No, this sub-thread is a response to:

> The whole business is a scam built around sending in some 26 year-old with an Ivy League degree and $100 haircut to regurgitate snippets from articles in HBR.

There are a lot of scammy consultants, but there are also tons of bad employees and whole bad divisions in companies. I run a website design and SEO firm that is highly successful because we actually do the work of building a website and the work of doing the online marketing. Many clients have internal IT or online marketing divisions that are incapable of even making a change to their own website. I find small consulting companies that actually do the work are actually much more valuable per dollar spent than internal employees whose main goal is just to hold on to their job as long as possible and do as little work as they can.

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.

EXACTLY

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....

> Source: That IT guy worked for me at lockheed, the IT CIO was my boss at Lockheed - and I know their level of corruption....

Jesus. Hackernews is one hell of a website

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.

Edit: clarification

I’m a physician, the biggest culprit in the opioid crisis is the government. They are the ones that started telling doctors that “pain is the fifth vital sign”. They are the ones that said they would pay doctors based on results of patient surveys - it turns out that addicts wanting opiates from doctors give you bad scores if you don’t give them what they want. And that has nothing to do with capitalism - more the opposite, it shows how good intentions together with the overwhelming force of the government can ruin people’s lives. So maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to encourage the use of government power in those cases where we agree with the political party using that power?

To everyone in this thread who has this overwhelming righteousness indignation about mckinsey - have any of you ever asked your elected representative about their view of the government’s responsibility for the opiate crisis? Would you ever vote differently based on the answers they give? Did any of the state attorney generals who are going after private companies ever do anything to stop the (federal) government encouraging the increased use of pain medication?

This is a classic example of unintended consequences by the government - the companies were just responding to the incentives the government created.

It may be unique only in the regard that the impact directly affects the US citizens, but multinational corporations that work in underdeveloped regions are known for their shady practices. You can probably write 10 articles on Nestle alone.