Guards who very often work for private companies are essentially given godlike powers of life, death and torture with no consequences. Its pretty revolting how we allow wards of the state to be treated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey (Link is disturbing)

It really appears that the US has no bottom when it comes to the treatment of its most vulnerable, and whether or not these are good people, they are in a power structure where they are indeed the most vulnerable. As a society we should strive to be better than this.

The US prison system is a patronage system, not a profit system. It provides stable, nontradable jobs for a large group of relatively low skill people. Guards, cops, and corporate vendors to those groups. It turns out that Microsoft is a good example of that latter category.

Managing a patronage system is a particularly potent form of political power. Patronage systems underwrite most examples of "Machine Politics", particularly Chicago style Machine Politics.

I would personally like to see the word "patronage" return to American political discourse. It's something our ancestors talked a lot about, but we don't.

Patronage systems brought down the USSR.

The industry is outdated as its "insights" are relatively common knowledge among F500 company executives. This may be why government is hiring them more often. Regardless the industry is on the decline. I wrote about this 7 years ago:

https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/146227/When-not-to-h...

You have an urgent problem, your stakeholders want change now, but you can get people off your back if you hire McKinsey.

Or, you know what you want to do already, but it’s a big change so you get McKinsey to sign off on it.

If it doesn’t go well you have cover ie we made the best possible decision we could - we hired McKinsey!

It's a good business model, kind of like hiring a flashy hairdresser that gives very expensive but often terrible haircuts - but when people are told that this famous stylist did it, they all just go 'ooooh...'

> His top deputy, Anthony Shorris, and other aides decided to hire a consulting firm. They solicited proposals from firms on a pre-approved list from the previous administration. Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract.

> The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.

Now that's a reason a deal like this actually makes sense! I give you $27m in taxpayer money, and when I leave, you give me $x in return. That's a deal that makes a lot more sense than paying 24 year old NYU grads to solve big problems with powerpoint and linear regressions.

Thanks. That would explain my perception that McKinsey has been trading on its reputation for the last 15 years at least.

At this point I'd only consider Bain, of the big three - and that's because I don't know much about them.

It's one of those system traps they liked to talk about: the industry is in decline, so the good people leave.

The Amazon apocalypse in retail made Global F2000 clients realize they needed to change how they treated tech. They wanted to buy, we found a way to sell it.

Do you have any examples?

A lot of basic statistical analysis, including regression of sales data, is no longer solely the domain of consultants. Similarly, cost level analysis (unit costs, profitability levers, margin analysis) is often done in-house via Financial Planning & Analysis teams.

The easiest sign of this is that many ex-consultants work in F500 companies so they bring their prior knowledge in-house.

It carries a lot of weight to say you worked with McKinsey on a proposal.

1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect

In other words, BS with no teeth.

1) Hiring a consulting firm is a great way to get the heat off of your own back. It's amazing this works too, because, at the end of the day, the consultants don't have control! They just make recommendations that you can choose to accept or not. NYC was in full control the entire time but here they get to shift the blame to a 3rd party without any actual control. What a great deal as a manager to remove culpability.

2) It's amazing how much everyone hates consultants and immediately begin to pile on them in these cases without any consideration for the culpability of those who took the recommendations. It makes #1 that much stronger!

3) Ultimately whenever I see this I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people who took the recommendations and implemented them. Don't let them (the managers of NYC jails) shift the blame to an out group you're conditioned to hate when the entire locus of control is on the managers!!!

Simply put, they are aware of their biases, they try and adjust contractually to align, they have smart people (because they can afford to be picky) who have a tremendous work ethic. Just don’t let them anywhere near Swiss Airways! [1]

[1] https://tbkconsult.com/did-mckinsey-company-kill-swissair/

Often, I don't think you hire McKinsey to solve your problems - you hire them when your problems are already out of control and you need to deflect the blame. They give it their best shot, if they turn it around then they're heroes, if not, you can blame them and they still get paid.

(1) Partners would gladly communicate that back—the payoff to keeping one gig on track is far less valuable than avoiding public scrutiny

(2) If they did ask to move the goalposts, I suspect the city would have been amenable

Doubling down to bet on moonshots is not McKinsey’s MO. What are managing consultants good for? Starbucks on two corners of the intersection, breakfast menu at your favorite fast food eatery, and many (MANY) restructuring plans (rightsizing initiatives, aka RIFs)

Heads we gain credit for giving you an amazing strategy, tails you lose because you don't know how to implement our amazing strategy.

It's a Heads I Win Tails You Lose situation.

But it's surprising how lucrative it can be to set yourself up as a Roulette Coach.

That said, I'm sure they gave upper management some validation that we weren't just drinking our own Koolaid. And they gave business planning staff a fancy spreadsheet model to play with--which helped keep said staff out of our hair.

Ultimately, the product was fairly successful although the company couldn't really overcome a bad strategic position.

It's the classic can't-be-wrong-no-matter-what-happens situation. Since there is no practical way to re-run the experiment, they can always claim "at least we made it less bad." And the clients are prone to buy into it also, because it makes them look like they didn't make a bad decision to engage the consultants.

Same thing frequently seen with politicians and their supporters.

> The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.

I think ultimately what happened was most of what made them famous in the 60s, 70s, and 80s has largely become standard business practice. With the low hanging fruit gone they've moved onto laundering accountability and/or very expensive side-steps of corporate bureaucracy.

However one thing that is less talked about is that external consultants are extremely useful to implement unpopular decisions or to 'settle' disputed decisions.

If investors appoint a new CEO and he needs to implement something unpopular like fire people, it is much easier to get the whole board behind the decision if an external consultancy "analizes" the issue and proposes measures (usually aligned with the CEO's direction).

The same thing happens with 'factions' of the board if some people are behind a proposal but are being blocked be another 'faction', an external consultancy can act as a arbiter (usually in the direction of those who hired them).

A useful consequence is that in terms of accountability you can always take cover behind the recommendation of the subject matter expert consultants.

All that said there are definitely a lot of bright people with insightful knowledge in that field. My point is that consultancy as a business also ends up serving a less glamorous purpose.

Most of the time, we’re explicitly hired to keep things quiet. We rarely advertise clients, much less engagement outcomes.

But be sure most revenues come from long lasting relationships. In some cases, decades old relationships. And unlike what some commenter said, revenues are growing double digits % YoY, despite BCG being over 50yo (McKinsey is almost 100yo)

So I guess MC delivers at least for those singing the check.

“From 2009 to 2019, BCG’s global sales grew from $2.75 billion to $8.5 billion, and its workforce expanded from 6,900 to 21,000 employees worldwide, tripling in size. “ https://www.bcg.com/en-us/press/12march2020-bcg-revenues-rea...

Because McKinsey works in so many areas, it has a huge portfolio of outcomes. There's not a lot of public visibility into what each exact outcome might be. So the firm (and others like it) are able to benefit from this opacity.

To wit: top consulting firms are able to present prospective clients with a recap of their best engagements and wins. Is that representative? Cherry picked? No one ever knows.

They showed this during a recruiting event once.

so it must be true !

Sarcasm apart, selling to young people the dreams is probably their 2nd most profitable activity (after selling to C-level)

I’m happy I didn’t bite though. Friends of me did and I don’t envy the 80 hour weeks they worked.

This happens a lot when I'm reading ProPublica. It's fascinating while I'm reading it, but at the end I'm left wondering what exactly just happened, and whether I got duped by sophisticated outrage porn. They look for dysfunction with tunnel vision to the detriment of coherence and context.

McKinsey seem to have done that extremely well in this case. They allowed the jail to continue running, violence to continue, no extra funding was used and the federal regulator was assuaged. A new mayor avoided a costly, expensive, divisive, problem from a predecessor.

27.5m is cheap for that. That's why the mayor will hire them again next year.

This makes no sense, right? Who would ever choose to spend this money. Even if you are as cynical as possible about the intelligence of NYC public servants, they would never choose to spend money in this way.

Whenever I see something like this, I ask "where did the $27.5m go?" It didn't just enter a void called McKinsey; it was bonused out to people and given to subcontractors. And IME, whenever it makes no sense where public money went when judged through the lens of the good of the people, it ends up making a lot of sense when judged through the lens of paying off special interests and political allies.

Why would you hire a bunch of generalists who are probably less informed in your sector than your own staff and lack any track record of building great companies? What a waste! Go hire someone who's proven themselves instead. Maybe a champion from your competitor, a hero from the open source community, a promising young startup who's running circles around you.

Some quotes from the article:

- Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract.

- As they formulated a reform plan, the consultants did not solicit the views of inmates, clinic staff or others with direct insights into drivers of violence.

- The city’s bill from McKinsey would include $5.5 million for data analytics... These tools, however, proved I'll-suited

- Officials discovered coding errors in spreadsheets used to collect violence data from Restart units. The flaws were significant.

If you're going to hire a big firm like this because you think they bring reputation and prestige, at least tie a portion of their remuneration to performance outcomes.

when management wants something done but has to offload the responsibility to some external brand,

so in case things go south they can shift the blame. Seems to work in this case.

The thing that baffles me is not that the majority of McKinsey consultants would go along with it but there are almost zero whistleblowers. I guess it shows the power of McKinsey's narrative and the strength of the McKinsey alumni (read: mafia) to blacklist the whistleblower.

TLDR: Thinking ants working hard to sprinkle consultorial fairy-dust.

https://archive.is/Lj9Wv#selection-757.83-757.107

Most people don't care about prison reform because it's a place for bad people who did bad things, and they don't deserve good things.

While that attitude is fucked up on the morality of it alone, it also ends up being pro-crime, as it promotes a system that is designed to create more criminals.

EDIT: Also, I absolutely agree, fwiw. If the discussion hasn't been had in your country, please do push for it.

The prison system is broken because hanging around with morally broken people is not good for anyone.

Let me point out that prison sentences for minor drug offenses are quite rare so we don’t have much of that particular problem.

It's not that they wanted more crime -- they wanted criminalized behavior to wield as a weapon against people of color (and hippies, in Nixon's case).

If it was ever about reducing harm from drugs there's plenty of better ways to do that, don't you think?

First time I've heard of it as well. I like it.

"Rehabilitation" has a nice ring to it, but the only institutional approach for that is education. It would be cheaper to pay for an apartment/tuition/food than to house someone in a prison: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/19/how-much-does-it-cost...