Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants.
The losers are only
(a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures.
(b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc.
(c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc.
As someone who works at McKinsey I get kind of irritated by this meme. It is objectively and obviously not true for external blame because all work by McKinsey is NDA’d. you’re almost never allowed to share that McKinsey helped on anything because we want to maintain firewalls between teams working for competitors / vendors / customers internally and externally as much as possible.
I have several decades of experience as a software engineer and have worked at several different companies that hired management consultants to rubber stamp decisions they had clearly already made. In each case, the company proceeded to deflect blame to the consultants internally, when employees got mad about the decisions. I have heard similar stories from friends and colleagues. So at least your skepticism about internal blame is unfounded.
I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.
Are you sure your experience really maps to McKinsey? There are countless garden-variety Office Space bean counter management consultancies that are called in as RIF shock troops etc. My experience with McKinsey is them being strategic consultants to C-suite where nobody is looking to "shift blame" or a docile rubber stamp. They're far too expensive if that's what you're looking for.
I don't recall if my experiences involved McKinsey or not. I do understand that not everyone looking for a rubber stamp needs to involve a firm as expensive as McKinsey, however I disagree with the general assertion that they're always too expensive for this.
If there are very large amounts of money or very risky behavior involved (e.g. behavior that could trigger an investigation by a government agency), it's sometimes worth paying for the best of the best, so you can avoid any questions along the lines of "why did you use JoeSchmoe's RubberStampsRUs Consulting, when you could have used one of the big firms?"
I can’t guarantee that my experience scales to the entire firm but this doesn’t really resonate. I’ve never come into a project with a day one answer. I think the archetypal example of what you describe is organizing layoffs, in which case the company needs to shed heads and needs to know where it can do so. Which is sort of a day one answer. I’ve never touched this sort of thing Personally.
I’m not sure who the rubber stamp would be for either. Your subordinates I guess? But that seems not particularly important tbh.
I'll just reiterate what I said above, I urge you to consider the ethics of your current employer and consider seeking employment with a different company.
I’d rather work on something I believe to be good at a big decentralized company like McKinsey than something like what many / most large tech companies do. There’s basically no relationship to the other parts of the firm
Sure, I get that it's a big company and that not everything it does involves selling people dangerous drugs that ruined their lives [1], while simultaneously consulting for the government regulators that regulated those drug companies [2], or aiding government corruption [3], or assisting dictators with their assassinations of pesky journalists [4]. But it's all the same company. I wouldn't want to work for big tech either, but to imply that McKinsey can be better than them in _any way_ is completely laughable.
When I worked with McKinsey folks (in a group directly under a C-suite who was ex-McKinsey themselves), it seemed pretty clear that for mega-large companies, external consultants can call shots and "get things done" because they don't have to "play politics" and are thus "objective" and thereby, weirdly, more loyal to the company's mission ... than its own employees.
It's pretty wild to watch the McKinsey folks break out their lexicon of mental tools and jargon, "design thinking" etc, and often pretty nauseating. But ultimately, it's the fault of big organizations being pathetically ineffective that they write the big checks to McKinsey and others.
McKinsey in particular seems to have done a good job projecting themselves as the "strategic" folks in these strategy groups that advise the top brass, pilot innovation groups etc. The other big consultancies seem to specialize differently, for instance Accenture I associate with big ERP integrations and such.
Mostly accurate. Big expensive C suite mandated consulting group can make things happen when the org is so shibari’d in its own red tape that it can’t do anything. That is the number one reason to hire a consulting team.
The projecting thing is, imo, not about optics. It’s just a different product. Accenture is a body shop. McKinsey is mostly just getting a strategy done. It’s transparent in both firms marketing and proposals.
No, not at all. It should not surprise anyone that hiring the same people to solve the same problem at different places will result in similar outcomes frequently.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that corporations are an elaborate scheme to provide some people with money and status without them actually providing value to society. Mainly the MBA class. "You know what this rowboat with two people rowing and six managing needs? Another management layer." Leeches like McKinsey are right at the heart of it.
If you add enough indirection and shared responsibility, the most atrocious outcomes become palatable.
Another way to view them, is as slow AIs directly driving the sixth mass extinction event.
So you are suggested that the police get a pass because we already accept that some are bad but protesters shouldn’t because some people don’t realize that rioters like to hang out and cause mayhem at protests?
No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.
It stopped being that the moment it turned into riots.
Those still participating are complicit at the very least and I would hazard a guess are well fucking aware of what they're doing.
I should clarify, I am well aware there are still ongoing peaceful protests.
Those are not an issue, and nobody on this side is confusing them or labelling them as rioters.
If you want to see what biased but relatively fair coverage of this, go watch tim pool on youtube. There is a bit of exaggeration but by and large what he speaks is mostly pretty solid reasoning.
The extreme left has taken over this issue and is destroying our chances at finally removing trump. And I'm pissed about this, because the issues these riots started over are real, and need resolution, but these riots don't result in this outcome.
They result in more people falling down the right side of things.
> No sane person can look at the riots and say this is protest it stopped being that long ago.
Plenty of us sane people can still see the protests going on, the actual riots are not that common but are covered disproportionately by the press (but especially by FoxNews who is making out Portland and Seattle as apocalyptic hellscapes). I assume you are either in Portland and just not paying attention or you are getting all your information from the media.
Whataboutism. And, yeah, that was super bad. So, for that matter, was the whole colonial era. But none of those guys are still the leaders of nuclear-capable nation states, so they're a little less relevant than Putin to our prospects going forward.
> are not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
This is not a court of law. My standard for "observing events as likely true on internet comment threads" falls somewhere below "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" and somewhere above "preponderance of evidence." But I'd say for these cases we're way closer to the former than the latter.
> Wikipedia link.
On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.[14][15]
The argument here is that USA cannot claim moral high ground when USA is actively committing the same act. Blindly claiming whataboutism without even attempting to refute this argument and is, therefore, a form of intellectual dishonesty.
> This is not a court of law, so that's kind of irrelevant.
It is important to make reasonable arguments in defense of your claims even outside courts of law.
> On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.
This is neither here nor there. This whole argument is inconclusive.
US can't just invade any country. US would find it very difficult to invade a country with second strike nuclear capability. Even if nuclear war is out of the question, US would find it very difficult to invade, say China: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/china-u...
But is that the norm? Cuba, Panama, Syria, Egypt, Iraq v Iran, Ukraine, Libya, Yemen, Somalia. The US takes sides all over the planet; Sometimes the US backs a 'state' and sometimes the US backs 'rebels.'
Why are you solely blaming the companies? Are the government officials doing their jobs? If the government officials are being corrupt by accepting lobbying money and helping the corporations; they are as much (if not more) to blame for the situation as "for-profit companies". At least, for-profit companies exist to make a profit. The government, on the other hand, exists to defend the citizens.
What also makes moderation hard is that it can be abused. For example, anyone who is influential and persuasive enough can be labelled a Nazi by political opponents and targeted campaigns can be run to get them deplatformed
The larger problem here is that many technology companies have become virtual monopolies. If you can be deplatformed from Youtube + Facebook + Twitter then you will not be heard at all. Afterward, your political opponents can go online on these platforms and call you a 'Nazi' a million times. At this point, what Joseph Goebbels said applies: 'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it'[1]. This causes even more platforms to deplatform you and eventually, it becomes a cycle.
The core of the problem is that these companies are too big, too influential. They must be broken up
Yes, totally agree. These big companies must be broken up, or treated with a much greater degree of regulation (effectively holding them to the standards that the government is held to, as sole provider of some functions).
The larger larger problem is that those giants are owned lock stock and two smoking barrels by advertisers. You can say anything you want on the internet so long as it doesn't lose Proctor & Gamble or Mars or Pepsi Co any money.
I love how people are trying to justify the West's practices in asinine ways. The west needs to be criticized, ostracised and banned in the strongest way possible.
West lost its credibility long time ago. They have mismanaged their brand to reap short term benefits. Blah blah blah....
Yep, that's what I was thinking of. Didn't realize they actually stopped using it. I haven't watched TV in many years, I am falling behind the times.
A quick Google search suggests they now say "most watched most trusted" instead. That seems more like the garden variety lying-with-an-element-of-truth I expect to see from an entertainment news source.
The losers are only
(a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures.
(b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc.
(c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc.
We should all get MBAs and enjoy the gravy train.