I get the impression if you're at McKinsey you're basically a "made man" and are impervious to most normal professional consequences for failure, provided that failure does not significantly reduce billing. Also the people who hire you are in the same situation. So things like this are inevitable.

McKinsey is often hired to provide 'intellectual firepower' behind a proposed change that a high-level manager already wants to make. As such, McKinsey isn't really coming up with any original idea, so their past 'proposals' are somewhat irrelevant.

This is my experience working with McKinsey. The consultants on our team were incredibly smart and incredibly hard working, but internal politics and selling ideas to stakeholders is a huge part of their value.

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

I don’t understand this. Isn’t it common knowledge that hiring McKinsey or other consultants is often to do what you wanted while off loading the blame on the consultants? But because it’s a known reason for consultants shouldn’t it stop working? Why do people humor it and go along with the farce? Even then, even if they weren’t just cover, the person who hired them and let them do something poorly thought out or wrong should have responsibility.

Pretty sure they're paid to provide bad numbers and take the fall for the results. New York wanted to say it was doing something and it was successful, McKinsey helped them do it, and when someone bothered enough to fact check and they got caught McKinsey now takes most of the heat.

This will eventually lead to The Whorf Effect[1]. Nice work while they can get it though.

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

they all went to harvard so obviously if you question them you’re in the wrong

Because they are often there to tell someone what they want to hear, and give them a report to cover that person’s backside. No one ever got fired for following McKinsey, even if McKinsey was just an echo chamber.

"Outside experts" are a way for a so-called managerial class to signal that they are "taking action" while offloading negative outcomes and any accountability to firms like McKinsey via blame-shifting. The voting public is not exactly allowed to weigh in on whether high-priced consultants should be engaged.

But how is it tolerated if that’s a common purpose? Like the cat should be out of the bag by now on that tactic.

It's like "third party investigation."

In other words, BS with no teeth.

military industrial complex i think

No, that's why Boeing, Raytheon, et al are impervious to their mistakes. McK is impervious because they contract in such a way as to never actually have to deliver anything. A sea wolf sub is a tangible deliverable. You can tell it's not fit for purpose in a physical fashion. You can always BS around the kinds of soft deliverables that are specialties of McK.