beautiful scenes from a high middle ages fantasy world.

i have to say, the illustrations weren't relevant to the project, but they really made the powerpoint deck look utterly gorgeous. the content of the powerpoint, intended to be highly insightful and fuel for decisionmakers, had about three paragraphs of written content across ~50 slides.

the rationale for this very light amount of information was that the intended audience of the presentation would have their eyes glaze over if they saw anything with more than one sentence's worth of exposition. the audience -- government decisionmakers -- needed to be drip-fed the content they'd paid for, or else they wouldn't understand it.

at the time, i thought it was incredibly limiting for the client, even if the mckinseyites were correct about the client's poor ability to digest material -- which was no sure bet. of course, in retrospect this entire rationale was just a cover for the utter lack of insightfulness/knowledge/competency brough to the table by the mckinsey team. the project was light on information and heavy on illustration because the team hadn't ever had a clue about the substance of what they were trying to do.

the lesson here -- and there are other anecdotes in this vein too -- is that the mckinseyites are adept at gaslighting both themselves and their clients such that the innumerable shortcomings of their output are slickly presented as features.

tehjoker• 7 years ago

Just a reminder that Mayor Pete is an alum of this organization.

TurkishPoptart• 7 years ago

I did not know that!

jshaqaw• 7 years ago

I worked at McKinsey a while ago. I’m willing to bet this person was an Analyst (the recent college grads). Analysts were most likely to believe the firm’s marketing schpiel about how important they are in the world. In reality, McKinsey just kinda puts out power point decks. People past a certain level at McKinsey admitted that in quiet confidence.

McKinsey and Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

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