I've been in one of the "Big 4" Consulting firms, and I can vouch for the article. As a "Senior" the Customer is charged 150-160$/hour and on top of that 25% for travel. The work that we did for these customers was lackluster. We used to come in as "experts", get all the technical work done from body shops in India and offshore. I was shocked to see that Customers just keep paying for these expensive services, and have no clue they are getting hoodwinked.
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.
AS someone who has both read the book and interacted with "big 4" names a few times this is going to be one of those "underrated" comments you sometimes see here.
At my previous place of employ they made some really terrible decisions which ended up costing a LOT of money later.
Their response was classic "the design was vetted by McKinsey"..
No.. you sent them what you wanted to do, they told you what you wanted/needed to hear and now you are deflecting your decisions.
Another rôle they play is a kind of out-in-the-open corporate espionage. You pay them to come in and tell you what the "best practices" are in your industry (i.e. effective new things your competitors have been doing since the last time they came to visit you—and they'll learn some new ones from you to tell your competitors, next time)
I had an Econ prof who described his consulting business as:
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.
I have worked as a consultant, but not for the one of the big 4. We understood that we were often being used to develop an 'independent' perspective that would support a decision that had essentially already been made or disprove a rival decision.
We also were fully aware of the old joke that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and then tells you the time. We sometimes deployed this ourselves with customers, and extended it to say that unlike our rivals, we would actually point out how late you were and how to get back on track.
[Edit] We sometimes found ourselves supporting one of the big 4 companies (as domain experts). We were often amazed by the quality of the A team that they would deploy to win the work, compared with the B or C team that would then actually execute it (often bright but junior staff).
That's exactly my experience in Europe. We want to fire 50 people/close a factory/whatever without blowback...let's hire McK to tell us to do exactly that.
I've also had some experience working for a smallish company with very big clients and they sometimes insisted on having an IT-Consulting company like Capgemini as a middleman. That's the biggest nightmare because they were always a net-negative from my POV...integrating them was just extra work and they provided no value except for their brand name to make the client feel at ease.
I'd say companies like this are a scam, but they're only half a scam -- half the customers know exactly what they're getting.
The other half haven't figured it out and think they're getting top-tier stuff and end up with life destroying garbage like your employee performance system or a citywide trash crisis? [1]
Do you need to spend millions to justify an inevitable decision but blame the hired guns for it? Hire McKinsey.
Do you need to spend millions for severely overworked junior grade consultants and offshored "experts" to provide you with objectively terrible advice and create an opioid epidemic? Also hire McKinsey! [2]
I have worked in a third-grade infrastructure company in India. Everyone in top management (including founder) was corrupt. Their business practices were always about bribing, siphoning off investors money, inflating assets, money laundering and so on. When it was trying to go public, it hired one of 'big 4' to do the auditing and other due diligence. Once it went public, that agency was fired (2 years after going public). With in 6 years, that company became bankrupt.
Everyone knew that one of 'big 4' was hired to make the prospects of going public legit and credible. That consulting firm made things look right in exchange of big bucks.
This has been my experience when the company I work for engages with an external consultant. Managers look for validation from an external source so that:
- when things go well, they can take the credit, or
- when things go bad, they can blame the consulting company.
This. Big 4 consultants are also needed by law or by convention in a lot of places for auditing and such tasks. If it's for actual consultancy services, the decision has already been made. Having a Big 4 company "sign" and provide authority on a decision a manager has already made, just makes it an easier sell to his/her higher ups.
Furthermore, they're trying to convince someone else (usually a boss) of a theory/idea/strategy that they might have but don't have the resources/rapport/etc. to demonstrate it's effectiveness.
Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
$150/hr is really not that much money, depending on the importance of the project, and having devs from India is fine.
Almost the entirety of the question in any given situation is 'Did it work out?'
Because if it did, it was worth it.
Companies are not interested in making 'great products' like a startup would, for some secondary thing.
Mostly, it's like construction: they need something built. That works. Not some kind of innovative thing.
They don't have a year to find 'top talent' and go through interesting architectures, or dynamic processes. They wouldn't even know how to do that.
You might be very well downplaying your input: if you are competent, know what you are doing, show up, and can solve the problem, you're probably worth every penny and much more. Now maybe that is or is not the case! Or maybe 'it depends' or maybe, some projects kind of necessarily require 'proper engineering'.
Now, all of what I just said would apply to normal circumstances. In Africa, it's so complicated. McKinsey is also very different office by office. Corruption is harder than we understand, because when it's a random event we can say 'oh, corrupt!' - but when it's normal trade practice aka 5% kickback for the buyer, well, it takes on a different characteristic.
your comment just establishes a spectrum- on one extreme, you have what is essentially a helpful project manager, on the other extreme you have a worse than useless middle man. I think the point might be that Mckinsey is more towards the bad extreme than people think.
> Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
That’s not being hoodwinked either. If you’re happy to pay $1B for something and get that thing, then that’s your fault for not shopping around for a better deal.
Bernie Madoff and SBF hoodwinked people. Somebody charging a premium for their services and getting willing customers isn’t.
I have worked with the big 4, and also been on the receiving end of their "work". I can vouch for this comment personally. I've never seen less effort put into something worth so much money. Reams and reams of documents, jargon, and other bullshit and some cheap, obviously outsourced, incredibly shitty, "wireframe" sold as an MVP of a product.
I would be impressed by them if I wasn't so disgusted.
I've also seen some of these expensive "strategic" documents. And they looked like they were written by a high schooler (not a top of the class student either).
Used to work as a sub-contractor for Deloitte, all the work was done by us, the Deloitte folk would spend 12 hrs a day at work - looking super busy, attending meetings, schmoozing with the client, go for lunches and dinners and building reports and spreadsheets.
They hired impressionable good looking young people who were good at selling, period.
Plus, the Big 4 are, by law (SOX), forbidden from doing consulting work. Also, there are for, because public companies need someone to audit the books and someone to help them to prepare those books. Companies have to change auditors and the ones helping to prepare the books ever so often, and you cannot just stick with the same two simply switching chairs. All of that, of course, to avoid another Enron like disaster. Hence a pool of four big accounting firms most public companies, regardless if the fall under SOX or not, cycle through.
I've heard that curing internal myopia is a top priority for McKinsey this decade. Focus is on broadening gender/age/economic background and also broadening professional experience backgrounds.
They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss.
Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
Oh, glad McKinsey is going to ruin the psychology of a bunch of LGBTQ people with 80 hour work weeks while they union bust foreign nations. You aren't developing shit when every single person you hire leaves after 2 years, don't astroturf this garbage here.
What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
In my experience, Accenture is the big body shop. I've worked at companies that outsource tech strategy, new system requirements / scoping, delivery and development, and post deployment support and maintenance 100% to Accenture.
There are regional hubs they have (I've worked with Philippines and India and heard of Eastern Europe) for the support and maintenance.
There are some back office financial shared services (e.g., AP / AR / cutting POs) that they also support. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more.
Accenture can give you everything from the PowerPoint slides up to the people that will be seconded or placed in your organization as contingent workers / contractors.
That's Big 3 like McKinsey, and yes, notes sent to India, India turns them into powerpoints, team on the engagement has the powerpoints by the next morning (apparently execs don't even read something that's not in a powerpoint—they'll do this with stuff that's only ever going to be emailed, never presented)
Implementation: body leasing, offloading large projects. Larger teams, IT-heavy, longer timeframes. Actual coding / documentation, etc.
And no, your experience working on a 300-people core banking project at Accenture doesn't translate to a 5-people McKinsey project.
And while both types are "expensive", they are needed in the corporate world. Because work in that environment is more than just writing code in a text editor, it's mostly politics at the top.
The big problem with talking about consulting is that there are so many different people doing so many different things that are all called just "consulting". Everyone has a different idea of what consulting is since they worked with different types of consultants but it all just gets called "consulting". Even in this article they talk about McKinsey's strategy work and their tech work basically interchangeably, even though the two are very different things.
Thanks for saying that. I worked on a bunch of large transit fare-card implementation projects for accenture, over a decade ago. Having a large company, with people having some know how from previous implementations, and the ability to handle a project that was far, far beyond the capacity of the transit operators cautioning them, made TOTAL SENSE. We effectively shipped stuff, in a very political environment (as in, with actual politicians trying to dictate requirements so the schedule fits their re-elections and stuff like that), through lots of integration pains and issues with large scale hardware deployments. I'm pretty proud of those projects, I'm sure some of the code I wrote back then is still in prod. I never worked as a bodyshop, or sold useless erp replacement projects. The outcome was a working system that millions of users can use. It's palpable. It's concrete. It's useful.
It pains me that it's always seen as an evil, because sometimes it is the best option.
Was the use of your team necessary due to the political and regulatory capture, however?
I don't know what you did, and I don't want to besmirch it. So let's take a recent "successful" project: OMNY, the new transit fare system in NYC.
That system cost the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority over three quarters of a billion dollars. $772,000,000.
To put that in comparison, the point of sale payment processor Square raised 170 million fewer dollars over from seed to series E and does fifty times as much payment volume.
There is a staggering amount of inefficiency in these projects, and I suspect it's because of capture.
A lot of the comments make this mistake, but the article clearly talks about both. It snarkily says the Ivy League graduates end up doing strategy and everyone else ends up doing software implementations.
There is truth to that, because strategy is what sounds the most shiny, brings the most money, and is the most prestigious... Even when it's in fact either pure garbage or outright devilness.
I draw a parallel with some Asian cultures where being tanned is a sign that you're working in the field, so it's better to avoid the sun and stay as white as can be. When I was at accenture, there was a huge culture to "leave code" as soon as you could. Code is for people who do. Mere grunts. You gotta be a decider, a boss. The only career path (I think that's not true anymore) was management track. They even had a subsidiary called accenture technology services to recruit from universities with less reputation, but "keep the blood pure". It does make sense when you're in it, but golly am I happy I left that world.
Note that BCG also have BCG X (recent fusion of Gamma, Digital Venture and Platinion), a Data Science and Software arm that could be compared with Palantir in size and breath and depth, but are not working with the CIA.
So, they also do some -high end- implementation work as well :)
It’s not uncommon for firms that need to do big layoffs to not hire consulting firms, and then screw up the layoffs (multiple rounds, bad severance, etc.)
There’s a certain class of work that is (1) really critical to get right the first time and (2) only done once a decade. That’s the type of stuff where it’s good to hire an outside firm - the outside guys go from company to company, doing this one rare thing over and over.
Other examples might include M&A (eg divestitures), offshoring (eg standing up a factory in Mexico), or new market entry (eg launching a product in a brand new country).
Most strategy consultants are saying what management already knows but needs to confirm in case things go bad in order to cover their ass. Without the consultants they maybe wouldn’t make the “difficult” choice of laying people off or paying pharmacies to get people addicted to opiates and therefore the business would suffer.
The article doesn't mention it, but McKinsey in France is currently under judicial inquiries for at least two reasons:
- They worked on the presidential campaigns of Macron in 2017 and 2022, and were awarded huge government contracts with little or no bidding afterwards
- They didn't pay any taxes in France since 2011, sending money to the mothership instead to reduce taxable profits to zero; and their managing partner, who is accused of having lied to parliament about it, resigned in the wake of that discovery.
I worked at McKinsey for three years. Here are a few thoughts. Sorry it's so long, didn't have time to make it more concise.
- I'd guess >95% of people never run into anything morally questionable while there. My teams always tried to do their best and I never felt like we were helping achieve any sort of nefarious goal. Most of the time I think we were worth the money for our clients.
- I do think the culture makes it more likely for individuals to take risks that may end up getting them in trouble. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, and a lot of money (and prestige) at stake. It's easy to imagine individuals cracking under that pressure and making bad choices, and that the rest of the team might fall in line so that they can also succeed. I'd put most of the blame here on McKinsey and some on the individuals involved - maybe 70/30.
- I'd guess most other consultancies have bodies hidden somewhere that are similar to McKinsey's (questionable contracts, outright fraud, botched projects, moral failures, etc).
- The closest I got to something morally questionable was a project where we had a huge contract to help the client cut costs, including firing people. You'd think our budget would have been on the chopping block too, but I guess not. Obviously this left a bad taste in most of our mouths. I feel we tried to do our best, but I doubt we were worth our fees in that instance. The company eventually merged with another, so even more people were fired in the end.
- The 'internal firewalls' are real - if you've been on a project for one big company in an industry, they won't let you work for a project with another one. There were internal experts we couldn't talk to because of concerns in this area. I'm sure this hasn't been 100% true 100% of the time, but generally I think this is a real concern for McK (if they couldn't guarantee this they'd lose client trust) so they make a real effort to prevent it.
- While I was there, projects with the tobacco companies were famous for having better work/life balance than almost any other project. They were hard to staff because so many junior consultants refused on ethical grounds, so I guess this was a carrot?
- I can mostly only speak to the US. I heard some jawdropping stories about how reliant the Saudi government is on McKinsey and other consultants to get almost any work done, even the most basic things. But that's all secondhand gossip. In general, the sense I get is that the standard in the US offices doesn't carry over to every global location, but I don't have the personal experience to say that for sure.
Would it be fair to say that consulting firms could get the top (good) people in a developed country, but also is more likely to hire the smartest but corrupt people in a corrupt country? As that is the name of the game in those countries.
And the HQ not caring as much because those other countries bring in the 'franchise fee'. At the risk of a story like this.
In my experience McKinsey (like most consultancies) does almost all its hiring directly out of college or grad school. Hiring outside those pipelines was becoming a little more common when I left, but I'd imagine it's still probably <10% of the total.
I don't think there'd be much hiring of already 'corrupt' people, but it's pretty reasonable that when you have a very competitive and prestigious position, on average, you might find that more 'cutthroat' people are more willing to invest time and energy to getting hired.
The folks that work on tobacco clients need to go to tobacco clients. They smoke ALL the time there. I’ve heard it’s a terrible thing to get staffed on unless you’re a big smoker yourself.
The article starts with an Indian dynasty in South Africa is cought with the most brazen corruption. Around 10% of the annual gdp where stolen, with the help of mckinsey.
The rest is a history of consulting companies and their (criminal) endeavours
I'm of the age where, as a fresh grad, I was kind of impressed by the Big Consultancies in general and by McKinsey in particular.
Few of my viewpoints have changed more drastically in the last 30 years. Now, when I see someone has one of those firms on their resume or business card, I just assume they're not someone I want to hire or work with. Or even have a beer with.
Previous company of mine wanted to make drastic reorganization changes and so they hired McKinsey to simply echo what they already wanted to happen. This is to provide cover for upper management (a.k.a. the "wooden desks") who can then use the official McKinsey report as a shield against any backlash. They can simply point at the report and shrug their shoulders in apparent helplessness in the face of the recommendations of the "experts". It was quite the Office Space moment.
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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.
At my previous place of employ they made some really terrible decisions which ended up costing a LOT of money later.
Their response was classic "the design was vetted by McKinsey"..
No.. you sent them what you wanted to do, they told you what you wanted/needed to hear and now you are deflecting your decisions.
1. Coming into the company and gathering information from the low-level staff.
2. Presenting the information to management.
3. Collecting $1000/hr or more for his trouble.
Basically information washing to get execs to accept information that they would normally ignore. I wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on in industry.
We also were fully aware of the old joke that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and then tells you the time. We sometimes deployed this ourselves with customers, and extended it to say that unlike our rivals, we would actually point out how late you were and how to get back on track.
[Edit] We sometimes found ourselves supporting one of the big 4 companies (as domain experts). We were often amazed by the quality of the A team that they would deploy to win the work, compared with the B or C team that would then actually execute it (often bright but junior staff).
I've also had some experience working for a smallish company with very big clients and they sometimes insisted on having an IT-Consulting company like Capgemini as a middleman. That's the biggest nightmare because they were always a net-negative from my POV...integrating them was just extra work and they provided no value except for their brand name to make the client feel at ease.
The other half haven't figured it out and think they're getting top-tier stuff and end up with life destroying garbage like your employee performance system or a citywide trash crisis? [1]
Do you need to spend millions to justify an inevitable decision but blame the hired guns for it? Hire McKinsey.
Do you need to spend millions for severely overworked junior grade consultants and offshored "experts" to provide you with objectively terrible advice and create an opioid epidemic? Also hire McKinsey! [2]
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/nyregion/new-york-city-tr... 2 - https://www.mckinsey.com/about-us/opioidfacts
Everyone knew that one of 'big 4' was hired to make the prospects of going public legit and credible. That consulting firm made things look right in exchange of big bucks.
- when things go well, they can take the credit, or
- when things go bad, they can blame the consulting company.
Grubby business if you ask me.
Just come to provide the results the boss wants to have for him to rubber stamp and justify the cost cutting.
Paying $1B for a site that should cost $50M is 'hoodwinked'.
$150/hr is really not that much money, depending on the importance of the project, and having devs from India is fine.
Almost the entirety of the question in any given situation is 'Did it work out?'
Because if it did, it was worth it.
Companies are not interested in making 'great products' like a startup would, for some secondary thing.
Mostly, it's like construction: they need something built. That works. Not some kind of innovative thing.
They don't have a year to find 'top talent' and go through interesting architectures, or dynamic processes. They wouldn't even know how to do that.
You might be very well downplaying your input: if you are competent, know what you are doing, show up, and can solve the problem, you're probably worth every penny and much more. Now maybe that is or is not the case! Or maybe 'it depends' or maybe, some projects kind of necessarily require 'proper engineering'.
Now, all of what I just said would apply to normal circumstances. In Africa, it's so complicated. McKinsey is also very different office by office. Corruption is harder than we understand, because when it's a random event we can say 'oh, corrupt!' - but when it's normal trade practice aka 5% kickback for the buyer, well, it takes on a different characteristic.
That’s not being hoodwinked either. If you’re happy to pay $1B for something and get that thing, then that’s your fault for not shopping around for a better deal.
Bernie Madoff and SBF hoodwinked people. Somebody charging a premium for their services and getting willing customers isn’t.
I would be impressed by them if I wasn't so disgusted.
Top tier consulting firms are: McKinsey, BCG, Bain
Deleted Comment
They're hiring and developing a lot of top talent in "hard skills" (e.g., not MBA's) across different industries. From what I've been able to tell, it's paying off a lot with strategies that are grounded in reality and catching things that non-technical people would miss.
Really depends on the team you get assigned to your project though, as with any contracting/consultant situation.
What kind of weak political literacy do we have in America where agencies who literally aligned themselves with tyrannical oppressive dictators who behead rivals and loot the wealth of their own population get an ounce of room to "change" and represent "more diverse opinions". (Spoiler warning, it's one where everyone in power secretly agrees that profit triumphs over any other possible motivation)
What if you have a grocery store that makes $50,000 an hour? and you need to update the payroll software to deal with the latest tax law changes.
in a situation like that, does $150/hr matter?
There are regional hubs they have (I've worked with Philippines and India and heard of Eastern Europe) for the support and maintenance.
There are some back office financial shared services (e.g., AP / AR / cutting POs) that they also support. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more.
Accenture can give you everything from the PowerPoint slides up to the people that will be seconded or placed in your organization as contingent workers / contractors.
There's a difference between strategy consulting (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain) and consultants that do large implementation projects (e.g. Accenture).
Yes, it's not so black and white these days as both do a bit of both but the reasons they are hired are very different:
Strategy: best practices, ass-covering, politics. Smaller teams, shorter timeframe, C-level. Think interviews & powerpoint slides.
Implementation: body leasing, offloading large projects. Larger teams, IT-heavy, longer timeframes. Actual coding / documentation, etc.
And no, your experience working on a 300-people core banking project at Accenture doesn't translate to a 5-people McKinsey project.
And while both types are "expensive", they are needed in the corporate world. Because work in that environment is more than just writing code in a text editor, it's mostly politics at the top.
It pains me that it's always seen as an evil, because sometimes it is the best option.
I don't know what you did, and I don't want to besmirch it. So let's take a recent "successful" project: OMNY, the new transit fare system in NYC.
That system cost the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority over three quarters of a billion dollars. $772,000,000.
To put that in comparison, the point of sale payment processor Square raised 170 million fewer dollars over from seed to series E and does fifty times as much payment volume.
There is a staggering amount of inefficiency in these projects, and I suspect it's because of capture.
I draw a parallel with some Asian cultures where being tanned is a sign that you're working in the field, so it's better to avoid the sun and stay as white as can be. When I was at accenture, there was a huge culture to "leave code" as soon as you could. Code is for people who do. Mere grunts. You gotta be a decider, a boss. The only career path (I think that's not true anymore) was management track. They even had a subsidiary called accenture technology services to recruit from universities with less reputation, but "keep the blood pure". It does make sense when you're in it, but golly am I happy I left that world.
So, they also do some -high end- implementation work as well :)
There’s a certain class of work that is (1) really critical to get right the first time and (2) only done once a decade. That’s the type of stuff where it’s good to hire an outside firm - the outside guys go from company to company, doing this one rare thing over and over.
Other examples might include M&A (eg divestitures), offshoring (eg standing up a factory in Mexico), or new market entry (eg launching a product in a brand new country).
- They worked on the presidential campaigns of Macron in 2017 and 2022, and were awarded huge government contracts with little or no bidding afterwards
- They didn't pay any taxes in France since 2011, sending money to the mothership instead to reduce taxable profits to zero; and their managing partner, who is accused of having lied to parliament about it, resigned in the wake of that discovery.
Here's one article (of many), in French:
https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/affaire-mckinsey-une-...
(Disable javascript to bypass the firewall).
So it's not just South Africa, UK and the US; it really is everywhere.
- I'd guess >95% of people never run into anything morally questionable while there. My teams always tried to do their best and I never felt like we were helping achieve any sort of nefarious goal. Most of the time I think we were worth the money for our clients.
- I do think the culture makes it more likely for individuals to take risks that may end up getting them in trouble. There's a lot of pressure to succeed, and a lot of money (and prestige) at stake. It's easy to imagine individuals cracking under that pressure and making bad choices, and that the rest of the team might fall in line so that they can also succeed. I'd put most of the blame here on McKinsey and some on the individuals involved - maybe 70/30.
- I'd guess most other consultancies have bodies hidden somewhere that are similar to McKinsey's (questionable contracts, outright fraud, botched projects, moral failures, etc).
- The closest I got to something morally questionable was a project where we had a huge contract to help the client cut costs, including firing people. You'd think our budget would have been on the chopping block too, but I guess not. Obviously this left a bad taste in most of our mouths. I feel we tried to do our best, but I doubt we were worth our fees in that instance. The company eventually merged with another, so even more people were fired in the end.
- The 'internal firewalls' are real - if you've been on a project for one big company in an industry, they won't let you work for a project with another one. There were internal experts we couldn't talk to because of concerns in this area. I'm sure this hasn't been 100% true 100% of the time, but generally I think this is a real concern for McK (if they couldn't guarantee this they'd lose client trust) so they make a real effort to prevent it.
- While I was there, projects with the tobacco companies were famous for having better work/life balance than almost any other project. They were hard to staff because so many junior consultants refused on ethical grounds, so I guess this was a carrot?
- I can mostly only speak to the US. I heard some jawdropping stories about how reliant the Saudi government is on McKinsey and other consultants to get almost any work done, even the most basic things. But that's all secondhand gossip. In general, the sense I get is that the standard in the US offices doesn't carry over to every global location, but I don't have the personal experience to say that for sure.
Will the big3 be around in 15-20 years or is it a dying industry with many of the best people leaving for exist opps in tech/finance/etc.
And the HQ not caring as much because those other countries bring in the 'franchise fee'. At the risk of a story like this.
I don't think there'd be much hiring of already 'corrupt' people, but it's pretty reasonable that when you have a very competitive and prestigious position, on average, you might find that more 'cutthroat' people are more willing to invest time and energy to getting hired.
The rest is a history of consulting companies and their (criminal) endeavours
Few of my viewpoints have changed more drastically in the last 30 years. Now, when I see someone has one of those firms on their resume or business card, I just assume they're not someone I want to hire or work with. Or even have a beer with.