If we were to rank large companies based on how horrible they are to society then certainly McKinsey is indeed “far from a normal company.” They’re far lower than the normal company, in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say they’re not even in the top 75%. Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking have caused objectively (and subjectively) orders of magnitude more harm to our society than a bunch of reviled white collar consultants whose only real power is to give a voice to and action plan for all the bad ideas that a company has.
It’s easy to sit here and talk shit about management consultants while forgetting that management consultants aren’t coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn’t the common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like McKinsey do is “parrot back something a lower level grunt already knows”? Someone at the company gave them every idea they’ve ever had, or so the argument goes.
They can’t both be totally useless mouth pieces while also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.
Having worked at a large management consulting company, the harm isn’t direct but it’s still there. These companies have incredible leverage, but it’s from credentials not competence. Economic harm isn’t as obvious as say water pollution, but diffuse harm is still harm.
Anyway, the average company does all the stuff you don’t really think about like making pots, windows, staplers, hearing aids etc. It’s the extreme outliers that people talk about not the dozen small factories making decorative concrete flagstones, etc.
Look at it in tech: Some FB engineers are INCREDIBLY smart and good - but the, as you say, "diffuse harm" they do is still *harm*
FFS when I was at Lockheed and we got audited for SOX the execs were stealing stocks from the newer employees and giving those stocks to the execs
and the auditors, I think it was PWC, gave use a green passing grade and employees got fucked.
Some of the execs went on to Solyndra and we all know about how they stole 700 million from the USG...
(look at the SEC claims for Solyndra, where weeks before shutting their employees out without notice, they were giving out huge bonuses to execs and certain employees - e.g. they gave a $40,000 bonus to the IT manager that locked out all the accounts of employees)
Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....
I'm not arguing that the harm isn't there. I'm arguing that the harm they cause is second order and smaller.
And just as a small rebuttal: the small companies are usually owned by larger companies. So while they may not be "the company" people think of, they're still part of "that company." The connection is certainly just as direct as a McKinsey-client connection.
> Social media, other big (and small) tech, pharma, and banking
If you're ordering by importance, I 100% agree with "social media" being at the top of the list, and this almost cannot be emphasized enough.
I say almost because this article is about McKinsey and the role it played in the opioid crises. As an article it's also light on details, so I'm let down that I come to HN-- which is often great at filling in details-- and begin to read low-effort exchanges about the implications of someone's hair cut.
What do people know about McKinsey's relationship with Purdue in this case of pushing opioids into treatments where they didn't belong? I'd like to know more about that. And when I can blithely complain about the shit UX of a billion dollar company on HN and get a direct response from management, I'd expect information from PR nerds about McKinsey's role in the opioid crises and the ongoing lawsuits against them to flow to HN, too.
It isn't productive if we keep hop-scotching over the meat of every article to talk about some other hazard to society that isn't mentioned in the article. If that's going to be the flow then the next article that pops up about Google's monopolistic practices will instantly veer off into whatabout Visa/Mastercard's monopolistic practices, as it did before.
It’s easy to sit here and talk shit about management consultants while forgetting that management consultants aren’t coming up with these ideas in a vacuum. Isn’t the common refrain of an MBA-hater that all consultants like McKinsey do is “parrot back something a lower level grunt already knows”? Someone at the company gave them every idea they’ve ever had, or so the argument goes.
They can’t both be totally useless mouth pieces while also being evil geniuses responsible for this stuff.