Their fingerprints are all over numerous bad decisions in business and government in the past few decades[0]. These are the bare minimum, because there are quite likely many negative outcomes they have championed in their role as consultants that were never publicized or reported on.
Totally separate from the above is their absolutely mercenary tendency to work with anyone who will pay them[1][2].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china... [2] - https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-...
Elite management consulting firms (McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain, etc) exist to enable the worst impulses of leadership across the spectrum. The ends certainly justify scrutinizing the means.
"Comcast customer service has a huge number of employees. I'm not saying there aren't jerks in there, but..."
Devolving corporate responsibility (for the bad stuff) to individuals is of course the corporate preference. But at some point you run in to the "only the best people" problem - McKinsey hires them, trains them, assigns them and pays them, no matter how slippery McKinsey PR is, I keep seeing that name, McKinsey.
Any company the size of McKinsey around as long as McKinsey will have success and failure stories.
The proper way to evalaute is to take all things McKinsey did, normalize for background, and see how it performs compared to other methods of solving the same problems.
Cherry picking to make a claim is the 2nd worst form of evidence, outranked only by outright lying.
Firms like McKinsey, for reasons of trade secrets, confidentiality wrt their client book, discretion because of the nature of their work, etc don't have data available about the completeness of their outcomes. In fact, their white papers focus exclusively on successes. What about instances where their contribution has a not-zero impact (we could even include and offset the cost of their consultations against the total impact of advise offered, assuming it's followed)? Do you have a proposal for how to conduct such an analysis?
Furthermore, I would offer that much of the nature of their impacts isn't something we can know with mathematical precision and exists in the realms of the social sciences (a broad domain known to have major skew problems when measurements are taken, if at all).
So we are left with optics and moral/ethical assessments of the work they have done. Taking this into account, I am content with this approach and the conclusions I have arrived at.
But you're ok with cherry picking events to suit a narrative when advocating for change? Did you even try to find examples where they were successful in your eyes, or did you simply pick the examples that suit your claims?
>Do you have a proposal for how to conduct such an analysis?
Simply looking at how many customers are repeat customers shows that they're at least doing something their customers are willing to pay for. That's easily a vastly better metric then simply cherry picking examples on one side of an argument.
I'd suspect that current customers are vastly more aware of what value they provide than you'd pick up from news stories, especially if, as you contend, there's no way to know these details from outside views.
They've been around 95 years, 27k employees, 10B in annual revenue, a client list that is incredibly diverse, among every sector of society, among all political parties, and including a huge number of worldwide governments and companies. That alone should make you realize perhaps there is value in what they do, that thousands of customers think so, and that trying to paint them as "McKinsey make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes." is probably vastly short-sighted.
You then double down and claim it's probably even worse if one could see inside.
I would weight the opinions of their customers over those obviously cherry picking examples then making un-nuanced and sweeping generalizations. I am content with that approach. Seems more evidence based.
Take a big construction project. In the like of the Berlin airport. What do you think is more profitable for the consulting companies :
a) A well thought project, done in budget and in time. Where the consulting company gets the whole contract + all the bonuses associated with it.
b) A poorly managed project, that gets refinanced multiple times and that ends up being pushed back decades.
It's actually B. Consulting companies love long projects, because this allows them to place consultant for extended periods of time. And any consultant working for a client is a profitable consultant event without bonuses. Consulting companies hate projects that end up shorter than expected, because any bonus they might get from that project ends up being spent on consultant that are waiting for their next assignment.
The main KPI of any consulting company is "the %age of time you consultant are spending 'on assignment' vs 'on the bench'". And long projects where consultant are busy for years are the best way to bring that KPI to 100%, even when the underlying project is a complete mess. The only thing they get from shorter and better managed projects is a better image, which is easier and less expensive to get using marketing technique and PR.
However, zooming out, it's the incentive system that's completely broken: there is no skin in the game. Consulting firms are too detached from the consequences of their advice. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a nice book about this phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book)
You get to recommend a better approach to an industry or technology and then go off and do it all while having equity in the company.
So if you oversaw the build-out of a system and everything went smoothly, good, but nothing to talk about during promotions.
On the other hand, if there were difficult issues faced and you fire-fought, sent out late emails with decisions to clients, came up with memos documenting tricky situations, awesome! Promotion material!
Of course, sharp consultants figured this out and the sharpest ones looked the other way when design documents had landmines -- just so they had known manageable issues to "manage" and "save the day" with.
Bad incentives, bad outcomes.
The issue with the MBA field is that it tends to attract power hungry narcissists/psychopaths who enjoy holding power over others. Engineers like to tinker with stuff and be left alone.
(Disclosure: I do not have an MBA)