Hilarious video that just get's funnier as it goes. 
Brilliant Video About Mckinsey
- Thread starter tombombadil
- Start date
I"d never heard of the pricks before now but the grimness outweighs the hilarity for me.
We've had similar scandals in Australia. A consultant firm was working with corporations to get around the tax laws the government was paying the consultants to devise.
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...countancy-firms-became-mired-in-a-tax-scandal
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...countancy-firms-became-mired-in-a-tax-scandal
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I've hated these twats (and their ilk) for years. Nothing to do with their morals though. It's the absolute snake oil they push to corporations about efficiency, outsourcing and new models of working that do nothing but make thousands of people unemployed and create an infinitely worse experience for anyone who works with or for those corporations. These bastards are the reason every time you ever need customer service from a big corporation you end up feeling as though pulling your teeth out with pliers would have been a better, less painful use of your time. Ditto if you're an 'internal customer' who wants some help from IT or Human Resources. But hey, they've given better value to the shareholder by laying off all the people who might actually have helped to fix your problem. And they do all of this assuring the corporation that this fulfils their mission statement about "putting the customer at the centre of everything we do". Go figure.
In the end it's still the executives of these corporations that a) Hire McKinsey and similar consultancies, and b) Decide to implement their practices and recommendations. Blaming the consultancies here is, in most cases, just scapegoating and absolve the company leadership of agency and blame. A high-end consulting firm is to some extent just used to rubberstamp business strategies that would have been implemented anyway, because the C-suite pushed by their boards will always look for efficiencies.
That being said, McKinsey especially have had some comically evil cases, such as their opioid scandal. Those cannot be defended at all.
Yeah, actually was “sold” the dream of working for a firm as “prestigious” during uni around 2003 when I first heard of them. Never got around to it after I completed my stint with PwC but my word, you’ve summed them up quite while. Sure, they sometimes come up with innovative solutions, but mostly it’s selling snake oil or simple solutions dressed up in fancy lingo. Often resulting in mass layoffs to the ordinary person but executing on “streamlining processed & efficiencies” thereby saving costs and….eureka….massive executive bonuses. And they charge an arm and a leg.
They’ve also been embroiled as part of our “state capture” corruption this side in South Africa. They issued a public apology (its on their website somewhere still), denied knowing anything about it all (of course) & promised to pay back the money (they did). Yeah, crazy what fees they charge etc.
Ah they’re all in it together. I’m not absolving anyone of blame. Just saying that I despise these useless parasites for their role in what’s been going on over the last couple of decades.
Fair enough. I've just seen plenty of examples of people taking the easy way out and saying "Well, McKinsey said we should do it", which is always only a half truth.
I worked about five years in the industry, so I have seen my share of both good projects and worthless projects. The consultancy I worked for was eventually acquired by Bain & Co., which is mentioned towards the end of John Olivers' video, so technically I worked for them for about a year. They've also had some shockers, to my knowledge.
In the end, these firms are just another manifestation of greed. You quickly find out that despite the branding and everything else, profit and thereby Partner compensation comes above pretty much everything else.
For sure. I have friends who worked for McKinsey. They said they quickly learned that the most important tactic of all is to find out who the most senior person in the room is and tell him what he wants to hear!
@Mike Smalling The company I work for is about to go under a massive restructure on the absolute nonsense that gets generated when management consultants interact with corporate boards. The members of the board recently chaired an all company meeting to discuss these changes, which will mainly involve making thousands of middle managers unemployed. They said that they’d discovers that certain job grades were entitled to prioritised parking spaces at headquarters. They had a good chortle about how mad this is and “we’re all in this together” and how a new flatter structure would fix all this bureaucracy and elitism. Deliberately ignoring the fact that not one of the gobshites on stage had to think for a moment about where to park their car that morning. Wankers, the lot of them.
Yep, they’re total cnuts.
Also very likely a big reason why political parties are all the (neo-liberal) same.
Also very likely a big reason why political parties are all the (neo-liberal) same.
This reminds me of a manager I had back in EY.
She used all of the corporate lingo and rhetoric constantly, and was huge on making every second of every day count when talking to us. If we had two minutes in-between calls she'd make the point of suggesting we do something in those two minutes, usually recommending we do something that actually takes an hour just as a way of making us feel under pressure. I always came into emails from her at 4am or so, which again was just a way of indirectly heaping pressure on us.
If we were going home, no matter the time, she'd ask us what our priority will be when we get home and come back online. She was worse again with the offshore team based in India. Had them working past midnight every night. Never checked the time difference to note that oh hold on, its 1am where they are and they're still online. Still gave them more work and no time to do it in, subtly threatening a full weekend of work in the process -'this might have to be done on Saturday'. Always told us to threaten them with weekend work also. Treated them terribly. They'd be on calls with us and she'd be like 'Use Ahmed as much as you like, Laura can have him after when he's done working for you' all the while, poor Ahmed is on the call and its 10pm where he is.
And here's the punchline.. she did nothing. And I mean nothing. I sat beside her. She stared blankly at her laptop everyday. She had come to Dublin from South Africa and it was a slightly different area and she was totally lost so she made up for it with all this lingo and constantly 'adding value' and telling us to improve on last year and just putting people under inhumane pressure. And it worked. She climbed the ladder from there.
I remember 5 minutes before my goodbye call when I was leaving the company, she starting pinging me and asking me to do work. She knew I had my goodbye call, she was on it
To be fair, she wasn't alone in a lot of that behaviour. Not a nice 3.5 years that.
She used all of the corporate lingo and rhetoric constantly, and was huge on making every second of every day count when talking to us. If we had two minutes in-between calls she'd make the point of suggesting we do something in those two minutes, usually recommending we do something that actually takes an hour just as a way of making us feel under pressure. I always came into emails from her at 4am or so, which again was just a way of indirectly heaping pressure on us.
If we were going home, no matter the time, she'd ask us what our priority will be when we get home and come back online. She was worse again with the offshore team based in India. Had them working past midnight every night. Never checked the time difference to note that oh hold on, its 1am where they are and they're still online. Still gave them more work and no time to do it in, subtly threatening a full weekend of work in the process -'this might have to be done on Saturday'. Always told us to threaten them with weekend work also. Treated them terribly. They'd be on calls with us and she'd be like 'Use Ahmed as much as you like, Laura can have him after when he's done working for you' all the while, poor Ahmed is on the call and its 10pm where he is.
And here's the punchline.. she did nothing. And I mean nothing. I sat beside her. She stared blankly at her laptop everyday. She had come to Dublin from South Africa and it was a slightly different area and she was totally lost so she made up for it with all this lingo and constantly 'adding value' and telling us to improve on last year and just putting people under inhumane pressure. And it worked. She climbed the ladder from there.
I remember 5 minutes before my goodbye call when I was leaving the company, she starting pinging me and asking me to do work. She knew I had my goodbye call, she was on it
To be fair, she wasn't alone in a lot of that behaviour. Not a nice 3.5 years that.
Because the one thing they are genuinely good at is sales. They know exactly what to say to the executives and they know exactly what to do to make the figures look right for the 2 or 3 year bonus cycles those executives are all on. Everybody in the room gets rich, everybody is happy. And who gives a feck what happens to the company beyond that right?
I'm glad these firms are finally being shown up for what they truly are the last few years. Activist investors are the next ones that to be hauled into the firing line.
I knew the OP would be the John Oliver piece; he absolutely nailed it.
Bingo.
Sounds like general corporate elitism. I doubt those Board members became cnuts by interacting with consultants, to be fair. Many people that reach those 'heights' in the corporate world just lose all sense of connection with the real world.
The last company I worked for is owned by two of the top 20 richest people in the country, and yet they still couldn't find a way to compensate fairly. It was a constant topic. The company has about 400-500 employees in Kyiv, and when the war broke out there was a lot of support for them in many ways. But then after a year or so, it got kind of inconvenient that the output might not be 100% all of the time. Eventually a policy was put in place that people that had fled and was working remotely in other countries or regions of Ukraine would basically have to return to Kyiv or lose their job (within a given time frame). This was at a time when Kyiv was still being bombed. I later heard that some people in the Copenhagen HQ just got up and left when it was announced. I quit a few months later.
@Pogue Mahone nailed it. Snake oil is all they push.
That and creating useless spreadsheets and tools that break after they leave, and now you fecking have to fix it despite demonstrating to your boss that it was useless in the first feckING PLACE
Not that I'm biased or anything
That and creating useless spreadsheets and tools that break after they leave, and now you fecking have to fix it despite demonstrating to your boss that it was useless in the first feckING PLACE
Not that I'm biased or anything
Good call.
it's such a shame he supports Liverpool because I love him so much.
so trueI remember in the early 2010s, the move for engineers (some I knew) was to try to get in a top 10 business school, and from there get a move to one of the big 3 consulting firms (McKinsey/BCG/Bain) or an investment bank. In both cases doing mind numbing work for crazy amounts of money for a few years before exiting to be a director/VP somewhere else
I was too lazy/posted too much on the Caf to take that seriously
Anecdote aside, it's no surprise McKinsey and Co are utilized a lot by Fortune 100 CEOs, they all went to the same top schools and built those networking connections. Benefit to the company is secondary.
I was too lazy/posted too much on the Caf to take that seriously
Anecdote aside, it's no surprise McKinsey and Co are utilized a lot by Fortune 100 CEOs, they all went to the same top schools and built those networking connections. Benefit to the company is secondary.
The higher up I get in the cooperate world, the more clear somethings become (and the more cynical I become). At the highest level, especially when new to the job, Execs always feel the need to change things. It seems to me like the best run company in the world still puts in place a new CEO/COO/CFO just to 'shake things up' and 'keep them on their toes'. And so those people, in turn, need some way to do it.
So they grab some funds, and hire a reputable firm to put together an 8 week project to investigate options. Then a 24 week project to deeper dive and prioritise them. Then kick off an 12 month project of detailed planning. Then, two years later, after every person who actually works at the place has lost countless hours explaining to 20 year olds how their jobs work, attending poorly structred 3-hour workshops and reviewing 100 page slide decks, the CEO/COO/CFO moves on, the project gets put on a shelf, the firm pays 2m to a consultancy and a new CEO/COO/CFO comes in with new ideas on how to shake things up.
As someone that went straight from Uni into the strategy consulting world, I can say two things with certainty: 1: it's the best MBA you can get without doing an MBA and 2: I spent 95% of my time in the first 3 years having no idea what I was doing.
So they grab some funds, and hire a reputable firm to put together an 8 week project to investigate options. Then a 24 week project to deeper dive and prioritise them. Then kick off an 12 month project of detailed planning. Then, two years later, after every person who actually works at the place has lost countless hours explaining to 20 year olds how their jobs work, attending poorly structred 3-hour workshops and reviewing 100 page slide decks, the CEO/COO/CFO moves on, the project gets put on a shelf, the firm pays 2m to a consultancy and a new CEO/COO/CFO comes in with new ideas on how to shake things up.
As someone that went straight from Uni into the strategy consulting world, I can say two things with certainty: 1: it's the best MBA you can get without doing an MBA and 2: I spent 95% of my time in the first 3 years having no idea what I was doing.
So accurate. And often you are also being led by someone who doesn't know what they are doing. And sometimes the partner doesn't really understand what they have sold. Great times.
I'd go one-step further: if you can get into that world without doing the MBA, why do the MBA? It's a jack of all trades degree plus the opportunity to get a job offer plus the networking. Once you have the job, building then network is easy.
And you're absolutely hated by the people you work with every day. That was my friends experience anyway. He was a physician who moved to a management consultant job and was promptly hired on a project working for the national health service. Where he had to wear a suit and follow doctors around hospitals with a clipboard trying to identify efficiencies. He said they looked at him like he was dirt on their shoes. Although that says more about them than it does about him.
Yeah, I think that's very different from a purely corporate setting. I was mostly met with slight caution or enthusiasm depending on the type of project. Sometimes it was just plain old indifference. But most often we would work quite closely with the client, so there was some good collaborations once in a while as well. I've even been invited to the house of a client stakeholder at one point.
And the interviews are simply insulting.
My friend bought this book of prep questions for management consulting interviews. Idiotic questions like "How many grains of sand are in this jar". First of all, feck you for asking me this question. Second, there are much better ways of gauging my problem solving ability. Third, if it really was that important to know how many grains of sand were in this jar, i'd probably find the answer in a more methodical and accurate way that would take longer than the voodoo back of envelope calculations they've mastered at McKinsey which are good for generic conversations but awful for actual problem solving, like they are
My friend bought this book of prep questions for management consulting interviews. Idiotic questions like "How many grains of sand are in this jar". First of all, feck you for asking me this question. Second, there are much better ways of gauging my problem solving ability. Third, if it really was that important to know how many grains of sand were in this jar, i'd probably find the answer in a more methodical and accurate way that would take longer than the voodoo back of envelope calculations they've mastered at McKinsey which are good for generic conversations but awful for actual problem solving, like they are
I'm still scarred by an interview I had for an investment firm when I had my first wobble about clinical medicine. They had figured it might be cheaper/easier to hire doctors and train them on investment then teaching people with a business background how to understand biotech/pharma innovations.
Massive room in swanky Mayfair office, with a single glass of water on it. Tosser in expensive suits looks me in the eye and says "If I pick up this glass of water, drink half of it, then hand it to you and you drink half of what's left, and we keep doing this until all the water has gone... how much will each of us have drank?" I got lost in world of mentally adding up ever decreasing fractions and ended up stuttering nonsense. Still pisses me off to this day that I couldn't instantly come up with the answer.
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What's the answer?
I'm still scarred by an interview I had for an investment firm when I had my first wobble about clinical medicine. They had figured it might be cheaper/easier to hire doctors and train them on investment then teaching people with a business background how to understand biotech/pharma innovations.
Massive room in swanky Mayfair office, with a single glass of water on it. Tosser in expensive suits looks me in the eye and says "If I drink half this glass of water, drink half of it, then hand it to you and you drink half of what's left, and we keep doing this until all the water has gone... how much will each of us have drank?" I got lost in world of mentally adding up ever decreasing fractions and ended up stuttering nonsense. Still pisses me off to this day that I couldn't instantly come up with the answer.
If you keep drinking half of what's left you would theoretically never finish?
He will always have drunk twice as much as me. Extrapolate from there...
(I got hung up on the theoretically never finish notion too. I even started to shit on about the polar nature of H2O molecules. Cringe.)
That was my immediate thought as well. feck that question if that's not what they had in mind. feck it anyway.
If you took Calculus 3 it's a simple infinite sum
But again what that has to do with fecking investment, I don't know
"That's not the point though, we just want to test your ability to bulls... problem solve"
Technically that's only correct if you get the last sip. But of course there is no last sip because you can take half of something forever. I guess eventually you'll get down to a single water molecule which cannot be divided, but somehow I doubt that's what they had in mind.
I'm so glad I'm a teacher, because I think I might tell someone to feck off if they asked me those kinds of questions in a job interview.
I guess the points is that if one person drinks almost exactly two thirds of a glass of water and the other person drinks almost exactly one third then nobody needs worry about +/- one water molecule. And maybe the sort of person who loses their mind over that last molecule isn't the sort of person they want?
But anyway feck that guy. His loss (although also, potentially, mine
)Would have preferred a brilliant video about mockney.
That’s weird. I also first read it as Mockney.
That's outrageous.This reminds me of a manager I had back in EY.
She used all of the corporate lingo and rhetoric constantly, and was huge on making every second of every day count when talking to us. If we had two minutes in-between calls she'd make the point of suggesting we do something in those two minutes, usually recommending we do something that actually takes an hour just as a way of making us feel under pressure. I always came into emails from her at 4am or so, which again was just a way of indirectly heaping pressure on us.
If we were going home, no matter the time, she'd ask us what our priority will be when we get home and come back online. She was worse again with the offshore team based in India. Had them working past midnight every night. Never checked the time difference to note that oh hold on, its 1am where they are and they're still online. Still gave them more work and no time to do it in, subtly threatening a full weekend of work in the process -'this might have to be done on Saturday'. Always told us to threaten them with weekend work also. Treated them terribly. They'd be on calls with us and she'd be like 'Use Ahmed as much as you like, Laura can have him after when he's done working for you' all the while, poor Ahmed is on the call and its 10pm where he is.
And here's the punchline.. she did nothing. And I mean nothing. I sat beside her. She stared blankly at her laptop everyday. She had come to Dublin from South Africa and it was a slightly different area and she was totally lost so she made up for it with all this lingo and constantly 'adding value' and telling us to improve on last year and just putting people under inhumane pressure. And it worked. She climbed the ladder from there.
I remember 5 minutes before my goodbye call when I was leaving the company, she starting pinging me and asking me to do work. She knew I had my goodbye call, she was on it
To be fair, she wasn't alone in a lot of that behaviour. Not a nice 3.5 years that.
Are you saying she was trying to get you to log back in when you went home? Was it on OT?
As for the offshore team, what an asshole. Those poor bastards get treated bad enough as it is. I had an offshore team in India years ago who nominally worked 1 - 10 to coincide with our 9-5 hours but I'd always check with them when they started and were planning on leaving because often they'd stay late to get everything in the queue finished. This was a completely pointless activity because you'd get quiet and busy days with sales orders so they'd have feck all to do the next day, still have to work their full shift and not got a penny in over-time. I'd also tell them to go home if I found out they'd done more than their alloted hours that day.
Ha ha I know you've mentioned tendencies before that sounds like the nuero-divergent response to ridiculous questions like that. That'd be my reaction too especially with interview nerves destroying my insides at the same time.
He's not asking the right question for problem solving because anyone with an analytical mind will realise it'll never be finished and could well get stuck on that in an interview situation because it doesn't marry up with the question asked.
I thought it was this video when seeing the thread title