You’d make a good mark … I mean, client for them. The callowness of the McKiddsies they send over is matched only by their arrogance. These newly minted BA “experts”, brought in by executives who want to cover their arses with the McKinsey brand, regularly throw institutional memory out the window in favour of one-size-fits-all solutions (and in the process, inevitably fire the oldest and most expensive employees, which is the real point of the engagement). It’s a complete racket, and a multi-generational one.
For privileged and ambitious white kids, McKinsey is understood to be a very well-compensated apprenticeship, a checkbox on the CV and a stepping stone toward better and more lucrative careers. Connections and coming from the “right” kind of family are a key part of landing that gig.
[I say all this as a consultant myself, albeit one who worked corporate jobs for a decade before I even thought of offering advice for a fee]
So far, I’ve out-drank my kid’s millennial pals on every occasion we’ve engaged (except for my son, chip off the old tottering block), and I have to say, unlike myself, they’re too damaged to get up and go to work the next day…so…that is…something about millennials…I guess.
A former Secretary* of the Australian Defence Department gave a speech shorty after taking the role on where he decried what Defence was spending on consultants. His speech included this corker:
"What’s the difference between a consultant and a shopping trolley?
A shopping trolley has a mind of its own, and you can fit more food and wine into a consultant."
*chief bureaucrat, not political appointee for those thinking US secretary, or UK secretary of state
Things like this make me hope we are living in a simulator, and they are running all these laws through it to see what will happen when horrible people are in control, and somewhere out there better decisions are being made thanks to the hell we are living through.
That’s also been my takeaway over the past 25 years. An executive who I know hired McKinsey (or BCG or Accenture) is an executive I’ll never fully trust or respect.
And a politician who comes out of McKinsey’s corporate culture? No thanks.
After seeing what McK- did our our large research department,
i can only imagine the damage those high achieving 23yos could
do with the power of the government.
Rip-Off- Its a must read for anyone about to be McKinns-fied.
Most of the tricks he described I saw acted out in our department, the post-in note gambit, the pressuring of senior management (I’ll go to your boss) etc…
“Do you have any experience with regulatory environment for anti-body therapeutics and biosimilars for cancer treatments?”
“I took biology as a sophomore at Havard” - was the straight faced response.
Yeah - the uplift on a 23-yr old that’s not Chelsea Clinton is high. If they made over $100k I’d be surprised. They also made that kid work 60 hr weeks on top of travel and accommodations- something only a small % can sustain longer than a few years. Murica!
While I’m sure there’s a lot of higher-level grifters above the Pete B’s and Chelsea C’s doing the “actual work” at a consulting firm, making “<100K” (i.e. most likely 80-90K) as a fresh college grad is pretty fucking far from “peanuts”.
A couple of years making a little over $100k and expense-account living just out of undergrad is all they need – most of them move on quickly to top MBA programmes* and then executive positions that pay a lot more for a lot fewer hours after they tick off the management consulting box on their resumes. It’s the privileged white kid’s version of “suffering”.
[* which typically require two years of work experience after undergrad]
I worked with a McKinsey consultant in Afghanistan, the guy was in his late 40s at the time, supposedly had all this business experience, and was absolutely useless. He had been in country for about two weeks when he called everyone together for a meeting and told us that he had figured out how to fix everything (literally everything). Neither before nor since have I seen so many eyes roll at once.
The McKinsey “lifers” (i.e. the ones who go back after getting their MBAs or never leave) are either incompetents who can’t get hired anywhere else or grifters who want in on the racket.
Out of curiosity, what do they expect him to reveal, when essentially everything a consultant does and the names of their clients are all under NDA? I don’t think we want another president who ignores his contractual obligations, either.
I think that falls under the heading of ‘his problem’. If a sizable part of your resume for a position of immense trust can’t be talked about, then you can’t be trusted for the position. If it matters to Buttiegieg or his former employer that he gets that position, then they can renegotiate their own NDAs.
I thought back to this discussion as I read the following article.
In particular, this paragraph
We received bills from doctors my husband never met. Some of these bills were understandable, like for the radiologist who read the scans. But others were for bedside treatment from people who never came anywhere near the bed to deliver the care.
Andrej had a small finger fracture with a cut that needed some stitches, which a resident, a surgeon-in-training, sutured. But the $1,512 billed came in the name of a senior surgeon, as if he had done the work.
