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Ask HN: Success stories from McKinsey (et al.)
86 points by ramblerman 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
Hi HN,

I'm frustrated as this is my 2nd company where I've seen a high level executive consult mckinsey (or a similar consultancy). And then implement a plan that destroys any humanity, and just slowly destroys our product/spirit over the next 2 years while the best people leave and we are left with extremely bureacratic and terrible processes.

I was speaking with my wife tonight who is not in IT, but had an ex-mckinsey CEO move in to the company 6 months ago, and it just seems like the same pattern.

I've always thought these consultants where there to provide "cover" for high level executives who didn't have a clue. I.e. nobody every got fired for hiring mckinsey.

I'd be curious to hear stories where it went well.




Perhaps one of my most favorite quotes I've read on hackernews:

"This was one of those big eye opening moments for me. Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling. You pay them a bunch of money to come run roughshod over your enemies by producing reams of analysis and Powerpoints, to fling the arrows of jargon, and lay siege to your enemies employees by endlessly trapping them in meetings and then they depart. Consultants are brought in to secure your flank, to provide air cover and to act as disposable pawns in interoffice combat.

They are not brought in to solve problems, to find solutions, or because of their incredibly acumen. It's because they have no loyalty or love but money."

- Kneebonian


As a former consultant, it do be like that sometimes.

Great quote :) Now I'm remembering why consulting burned out the consultants too. You go in thinking you're going to help strategize some big initiative. But you realize you're caught in some political drama and to survive in the contract, you have to figure out what makes your point of contact successful.


How do these things play out? Say the CEO wants to fire the CTO, how do they go about engaging consultants for the job? Do they discuss their goal explicitly with the consultants or is there some sort of underhanded language where the consultant team somehow understands why they are being hired?

If you are being explicit, do you risk leaving a paper trail behind which might come back to hurt you? But if you are not explicit, maybe the consultants end up finding out that the CTO is in fact performing really good.


It’s one chat between engagement director and client. It can go in any direction.

I’ve seen consultants come in, bury the truth in a 150 page report, lie about the truth in the executive summary, and then misdirect in the presentation. No one reads the report. CEO does whatever they want by spinning the consultant result in any direction they want. As long as they have just a bit more juice than the victim, the performance works as intended.


The expectations are absolutely communicated, but usually behind a closed door, between the CEO and a consultancy's senior partner that may not even be involved with the project directly (because he's too high up). And there's no paper trail behind it (the CEO wouldn't want to be blackmailed later), but the agreement is upheld, because consultancy knows that if they don't deliver, there will be no further contracts coming in from that CEO.


They mostly play out with the talkers vs doers.

Mostly, the CEO will want to do something. Either people are on board with it, or the bus will have many stops for people to get off.

Consultants can be sincerely engaged around the change.

People who are entrenched in their self-absorbed politics may get off the bus.

There is not much of a secret language other than outside consultants providing third party perspective that may or may not be considered. Generally, employees who don't want to play ball with change (for example, digital transformation in an established company) will start to stand out.

Employees and departments may try to make things seem more difficult than they are, or be more difficult they need to be.

Aligning with company direction and helping execute them can be helpful.

The most important law in all of this is a double edged sword: Perception is reality. Make reality and perception the same. There will always be people committed to misunderstanding. If people are spreading untruths, whether it's death by a hundred cuts, or death by a thousand cuts it's another thing.

CTOs are relatively junior C level executives and can benefit from learning more about dealing with other C-Level situations before they find them. Yet, they present a great deal of consolidation of people, processes, impact and as a result power that this power can be targeted by other leaders who feel their influence is decreasing.

As a CTO its important to remember to understand theres many types of CTOs, and examine what type you are and where your sklls need to grow

Most people who speak to C-Levels don't understand it's not about impressing them, as much as speaking with impact. Sticking with this in a good way can be helpful.

Still, these types of undermining initiatives are often brought about by CFOs still trying to oversee tech despite any meaningful literacy in tech. Beware the CFOs. And to an extent understanding there may be different consultants other than management consultants.


What does speaking with impact entail?


The irony of most articles is it's about impressing and not impact.

So employees who speak to impress can sometimes stay on the employee / management track.

Leaders who look for leadership track people are people who know how to have a conversation that is direct, sincere, and done with proper considerations.

Employees who try to impress the csuite are trying to show off. Impact is the 2 sentences that you lead with that unpacks the explanation if needed. If you summarize quickly then you have time to unpack and discuss more on equal footing as them as a problem solver. Executives aren't just handling the thing one employee is talking about to them. Understanding value, effectiveness, etc and how it aligns with the leaders you work with is critical.

If they share the vibe of handling problems and not making small things sound bigger than they are, they can stand out.

I'm trying to look for an article about this if I find it I'll share it.

In the meantime, this one is not bad.

https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/career-succe...


Thank you!

Any writer or communities in this space that I could engage with to find out more?

Is the best way to just join a sales team?


The Gervais Principle is about just this topic.


The movie trailer writes itself :) I wonder where the original comment would rank in the sorted list of all-time favorited HN comments.

Dec 2022, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33871092


"A consultant is a person who knows more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing."


This really shouldn't be an "eye opening" moment for anybody. Or at least it's only part of one. Do you think the senior executives are your best friends? Or the middle managers? Or even the entry-level ICs? Which of them would you prioritize over your livelihood, the ability to support your family? Hopefully very few to none.

Of course they care about money. When you pay somebody a lot of money to spend a lot of time doing a task they wouldn't do for free, it shouldn't be a shock that they care about the money a whole lot more than the task. Employees have more of a stake in the long-term success in the company so the incentives are a little different, but the principle is the same.

It also doesn't answer OPs question even slightly. Some manager(s) decided to spend of lot of company money hiring consultants. They definitely thought it would be good for themselves, maybe they thought it would be good for the company (ie investors and remaining employees) too. Why did they think those things, and are they ever right? One would expect them to be correct sometimes. People don't get addicted to literally lighting money on fire, they get addicted to gambling because sometimes they win.


McKinsey worked to drive sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller into the opioid crisis. I'd say that would count [to McKinsey] as a succeess.

Although that one cost McKinsey $600M in a count settlement.

And we've yet to see what it costs the Sacklers


The first step of a consultant is to define the problem. Common problems are

-I have an idea and I want everyone onboard.

-I want to get rid of x with no legal consequences.

-My company is inefficient because of x, but it is not about x because x is emotionally unsolvable, so can you solve my companies inefficiencies?

Note that all of these are easily known beforehand, but getting a group to get on the same page and actually move in one direction is hard, so bring in consultants.


Management consulting companies offer their stamp of approval that shields the execs against the shareholders and the legal system. Here, we followed the Big Consulting advice. Which btw also writes your legislation.


They train a lot of people. I worked with a founder who had just finished a tour at McKinsey and we built a voice chat service for the Brazil market that got 300,000+ users and that he was able to sell successfully. I am certain his experience there helped prepare him for that role.


Recently worked under an ex-McKinsey consultant.

Say what you want about their solutions but they know how to talk to execs and boards and sell them on solutions.

Eye-opening rotation underneath them — my PowerPoint decks are so good now


And that's the force and the weakness of McKinsey (and other commercials guys): they sell something, from good things to craps. They sell it no matter what is the outcome.

When they sell a good thing, everything is good. When they sell a bad thing, it can put down a whole healthcare system (in my country, consulting companies admitted that hospitals are not industries and they did more harm than good with their plans), it can let survive a bad startup where millions of public money is invested, etc.


Gene Zelazny, McKinsey Communications Director, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39797259


Last Week Tonight had an excellent round up of McKinsey results:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ


We had a group show up at our company. We trapped them in a never ending series of meetings that was with high level executives but never made any accomplishments. They made fantastic PowerPoints, charged for 12 hrs a day then burned out and accomplished nothing. The gal was super hatable and nobody even said hi to her.


You "trapped them"? They got paid for every one of those hours, you know. The more wasted time, the better, it's just more billable hours.


Company does not care. They did no damage to people that’s what matters


You claim they made no accomplishments. They accomplished earning a lot of extra money due to your smugness. Sure it didn't come out of your pocket personally but who cares, the money is still green.


McKinsey always wins you can’t stop that. Once they show up they have already won. But they provided little value to the person that hired them in the war of office politics. That on its own is a victory.


Went well for whom?

For the rank and file employees or customers, almost never.

For the executives looking to shift blame, justify an unpopular decision, or sell more oxy… plenty of “success”.


The one company I've ever worked at that had layoffs was after they brought in ex-McKinsey hires (as Chief of Staff or similar).

The company was already super toxic due to middle managers being brought in, the McKinsey folk I guess laid a few of them off (along with half of the company, including the CEO). The company was profitable and had just raised eight figures or so. Apparently it's doing better now culturally though.

This isn't a success story, it led to mass layoffs. But some of the core assholes who drove the culture into the ground lost their jobs too, so there is a bright side to it I guess.


You described the company, pre-consultants, as "super toxic". Slashing staff, while it's uncomfortable, is likely the only way to save the company. And, as you said, the layoffs included the CEO and other "assholes", so it wasn't isolated to low-level people.


The company had literally about a hundred million dollars in the bank and were bringing in millions every month on a strong upward trajectory. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations had the total cost of staff monthly salaries at $500,000 - $750,000. That's now been slashed to about $300,000 - $550,000.

Nothing of value was saved here.


» This isn't a success story, it led to mass layoffs.

Did the company valuation go up? Because that is the only thing McK gets the fees they do. They're also at Google and Facebook, and have done mass layoffs there even though their enormous profits are not under threat.


I was previously at a public European company that was losing money. I was just a lowly engineer when they brought in a McKinsey consultant. A lot of the changes such as layoffs and cost cutting that came after the arrival was already common sense.

I think the company has at least stopped bleeding money. In my lowly position I did not notice any significant change.

I have experienced deteriorating conditions at other companies that accepted vc money then brought in their own people.


You're calling out a correlation, not a cause and effect.

Companies that are growing quickly, money coming, happy investors, don't hire McKinsey to make drastic changes to the company. They don't need to.

Companies who aren't growing, money is a problem, and investors are asking "what the fuck"? Hire consultants to make major changes.

It's similar to companies that go into bankruptcy. They often hire CEOs that are skilled in winding down operations, selling off parts, taking the company through bankruptcy. Someone needs to do that, it's not simple or easy to do well, so they are very well compensated. Then people complain why this CEO go a bonus when the company is filing for bankruptcy.


Then what’s the point of bringing them in if the company is going to die anyway?


When a company goes into bankruptcy, they still have assets (inventory, a brand, real estate, customer contracts) -- those things just belong to their creditors now. The new owners need _someone_ to manage selling all those things to recoup some money.

More often, though, the business is still worth more than the sum of its parts. It just wasn't making enough to pay the loans it'd taken out. Since the loans get eliminated in bankruptcy, the new owners might decide to just keep running the company (and want a new CEO, who they think will do a better job.


I’ll just speak positively for consulting (despite my other comment)

It is useful to have outside perspective to help you think through problems. People need help defining the problem.

In my experience it’s usually not a consultants idea that helps. But, like a lot of coaching and therapy, consultants can help a client bring focus to the most important problems and focus areas.

Consultants are actually generalists. I work in the search domain and often what I actually do is see someone’s problem from a broader lens of the entire search landscape of technical issues other companies have in general.

So it’s really about helping clients with perspective and not really about having big ideas. A good consulting engagement you eventually fade into the background and the client gets all the credit.


NullPointerException


I was really hoping that consultants couldn't just use ChatGPT to explain this to them, but sadly ChatGPT-4 explained this joke perfectly. I was really hoping this would be a nice example of conceptual connections that ChatGPT couldn't quite weave together.


Re-write McKinsey in Rust.


panic! unsafe!


I don't think anyone really answered your question. I work at McKinsey and can try to provide an understanding of how we add value. I have a PhD in computer science from a T1 university, so I'm not exactly the MBA type; but I am on the exact same track as them as a generalist consultant (called integrative).

Here are the good parts:

1. We are pretty good at being translators. For companies I serve, making sound business decisions requires understanding of the technical details. However, most of the time, the C-suite will not dive deep into them (most have no time; some just refuse to learn). Our job is to distill the complex topics into something that is digestible for everyone, and I mean everyone. The time spent by an analyst or associate is mainly on slide-making for this reason - there is a lot of iteration until the message and storyline are perfected.

2. We provide a voice for the technical working teams. Pretty much every project I worked in, the technical teams have a pretty good understanding of what they can do and what they need, but this doesn't always get heard by higher-ups. Part of our job is to relay these thoughts (again, in a digestible way) - anonymously if need be. Most of the time a representative of the client team also joins our C-suite discussion, which is a great career opportunity for them.

3. In addition to point 2 above, when the technical teams don't know what they need, we build out a plan for them. I built financial models, workplans, capability assessments for e.g., cloud migration for automotive part manufacturers (i.e., high-tech but not necessarily computer savvy companies) directly collaborating with working teams. They can then use these to present their case to higher-ups, enabling them to actually get what they need.

4. We have an understanding of the industry overall, because we go around and see what's happening everywhere. In order to prevent unintended spillage of company secrets, we get "conflicted out" of working with direct competitors when we serve a client, but we can work with different parts of the supply chain. We also have industry experts, internal and external, who can provide insights - which is sometimes very critical to get up to speed quickly.

The burnout is also real, and I am actively trying to move on to a "real" tech job after approximately 2 years at the Firm. But positive client interactions are very fulfilling, and I have learned so so so much about so many different things, it's incredible.

I'm also pretty lucky to have worked mainly in growth or go-to-market strategy. I have never laid anyone off, never led to someone losing their job whatsoever (I actually kinda did the opposite once by helping them overcome a PIP), never participated in political battles, and never did anything that could be considered unethical like the Purdue thing. Just solved cool business problems for tech companies for 4-8 weeks at a time.


"2. We provide a voice for the technical working teams."

This doesn't correspond to my experience. In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions - on the contrary a major incentive for going into (strategy) consulting appears to be to able to deal with C-suite executives directly and not having to care about understanding any of the day-to-day business.

It usually goes like this: The CEO, a former McKinsey partner, hires McKinsey to formulate a strategy for the company: Often on a trending topic like digitalization, AI, etc. The details are usually confidential so there's no involvement of lower-level employees (maybe providing some data but without any context as to why). After a few months of utter secrecy management presents some transformation strategy.

I have yet to meet a normal employee to respect what comes from McKinsey. The average strategy consultant will look down on lowly employees and prefer to have as little interaction with them as possible.

"I have a PhD in computer science from a T1 university"

Why is the "tier" of your university important here? Not trying to offend you, but that kind of elitism is part of the reason consultants have a bad reputation. And unfortunately it is reflected in their work.


> In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions

This is certainly not my experience. Sure, we might not be talking to every entry-level employee (we'll interview some of them if need be), but we definitely talk to all levels of managers. The normal meeting cadence is 2-3x "touchpoints" with working teams and one "steerco" (C-suite) meeting every 2 weeks to update them on progress. We usually get a team room on client site, so pretty much everybody is aware that we are there, and we are more than happy to have a coffee with you anytime. (If you ask and they say no, that is kind of a red flag IMO.)

It sounds like the projects you have seen would be CEO-level secrets regardless of McKinsey's involvement. But I personally never had a project on e.g., digitalization or AI that doesn't pull in the relevant non-C-suite stakeholders of the client.

> Why is the "tier" of your university important here?

I made the point just to provide a counterexample to the notion that consultants don't have technical depth. Of course this is not always true - we all operate outside of our expertise area at some point; I had to learn the steel industry from scratch in 2 weeks for a client - but I just wanted to show that some of us do bring considerable technical expertise, not an MBA.


>we definitely talk to all levels of managers.

Consider how much of HN are individual contributors, not managers. So, you don't talk to those minions.


We - or, at least, people in the projects that I've been in - most certainly talk to anyone who can provide valuable input to the question at hand. That being said, it's impossible for us to know which individual contributors are relevant to a project - it's up to their manager to pull them in (we encourage them to do so). Just need a cc on an email and we'll handle the rest.


Spoken like a true consultant


Companies that hire mercenaries are usually not the type that people LOVE to work for.


Insitutional imperative

McKinsey speaks to everyone so they know what each industry’s mainstream insights are. In real time.

Fomo, insecurity and incompetence on behalf of management calls for action—>hire McKinsey

It takes strong leadership to trust local insights brought within the company and ignore consultants

Mciinsey & the like have had no love from Steve Jobs & Elon Musk

You are either a leader or you faked it till you made it & are now calling for help


We’ll, no CEOs ever got fired for hiring McKinsey…


McIBM ...




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