John Oliver is literally the only person on Earth who could get me to enthusiastically drop everything to click on a 26 minute video about a business management firm.
This reminds me of an old joke: A shepherd is tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a shiny red BMW appears. The driver is a young man in an Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes and Polarized sunglasses. He sticks his head out the window and asks the shepherd, “Hey! If I can tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looks at him, and agrees. The driver plugs his cell phone into a laptop and connects it to a GPS and starts a remote body-heat scan of the area. During the process he sends some e-mails. After receiving the answers, he prints a 100 page report on the portable printer in his glove compartment, and proudly announces to the shepherd: “You have exactly 1,478 sheep.” To which the shepherd answers: “Impressive. You can choose one sheep out of my flock”. He observes the man pick up an animal and load it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?” “You’re on.” the young man answers. “You are a Mckinsey consultant,” says the shepherd promptly. “You are right! How could you possibly guess?” says the man, visibly surprised. “It wasn’t a guess,” the shepherd replies. “You drive into my field uninvited. You want me to pay you for a piece of information I already know, you answer questions I haven’t asked, and you know nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog.”
Apparently McKinsey are into coding as well - when I joined Credit Suisse as a contractor last year I had to rewrite some code their consultants had written in R to Python. It turned out the R code had a bug and didn’t read the data files correctly and the liquidity reports that were being sent to the top management of the bank had been incorrect for years.
They're also into agile transformations without having a shade of understanding of what it is that makes agile work. I've spent years replacing their "agile playbooks" with new playbooks that are actually useful and replacing their "agile" micro-management, waterfall processes with no feedback loops with proper, flow-based agile ways of working. Good business for me, but certainly much, much better business for them, now that I've seen what they charge.
Whenever he covers a big company, I like to imagine the crisis meeting on Monday morning that starts with everyone watching the show in awkward silence.
To the contrary, I always find it sad knowing that they will have a big smug laugh about it, and carry on with their business as usual. Knowing (or believing) that no one can really hurt them.
@@gupta.vansh2000and you certainly have. The OP said they worked with McKinsey, and you refuted an imagined statement that they didn't make. Harvard taught you well.
In 2010, my company paid McKinney in Sweden $100,000 for 2 consultants for 4 hours to work with the management team on business growth strategy! The consultants just gathered all our own work, organized them in a PowerPoint document of some 20 pages, and gave it back to us. Pure bullshit.
Exactly what happened in our company. We paid them 250k to serve up "air cover" for our executives and BoD. All McKinsey did was "interview" our team and then redo our internal research in pretty charts. And oh, did I mention the guys and gals they airdropped into our office were fresh grad MBAs? (who had no idea what we did)
@bumblebootwiddletoes5185 Hardly. It's quite impossible to do that, because you're supposedly buying "brain power" and "advices". You can't just ask for refund for advices, thoughts, discussions and so-called "guidance" when you aren't satisfied with the outcome. It's not like returning defect products. That is what makes the consulting business a scam for the major part of it when it comes to strategies and management. There are other parts, such as financial accounting or other areas, that can still provide value.
My mom was a well liked middle leader in the government in Denmark. She was laid off due to a mass layoff orchestrated by McKinsey. They never even met her. Her responsibilities were passed on to her leader, who broke down with stress after a month.
@@Retzmag People with good work relationships usually stay in touch. Hell, I'm still talking to some of my ex peers from work 8 years ago. For me its mostly because I enjoyed working with those people, but if that's not enough of an incentive, maintaining your network is always a smart thing to do
@@lesulix9885 I wish I could do that. My last role felt like nobody gave a damn about one another, and my manager was a nightmare to work for. I quit after being diagnosed with CPTSD. It is a lot to take in still and has been four months, but I am so much happier out of there than in there.
@@johnsharestories Very sorry to hear that. Its also the reason why I never really care what product I will be working on, but rather what team I will be working with
@@Frank-dv4zu Like anything, not everyone in one particular field is bad. A lot of consultants actually do great work and are very helpful individuals.
I was an engineer in a company which (sadly) hired McKinsey for advice how to increase profits. Employees knew that meant major layoffs, though our Management took pains to deny the obvious. In the end major layoffs occurred, Management seats increased and the company never recovered. Basically, McKinsey's philosophy was: don't trust experienced employees, control everything to the n-th degree, increase profits by decreasing headcount (but never Management). Screw McKinsey and similar "Management Consultants". They're part of the evil which gives our capitalist market system a bag name.
It's an easy pitch to the high table though. The C suite and the upper management salaries go up, the people at the bottom get the stick. For greedy corporate people that makes sense. Rather than doing layoffs the guy at Nintendo took a paycut, meanwhile Microsoft fired 10K people at the same time they spent 68 billion to buy Activision-Blizzard.
Nonsense. Management consultants do good, hard work. Their work has rescued hundreds of thousands of jobs by keeping firms from going under, and increased profits led to bonuses for staff.
I had a McKinsey experience in the 2000s. They came in, cut close to 50% of the workforce in our warehouse and offices, and increased top management 25%. The result was that the "lucky ones"who stayed started to work 10+ hours per day, with peaks of 14 to 16 hours at month end in the finance dept (I was a middle manager in accounting) because the workload was the same but we were 50% less. Actually the workload was a slightly bigger as the new managers were asking for their own reports (they needed to justify they were there). My team started to fall sick after 1 year, I managed to stay 2 years more before falling sick myself and heard that the company was first sold and dissolved one year later. I don't trust McKinsey, if they come in the company I work for now, I will leave immediately.
But they decreased overhead, increased margins and income, and packaged up the company nicely for the private equity folks to pillage. Management got a nice payout. The board and shareholders got a premium on the stock price. The private equity guys got to make a ton spinning off the IP and liquidating the rest. Everyone wins! [Except employees, consumers, suppliers, local governments, etc.]
Last year, I worked at a company that hired McKinsey to work on a tech project here in Brazil. After 6 months and millions of dollars spent, they delivered a project so fundamentally shitty that some analysts from my company (me included) had to be brought in to fix the absolute mess they had created. When confronted, they refused to acknowledge their bad job, and according to one of their partners "were very disappointed at us". The truth is, upper level management loves McKinsey because they are very good at making nice-looking Power Points and easily convince people who don't really know much about anything (such as upper level management). The analysts who are forced to work with them absolutely hate them (and I know a lot of cases that were similar to mine). And, of course, all of this is just peanuts compared to the actual harm McKinsey does working for governments and morally dubious companies around the world.
Hahahaha entregaram um “deck” de 100 slides e uma planilha com algumas abas de cores diferentes e várias tabelas soltas com referência cruzada e cheia de cores?
@@brenoingwersen784 era um projeto de machine learning, entregaram um modelo cuja previsão era pior do que jogar um dado. Mas a verdadeira entrega foi o power point bonito
Main point for upper management to bring those consulting firms in is to cover their ass. If something fails they always can blame it on the advice they received. That's why those consulting firms also get the big contracts from governments and political institutions.
Yeah, I had major surgery on both feet as a kid, and the surgeon had me on a combination of extended-release OxyContin with shorter acting Percoset. It was horrible. I stopped taking it after less than a week, and when I saw him for my post-op and hadn't continued with my pain management he was pissed. I told him I would manage find without it. I have severe chronic pain now, and I still won't take opioids outside of acute pain for surgery or post injury. I think they have a place, absolutely, but I think our rules were way too indiscriminate with them.
Well I guess they'd have to prove that any of it was either clearly a lie and not satire, or a lie and presented as truth. Idk how they would sue him for talking about the things that they did and continue to do, presenting opinion on true facts that are documented either in official sources or literally by themselves doesn't seem like something they could sue for. I guess if any of this sounds outlandish, it's because these people behave like actual cartoon villains since they can just hide behind the corpo name and rarely, if ever, face personal consequences.
@@CommentPoster10 Every night they thank whatever deity they believe in for choosing HBO among all the equally appealing choices they had, without knowing what was expecting them.
One of my personal favourite McKinsey ideas: when it was hired by the French government to find ways to spend less, they advised reducing students' aid by 5€ a month. The amount the government saved? Precisely what McKinsey billed them for the advice...
Yes! And the "rapport sur l'Education Nationale" was a joke. I read it when it came out and laughed my head off. It cost something like 400,000 euros. But then again Macron hired the consultants...I rest my case.
They did something similar in Germany if I remember correctly. Slashed some administrative cost in the university student help (Bafög) and 2 years later everyone was surprised that half of the system broke down completely and students who needed the money to pay their rent didn't get it for up to half a year.
Such a scam, wonder what other businesses they have their fingers in around the globe... besides the likes of the Saudis and oil money ofc, who else has an economy based around that and loves to prop up authoritarian regimes? 🤔🤷♂️
I owe a major debt of gratitude to John Oliver and team for putting these segments on RUclips for free. There are few things that give me as much joy as when I see a new episode is available to watch. Doing your part to educate the masses on relatively obscure or complicated topics while being factual, funny, and empathetic. John and team are all saints.
Exactly. They have covered in detail SO MANY obscure topics that most people just gloss over. And they do it in very entertaining ways. I'm a little surprised that HBO even lets them do this. It's probably ONLY because he is a comedian and they think most people won't take him completely serious. I've tried using his videos in arguments before and people just usually wave it off as being from a comedian. 😞
I've had the pleasure of working with them. You spend 75% of your time with them training them on the things that they don't know about your business. Their staff tend to be green new MBAs with next to zero experience. Whatever the problem is, they have a standard formula they will force your problem into - whether it fits or not. And then when the whole experience is done, they will give you basically the same answer you had from the very start. And a multimillion dollar bill.
Totally the same when they were brought in to a company I worked for. They came up with processes and tracking that gave useless data that just averaged everything and gave nonsense results that management pretended was important yet did nothing with. Now we are stuck with all these nonsense meetings called huddles and side by sides. Mostly just to discuss feelings and anything important is taken offline which is another word for we are never talking about this again.
in all the examples I read only here, I remain baffled (as I was for years already) why companies pay HUGE sums of money to these kinds of bs 'consultants' instead of using that money to solve the problem. Because, often, that is what is needed (like Rikers.... 27 mlj pumped into the facility and recourses like library, sports, education, counseling, a.s.o. would have actually improved the situation.)
As someone who went to a premier B-school, yeah, during prep for management consulting interviews they tell you that the companies tend to already know the problem and what they want to do about it. They bring in external consultants to just put the same into a structured format and to have someone external with perceived credibility to point to when questions are raised later. That, a bunch of guesstimates and frameworks, executive presence, networking skills and ability to confidently keep talking and selling bs for an extended period of time.
My first job after college was for a large engineering company in Germany. The company had 4 divisons serving different industries. From nuclear power to technical consulting. Every division had it’s own purchasing group. The leadership brought McKinsey in and the 4 purchaing groups where centralized to one. You know the synergy, efficiency bs. The result was that we had large projects halted to a stop because of purchasing. You just don‘t by a domestice heaters the same way as a nuclear power plant component. The leadership brought a consultant back. The first statement: put back smaller purchasing groups, you will be more agile and closer to your market. That company was McKinsey. All of the turmoil nearly killed the company. I left a month later. What is my definition of a consultant? A consultant is a man who knows 50 sex positions but no woman.
My definition of McKinsey: is the big SUCKING sound Ross Perot would talk about --- Money from your wallet to theirs - with no benefit and maybe even harm.
@@mr.slyvesteefoxinator3426 I was a class A machinist/CNC programmer, auto mechanic, musician. Don't get me going on engineers. Every engineer should have to work with what they design. Just my opinion of course.
McKinsey is where all of the German defense budget went for many years, because the daughter of the defense minister worked at McKinsey. So McKinsey was hired for hundreds of millions of Euros per year to do "consulting", which has led to the complete destruction of the German Bundeswehr. The current minister of defense has a lot of shards to pick up to get the Bundeswehr into an even half-way viable state... It's ridiculous.
Came from America to study management in Germany, and the obsession with McKinsey is very alarming, to the point that my university is currently using McKinsey as a consultant for problems that us as students have been writing solutions to for free in our semester feedback forms to the uni. It's scary how idolized McKinsey is here, too.
You nailed it. They are not there for their expertise. They are there to isolate the company management from consequences. That's what they are paid for.
Yes. We were there to maximize shareholder profits. By definition, it was protecting shareholders. Anything less would be dereliction of our fiduciary duty and insubordination. All other rules were 'flexible'.
Exactly. As a former McKinsey consultant, I can confirm that we frequently had directions from clients about the desired outcome (“we need to break the union” “we need to chop 25-40% of workers” “we need to completely outsource these 3 functions” “we need to rationalize giving contracts to these political supporters”) And we gave them the recommendations they wanted, even when analysis indicated it was the exact opposite of what should be considered.
I once interviewed for a McKinsey internship (not in the US). I had great grades from one of the top business schools in my country but was not at all the boastful type. The partner actually accused me of being a liar, because “my grades did not match my attitude”. A friend of mine, who is the smartest, hardest-working and overall best person I have ever met - including really humble - also interviewed and was accused of being an actress. On the contrary, I heard from several people with not necessarily stellar but decent grades but more capable of projecting ambition and self-assurance that they faced no such mind-boggling feedback. These recruiting practices sound like a big red flag to me. Also, later I worked at Deloitte doing audit. It was still crazy hard work, but I found a much greater respect for honesty and truth, and earned enough respect that when I sent out my farewell email a partner actually came to the staff open space to personally say goodbye. Highly doubt I would be shown the same kindness at McKinsey.
@@SilverMe2004 which would be great if there was trust on all sides (who wants to buy something different from what is advertised?). When you make accusations such as that, even when it is on the "other side" of the market, all trust is broken - especially when, despite the fact that a CV can be easily forged, there was strong evidence that was not the case. In hindsight, it may have been a technique to dissuade less self-assured candidates.
Big 4 is much better than these BS management consulting firms. At least when Big 4 charges companies an arm and a leg they give more technical advice, and their employees know what they are doing.
Well, they hire what you need. If you are really capable at what you do, why would you go to them? You could go somewhere, where you could actually do what you are good at.
I interviewed with McKinsey in Atlanta in 1994. I was a West Point grad, Academic All-American football player at Army, Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and an infantry platoon leader in the US Army. The McKinsey people I met with were so self-confidently full of themselves, with absolutely no idea or appreciation of someone who actually worked somewhere where life and death was a real thing, that I walked out of the interview and said I was not interested in working there. Of course, they felt obliged to send me a rejection letter saying I was not a good fit for them. I framed it and to this day it reminds me that I'd rather not work at all instead of working for a firm without intellectual integrity or a moral compass.
I'm 64 years old and having spent my entire adult life in corporate America and having watched some great companies die (Sun Microsystems, Wang Labs) because of arrogance of the leadership who listened to McKinsey and people like them and having spent the early part of my career at investment banks on Wall Street with people just like they portray here .. this is a very important piece of journalism!
It's really sad because usually when an organisation needs changes either to grow or to implement processes, you need a team to examine the whole organisation, listen to the people and summarise solutions for the management. You don't need everyone to stay after the change, so being able to hire consultants can be good. Ideally, I think the team should at least be 50% made up of your own employees and 50% of a consultant company's. In tech, we charge 3 times the price of an average developer. Which is expensive but necessary to cover the cost of when the devs don't have assignments. So I don't understand how Mckinsey charged tens of millions of dollars for a few fresh grads.
it's not the first time this story comes out, and it won't be the last - yet nothing ever changes because the interests are too big ... I've worked for these companies and have seen decisions made 'just because of numbers' and the need for a scapegoat ... I've seen people I knew lose jobs because of a bunch of idiots in a room with no real-life experience nor empathy ... I left when we started working with tobacco trying to enhance the 'addictiveness' through 'secret ingredients' ... there is no oversight and because it sounds like everyone is doing it, companies keep buying this absolutely horrendous garbage from a bunch of nobodies pushed through ivy league schools with daddies' money. End of rant
They were a part of how the Astros culture came down to banging trash cans, believe it or not. This is an amazing segment. Oliver just keeps getting better and better.
Having worked for years as a tech architect at a Management Consulting firm, I found many in the team inexperienced yet were good talkers and PowerPoint makers. Some of the recommendations they provided were totally stupid from a technical perspective, however they bull shit their way through. There strategy is to get the C Level Exec in their pockets and rest of team will obey what they say. Extremely unethical business
I LOVE this piece. I worked for about three years for one of McKinsey's biggest rivals (guess two names and Im prety sure you got it). The doublespeak is intentional and carefully cultivated. And naturally, this sort of self-deception becomes a narcotic. The reason they are successful is that they can write long dissertations on why the employees need to be squeezed. They help companies justify decisions that no soul-possessing human being would want to make. Thanks John. This was a long overdue discussion of an industry that is actively harming the average working person.
As a professor at an Ivy League school, I've been repeatedly heartbroken to lose some of our most gifted students to this crowd. As a society, we're really setting the wrong incentives for where talent goes (and that's not to say that everyone there is incredibly gifted -- there's more than enough privileged duds there, too).
@@chpslife Oh they absolutely do not have it. I went to a school massively targeted by these companies for recruitment and they do not care about qualifications - have a PhD in 19th century Scottish poetry? Qualified! Masters in eroticism in renaissance paintings? Qualified! As long as those degrees have the right school name on them. The chancellor of the school literally said during a welcome event that one of the most valuable things you would get at the school is a particular accent branding you as attending the school. It is the modern aristocracy, people qualified by name recognition and fancy clothes chatting in backrooms to enrich each other without sparing a thought for the average person living on this planet.
Business degrees are basically participation degrees that assholes with rich parents get. I wouldn't call any of those students "gifted" even if mommy and daddy paid to have them go to a fancy Ivy League school.
@@chpslife Experience is generally seen as a detriment for consultants (And higher level managers). Experience means you have habits, ideas, and are less likely to conform to the "company standards" and have limited "company loyalty potential". They want a particular school name, 3 references from family in the industry, and nothing else.
John is breaking dangerous ground here. These three are all part of the same, BCG was founded by people from Bain (cough, Mitt Romney) and they are all owned by the same small group of oligarchs that own practically everything through the stock market. They are experienced in sending companies into bankruptcy (Toys r Us, Overstock, Sears, attempted GameStop), so that short hedge funds can profit and the monopolies of evil like Walmart and Amazon can maintain their stranglehold. These "consultants" are the arms of Hydra. They represent the love of money that has completely destroyed our world in every way. And the heads of Hydra don't like them talked about.
@@juliejanesmith57oh god… I bet you think you sound cool when you say stupid a$$ phrases like “eat the rich”. All while you probably don’t add a modicum of value to your community or society. Smh
Being anywhere near the opioid industry should get you blackballed from anyone who manufacturers or approves drugs after everything was exposed about them and how many people they killed.
I worked for Verizon for nearly 6 years and had to work with McKinsey teams on a multitude of projects. They were the bane of my and my team’s existence any time they inserted themselves into our work. This whole segment was spot on and pure gold.
Former consultant (not McKinsey) and I can verify this content. The "secret" to McKinsey's longevity and success is serving as resume builder for unqualified/unremarkable offspring of the ruling class for telling top level executives whatever they want to hear. There are literally thousands of US consulting firms that achieve better results at a fraction of the cost, but they all lack the real secret of success, giving super-rich a-holes a facade of competence.
I think you are very correct. I would add that the likes of McKinsey may even serve to promote the Universities endowments and trusts by masquerading as an essential support pillar for the corporate boards that run this world, while providing a connection to the families of the wealthy . Nepotism, western style.
@@kkp4297 they do everything to avoid that. In my engineer degree in France, we had some accounting + finance classes that were held by people working at a competitor of McKinsey. From the start of the class, they used the same narrative of their ad. They seduce student with very large salary announcement and exclusive experience (small group teaching, invite to cocktails...). It really is like a tinder for work at the end. I worked as an engineer consultant (small firm). And even in technical fields I was hired to manage a site that I knew jackshit about. Hopefully, the company that I was "advising" actually trained me on the industry specific and then internalised me. But when I see how a small firm was so good at bullshiting, big ones scares me
Yes. Former consult as well. The recruiting events are insanely and openly pointed. There is value to these old companies remaining loyal to these firms. Their reach is wide and intersects with everyone; public and private sectors.. They deal in information and keep secrets better than any spy. It's crazy to hear John talking about this topic.
I worked for a large telecommunications company. Every 18 months or so we'd go through a restructure. McKinsey was involved every time taking their cut. I did once ask the CEO during a kitchen chat why. "If they're so good at their job, why do we keep having to pay them to undo their previous mistakes every 18 months." The silence was golden. The CEO finally stumbled of some BS no one including himself believed.
I used to be friends with a guy who then started at McKinsey germany. That cult of money and grandiosity turned him into an absolute ghoul. You could see him get more shallow and vapid by the month. He would later pretend that it wasn't his old friends who dumped him for that but instead him leaving his old circle of friends behind because they were too small fish and couldn't even afford to be part of his new lifestyle, so what was the point in keeping us anyway. Some jobs absolutely eat your soul if you are prone to greed and think living your best life means buying and emulating everything from the latest GQ magazine while doing absolutely horrendous and inhumane shit hidden behind cold spreadsheets. Pitiful.
@@freddwoord It's not a laugh track. This is taped in front of an audience like most late night shows. You can literally sign up to get tickets online for the show tapings.
@@Asherek doesn’t change the fact that the laughs that you can hear here aren’t live ones but ones that have been added later on. No live crowd sounds like this
My ex-roommate used to work at McKinsey. I've never seen someone work so freaking hard in my life. It was utterly unsustainable, in my eyes. I barely saw her. She was worked to the bone and the pressure, gosh, as an outsider, I couldn't even wrap my head around it.
A friend of mine worked for them. I went to meet her for lunch when I was visiting London, and (aside from telling me that if she left the office at 8pm her colleagues would give her shit for "taking an early mark") we were 25 minutes through her 'one hour lunch break' before she got a call from someone in the office asking where she was as it was the first time in a year she'd ever left the office on her lunch break. She had to go back up to the office two minutes later to go back to work.
McKinsey has helped kneecap the company I retired from, 3M. Their continuous reengineering has lead to a 70% decrease in the stock price over the last 5 years and a complete destruction of the innovation culture at a once great company.
@@MC-ls9fsno, that's just the latest disaster. As a 3M shareholder it's been depressing. The biggest outrage to average shareholders, I'm not rich, is that mismanagement never hurts those at the top of the company. They wipe out millions or even billions of shareholder value and walk away with their ridiculously inflated salaries and the life of luxury
Not all of us but certainly there is a complete buy in to public corps because doing research on business is far easier it’s them. Most text books have very little that is really based on the main generating firms of gdp in this country. I used to object..no I still do. I critique what kids are taught while I’m teaching. I refuse to give them pat answers and groom them to comply with corporate party lines.
Except that did not become your life core value... as this company description shows. At least I hope. Percentage is the key in fakenews-ridden social /media age.
I don't live in CA, but donate to Katie Porter when I can, because it's a joy to watch her pin down CEOs when they appear before the house. She's running for Senator against some tough competitors, which means if she doesn't win that election, she'll be out of Congress.
When she pulls out the whiteboard it's like watching a wrestler climb the turnbuckle in a match... Someone is about to get annihilated and we're all going to cheer!
At my university’s business school there’s a class called Acting for Business Majors and it was mostly for consultants, I think it’s where they learn how to give off that impression 😂
McKinsey is brought in often to simply confirm a management decision. It helps company management to 'defend' their ideas and get approval from the board.
Rather they're brought in so management executives can say we looked exhaustive for ways other than firing everyone and giving ourselves big fat bonuses...but alas...here we are...BYE!
We had this with Return to the Office. We had worked for 2 years from home without hiccups. They brought in consultants, but thankfully incompetent ones. They did big company wide surveys during meetings. The options were skewed towards RTO as the only option at times, but half were missed and they left in some write in answers. They also put the poll results up AS we took them, so you could see the vast majority of people did not want a blanket RTO for 5 days a week. When the consultants wrote a report claiming we ACTUALLY wanted RTO it caused ripples and any manager following the report instantly lost like half their staff. Still have one C suite guy OBSESSED with everyone returning to 5 days a week, makes everyone under him do 3 when company policy is 2. People transfer out and hate him. We even had construction and had to "find office space" elsewhere in the building instead of just taking the week from home. We did this for 2 damn years with rising productivity... now our productivity is suffering so they are blaming WFH.
I’m a finance exec and I still don’t understand how a large successful company can think hiring a bunch of MBA students is going to get them some deeper insights or more expertise.
That is not it. They think hiring a bunch of eager MBA students willing to do whatever it takes is going to give them hours and hours of cheap labor they can sell as expensive hours while peddling some ideas a few people came up with that actually do not really work but sound neat. The graduates get a name on their CV, McKinsey a lot of money with relatively big margins and the customer gets advice they can sell as being reliable to upper management. If something goes wrong, McKinsey is the scapegoat. By that time, most of the people working on said project already left to big roles elsewhere, and the new team comes in promising they will fix it. Welcome to consulting.
@@dome8721 Before you tell other people what's up, might want to understand what they're saying. The large successful company he's talking about is the client, not McKinsey. Nobody questions why McKinsey does this, they make money. The question is, why hire McKinsey to 'solve your problems' when all they give you is the best looking MBA students, who know nothing about your business.
@@dome8721 I believe he meant the company paying for the consultation. but it does sound like they are regularly hired just so they can blame the consultant for the lay offs
there just minimizing their risk and hiring someone they can point the finger at...they are usually way out of their league (peter principle) in the role they are in anyway...
I graduated from an Ivy League college in 2020. At graduation, the student speaker said something along the lines of "We're going out to change the world. We are the doctors, engineers, and consultants..." The crowd audibly laughed at consultants.
@@andrewmclaughlin2701Lol consultants are the ones being replaced. Someone’s gotta actually do the engineering for AI to get anywhere, you can already “consult” ChatGPT and have it be more useful than a consultant.
They were invited to a bank I worked for in Kenya: we had to do these ideation labs thrice a week from each dept. They took the ideas put them on their letter head and presented to senior management plus laying off workers... got paid handsomely, the bank reported losses for 6 straight years. Same script for other organizations in my country that I know of.
Having been a consultant myself, I can attest to the accuracy of this observation: a significant number of F500 executive teams are consulting alumni, and many pivotal corporate decisions are influenced by consulting firms. The essence of our role was rooted in facilitating transformation-we advocated for change, asserting its positive impact, all while recognizing that our firms' livelihoods depended on it. We possessed the ability to propose a strategic direction one day, streamline a workforce based on that direction, only to return two years later with a different strategy, justified by the ever-shifting and intricate landscape of the market. We were trained to communicate and work in certain ways so clients perceive us as experts.
In other words, if it works, fuck around with it till it doesn't, then come back later and charge them all over again for putting it back the way it was.
Katie Porter is a national hero. I'd vote for her for president in a heartbeat. She will never run however, because she knows she can accomplish more in the senate.
Unfortunately the people who run for president have to be somewhat narcissistic to make a bid and the people who should run are too good to waste their time on that. 😞
Nah, she's an idiot. She's another AoC, grand stands for progressive talking points - which is good for her fandom, but ultimately doesn't mean or do anything. When the votes need to come in she gets in-line just like everybody else.
I work in a governmental institute (not in the US) they contracted McK once and implemented it’s proposed strategies. It was a shitshow. After that this institute trained their own consultants and they now help the departments improve which proved to be cheaper and better. I guess McK really helped us better ourselves.
I bet you're right-I also bet they invite Oliver to be the entertainment at their annual meeting, then try to hire him to head up one of their departments.
@@drdarkeny That's the sad truth, ain't it? Capital folds all criticisms of it into itself. Still, I have faith that John wouldn't go through with something like that.
Our national broadcasting station in Australia, the ABC, recently did a deep dive on the major consulting companies operating here. One of the stories centered around Governmental reliance on consulting companies, to the point where one company was simultaneously advising the government on Tax Reform whilst advising a private company on how to reduce corporate income tax!
And then they apparently ran the idea by everyone *except* the only department that could actually answer the real question "if something happens and we get sued, is it better to have hand-signed, helicopter-delivered invoices available?"
How much do you think they got payed for that advice as well; How to the stupid people at the top that NEEDED that advice got payed? When freaking anyone who gives them their coffee at Starbucks could have figured out that puzzle.
@@nebufabudid that really happen? I'd hope hand signed documents aren't actually considered better legally with the right processes (like a password for verification). They could have a printer and a scanner instead of a helicopter either way.
@@nicholase2868 No idea. But that quote didn't mention them considering legal implications at all, and they may be very different depending on when, where and how it happened exactly...
Having worked in a prison, to fix them: Add a/c, better food, better housing (these guys are literally stacked on top of each other like cord wood), better heating, give them something to do! Better libraries, activities, recreation, etc. Any of the above mentioned items would being down the violence in prisons especially the overcrowding and the need for a/c!
Careful friend, it sounds almost like you're suggesting we treat prisoners like human beings and actually try to rehabilitate them, that's just not the American way.
...I'm pretty sure the jail I toured with my soci 101 class had AC... but after hearing a corrections officer talk about how the institution views detainees? I'm the opposite of shocked (alarmed, but not shocked) to hear they're in the minority. Especially considering that the solitary wing that we got to go into, it was under construction. The construction: removing the (seatless yet kneeling height, too far from the bed) desks & leaving the cells with only the bed and toilet. His response to 'isn't this inhumane?' was roughly 'solitary is a *punishment*'. He also talked about the widespread resistance to seeing mental health professionals like it was no big deal, and definitely not a problem!
The sad part is it feels less unethical to give these useless parasitical millionaires large amounts of money to talk about things community activists would do for free than give homeless people and prisons *basic* amenities. Escaping poverty becomes exponentially more difficult when you have some rich assholes actively kicking you while you are down.
16:00 As a registered Democrat living in California, I _cannot wait_ to cast my vote for Katie Porter in the 2024 Senate race. Politicians like her are all the hope we have left to rein in the corporate malfeasance and abuse of the American people.
Politicians are one part of problem. The people have to push politicians to push change. Lobbyists have too much power. Politicians talk to get elected. I never imagined federal shutdowns being bargaining tool. People cry and do nothing of substance to get change.
I love Katie Porter! Every clip I've seen of her, she's just unstoppable with putting the bs going on into common sense language and pictures that even a kindergartner could understand.
I’m soo glad that Rep Katie Porter made this video!! Her integrity is something to aspire to!!! She wrote an amazing book, politics is messier than my minivan!! Recommend read!! We need more people like her in our government!! I will be voting for her for CA senate set!!
McKinsey did not invent the bar code. The NAFC with the help of McKinsey developed the standard for it. The bar code was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver.
Yes, excatly. The first barcode was patented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952 (US Patent #2,612,994). Much later trade associations from the grocery industry formed the Uniform Product Code Council (UPCC) which, with the help of consultants of McKinsey & Company, defined the numerical format (barcode symbology) that formed the basis of the Uniform Product Code. So McKinsey helped to define the UPC standard.
There was (and still should be) a scandal in France when it was discovered how much president Macron and his staff paid McKinsey (without declerating it) for useless advices, but it has always been about the money. I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about McKinsey other works, which seems way more relevant and incriminating.
Well, it wasn't just about the money, but also about the utter incompetence of their advice when there are ressources like the "cour des comptes" and many high level civil servant that *do* know their shit and whose work is already paid for. I believe Mediapart had a few articles on the subject... [responding mostly to boost the comment in the consideration of our algorithmic overlord]
No wonder he supported von der Leyen to be EU president - they have the same M.O. lol. She had a scandal for the same thing during her tenure as german defense minister.
Macron truly is a massive joke. I mean, he has to be for someone as awful as Le Pen to get as many votes as she did. Wasn't the Louis XIV regime equally smooth brained?
McKinsey have evolved into full scam artists. But their brand is WEALTH, so other elite tossers and "businesses" hire them for their brand. they don't care what the "advice" is, just that they can say "we got the advice from McKinsey, so obviously it must be correct and you can't blame us for how things turn out". McKinsey is used by failing management to justify looting the treasury before the ship goes down...and McKinsey love being that sort of parasite.
I was a consultant with WSP and Mouchel. We sometimes brushed up against McKinsey consultants - and most of the time they were wrong. Sadly, their reputation is pretty bulletproof - and we found out why. When the clients weren't happy, McKinsey didn't charge them and then made them sign NDAs.
Not to forget the journalists, who's research and information they use. Those do a great job with often little reward as well. The LWT-Team is great at putting a big and complex story together in an entertaining and easier to understand way for the general public. Love their deep dives into topics that most of us would never really know about otherwise.
lol who are you kidding, John is what makes the show, put anyone else there and the show will flop, its his charisma that carries this show no matter what topic he talks about.
I'm a retired emergency management specialist. I was stunned to learn that British Petroleum and other firms had allowed consultants to write their emergency plans that, expectedly, turned out to be virtually useless when the Deepwater Horizon Spill occurred. A good emergency plan requires input from the people who will actually respond to the emergency, who are the employees and managers themselves, with guidance from an expert in preparing emergency plans. However, the consultant-prepared plans looked like boiler-plate that did not take into account differences between companies in structure, staffing, environment, jurisdiction, and other variables. The same would expectedly be true for advising companies on day-to-day management, which should be closely aligned with disaster roles.
Aboriginal Americans say that Deepwater is still spewing, and that the chemicals used to cover the spill have killed the entire Gulf watershed. I have no way of verifying this.
but have you concidered that a good plan costs money? companies will rather take the gamble then being pro active and it costing them something. I think it was the same with Koch industries, who rather pay fines or court ruling than invest money into safety and enviromental programs.
Getting input on a process from the people who are actually using the process? That's CRAZY TALK! You can't justify $10.5 million payouts to talk to a line mechanic who already works for you!
Had one of them come to my job. He promised a new future for company and workers, no layoffs. Made it his point to greet every worker, was really sweet. Drove a ferrari. Month later, 50% of the workforce was fired effectively next day with no prior warning. Which, considering that most of them (including me) were migrant workers whose accomodation was paid by the employer, was a total disaster. Gave us a week to leave premises. For me it was either finding a job within that week or going back 1000 km back home with savings only. I found a job, but many didnt.
What I find extremely confusing about management consulting firms is that they are invariably staffed by people who have never actually run a business in their lives, so how can they possibly be "consultants" to other businesses on how to run their business? They hire right out of university, people who have no real world experience of anything, at all. When I started my technology consulting firm, by that point in my career, I had a full decade of technology management experience, and two decades of experience actually using computers. I'd founded the first 100% broadband end-user ISP in America in the 1990s, and designed and built wide-area, metropolitan-area, and local-area networks for clients ranging from Fortune 500 firms to high security government installations, and enterprises of over 10,000 users in both the private and public sector, with project budgets in the multiple millions of dollars, working with partners like IBM, HP, and Lucent, among others. A "consultant" is, or at least is *supposed* to be, a subject matter expert, and no one, absolutely no one, who graduates from college and business school is an expert in anything, at all.
The state legislatures decided they wanted to privatize and implement charter schools, McKinsey was simply hired to provide a justification for the decision the politicians already made and formulate a plan for carrying it out. So sure they played a part but it would have happened regardless once the politicians decided they wanted to do it.
On top of all these things one needs to mention that Jeff Skilling, the guy who created Enron (possibly the biggest corporate scam in the history of mankind, for those too young to remember), was a McKinsey consultant of 21 years.
He created Enron? Wasn't he hired 5 years after the company was created by merging two companies worth over a billion each? He's definitely responsible for their illegal accounting practices etc, so perhaps you mean he created the scandal?
every week i fear that john oliver will tell me "oops sweaty that thing you like actually sucks" but this week he was like "i am about to validate the hell out of you"
Pediatric oxycontin is a group of words I never imagined being spoken in the same sentence, and yet McKinsey apparently advocated for them. Wildly irresponsible and deeply heinous.
I started to get a bit teary during the Purdue segment. What a gut wrenchingly evil thing they did. For everything they do they are truly accelerating the downfall of society. Not surprised it started at the university of chicago.
I understand it was probably during the time when to the general public it was marketed as a non-addictive opioid, so at least some people in the room probably thought it was harmless. But it’s still recklessly irresponsible and horrifying
Oxycontin in and of itself is safe for use in adults and children when used correctly. The key issue is that correct use of oxycontin turned out to be extremely sparing and in very specific situations involving severe acute pain or cancer, rather than pretty much everyone everywhere like Purdue were claiming.
I was a visual analyst at McKinsey and company and was part of McKinsey Global services in India. We were the guys who made these powerpoints and i can say now how shitty they used to pay us eventhough they were this multi-billion dollars company, i can say the slide John showed is a legit one as McKinsey has their own powerpoint identity and i have worked on slides like those for years.
woah. can't believe this co sells outsourced powerpoint presentations for so much money, capitalists truly are fucking idiots. i'm sorry you were exploited like that too, that fucking sucks.
@@wholequestLMFAO partners spend their days wining and dining clients to make more money and making “pls fix” comments to the analysts until 3 am. they are definitely not the slide monkeys.
I owe McKinsey and other consulting firms my good reputation in Corporate Operations since I was always called to sort out the mess they left behind after a multimillion consulting piece with zero or negative results.
@@junemac7515 - I believe you meant to say "No, they're right." "They all" is also redundant here. I believe you meant to say "They all do good journalism", or perhaps "All those outlets do good journalism."
@@clivejohnson5645 Why are you being so insufferable about grammar bro. That person is right - those outlets indeed do great journalism and have covered these topics more recently than you apparently realize. I can't believe I've become "that" person on the internet but after reading your two comments I beg you to take the stick out of your ass
One of the most notorious and epic failure McKinsey made in South Korea was to tell LG Electronics to keep focusing on the feature phone market rather than smartphones facing with Apple launching iPhone. The repercussion was as many of you know, the firm, once the top 5 mobile phone maker had to pull itself out of the market once and all. The catch here in this story is that the consulting firm is still advising the manufacturer. Kudos to have such a loyal client!
This totally gave me goosebumps. LG is a brilliant company bar in the phone sector and ended up folding their business. Didn't realize McK is behind the scene... geez.
Then again, if you need a consulting firm to advise you in your core business, maybe you deserve to fail. Some things you should be able to get right by yourself.
Kinda arrogant of you an outside person to criticize them when you're absolutely nobody and don't know anything about it internally don't you think? There is a reason LG and Mckinsey are in bed to this day.
Can’t find a solution? 🤔 hmm, let’s get a consultation on why we can’t find a solution…and perhaps a consultant can come up with possible strategies on how to move in a differt direction right now while waiting on the findings about why they couldn’t previously find a solution, and they know that didn’t work so easentially, they’ll be back at square one; and the consultants will convincingly persuade them that further consults would ensure that they will come up with the best strategy for them next time! And when that finally works (or doesn’t…!), they have an array of services and consultants too …(you know…)
We recently discovered in France that the government was paying 1 billion per year for McKinsey (and other counseling firms that are probably not much better). It was a "McKinseygate" as you would say in America (we call that "affairs" in France). It's exactly the budget needed for sexual and sexist violence prevention, but the right have other priorities.
Same in Belgium between McKinsey and the Postal Service. Postal service, which is 51% or something owned by government, granted McKinsey highly paid contracts without public tender offers which is illegal
to be fair a french consulting firm cap gemini just work with the ministry of finance and used google maps and algorith to go through data of land contracts and building to collect properties tax for big pools, seconds houses and all other tax doging methods. bringing millions of dollars just outside of paris now rolling that out to all of france probably generating taxes dodged double digits billions in just 5 year
Worked there. Worst decision I ever made. But yet when I was leaving, so many companies were bending over backwards to have me. Which I actually found disappointing and sad.
It's a simple heuristic to cut recruitment effort. They assume that McKinsey has done all the hard work to identify talent, so they can piggy back on that effort. "If she was good enough for McKinsey...". That's what I'm going to believe because the alternative is too depressing.
@@HundredthldiotIt is also a question on heavy workload. The next employer know that if a person has done 2+ years at Mc Kinsey, they are able to take on crazy hours + pression from client. You can be bad for the society but great to make money and invested worker.
Pieces like this are why this show is so good and necessary. Groups like McKinsey dearly need to be exposed. But nobody but John Oliver is interested in doing it in a manner in which a large number of people will see it. Kudos.
Look up Mariana Mazzucato and her work on the consulting industry. There has been a academic case building against the exploitative practices of consultancy firms. So this has been ongoing, however, it is really good that John has finally paid some much-needed attention to it.
One place I worked they brought in McKinsey (at great expense) for several "workstreams". I was in charge of one of these from our pov. We were supposed to be having a week of "workshops" with them. The first meeting a partner and a bunch of bag-carrying flunkies came in and said they wanted to "listen to me", so I told them a bunch of stuff and they spent the entire meeting repeating back what I had said and stroking my ego. At the end of the meeting I said "OK now tomorrow you guys better bring something to the meeting and not just have what I told you put on a bunch of slides". They cancelled the rest of the workshops and said they wanted to "focus on areas where they could add more value". Super clear they knew I had their number and they would instead zero in on people they could bilk more easily. Also: later in that exercise we were on a late night zoom meeting with like 10 of the top partners in finance in McKinsey and one of the associates on the meeting didn't realise his camera was on. While we were presenting he got up, went to have a shower and came out of the shower naked. In front of his client and all of his bosses bossess bossess.
I love that they put Jeff Skilling on the wall of fame. For those who don’t know he was a McKinsey consultant who took over Enron. McKinsey did a lot to shape his outlook on business and he imported the McKinsey culture to Enron which turned the company into an arrogant and wasteful mess. He also was a key player in the Enron scandal and only recently got out of prison.
About halfway through the segment I was sure John would connect McKinsey to Enron. I didn’t know there was a connection but it seemed only natural that there would be one. Glad to learn I was right.
Yes, blame someone who simply used to work at McKinsey to somehow make McKinsey responsible or all the fraud that happened at Enron. I guess McKinsey will also be responsible for crucifying Jesus and the Civil War.
A new exec at the company I work for had their "introduction" meeting and in the presentation they said they got their start at Enron, which I thought was funny, but we all work for scummy people, can't really blame them for working there right out of school. Then the next slide they were like "After Enron I moved to McKinsey..." and immediate red flags started popping... What next, you left McKinsey for Raytheon? Are you purposely trying to find the worst people to work for?
Magnificent episode. As a business graduate who has long resisted the trend of joining a consultant company, this resonates with my soul. I have witnessed many friends and peers chase a nice paycheck and go down the consultant path and they all seem to deny truth or look for excuses. Almost as if they’re brainwashed.
Start a consulting firm where you charge significantly less that the "big guys" but plenty for yourself and then just go ask the lowest paid employees what is wrong and how to fix it. Most companies are full of their own solutions, they just simply aren't willing to listen to the peons at the bottom. You'll make millions collating other people's ideas into powerpoints and those people will thank you for it.
I retired from a major hospital system's IT department about 2 years ago, after 25 years. Shortly after I retired, they brought in McKinsey to review IT's operations and make recommendations. They recommended outsourcing. I can tell you from experience that outsourcing will only make their problems worse. The basic issue the department (and the hospital) has is too much bureaucracy. Outsourcing only adds another layer.
Outsourcing medical IT when it is broken in the first place is insane. I have worked as a hospital nurse for a few years... and electronic medical records are a mess, all these programs are complicated and they did nothing at the same time. The only reason EPIC is more common these days is because it's not the worst of all of the systems.
@@kpepperl319 It's not outsourcing itself that is the problem, but who you outsource to. If it is to a company specialized in software for hospitals, it could work out great. Unfortunately outsourcing most often goes to these large generic companies that in turn outsource 80% of the work to code monkeys in India. Medical data is highly specialized, with very high security and reliability requirements. It does not make a lot of sense for each hospital to handle that on their own.
Fun fact: German Railway was once known for its punctuality & reliability. Enter McKinsey: Its lack of punctuality & reliability turned into a runnibg joke for the last quarter century.
I had always thought that German Railway must be punctual and reliable until some German friends told me it isn't. I did not understand why, but this would explain a lot.
@@samuela-aegisdottir It was privatised, didn't care about infrastructure, gov bought it back and now there's maintenance work being done everywhere AT ONCE.
As a consultant, this is 100% true. The value a good management consultant has is showing a business something so glaringly obvious that needs to be changed/fixed, but having a third well respected party being the one delivering that message. Guaranteed at least one of the employees of that company had the exact same idea top help the business, but was dismissed.
So in other words, a "good management consultant" preys on businesses with culture problems and out of self-interest, does not solve them. Yeah, that checks out.
@@peterjj416 lol no I didn’t say that. They aren’t “preying” on a business if they fix an actual issue. I am saying that sometimes a business needs a 3rd party consultant to notice an issue. A good example would be in the movie “the founder” where ray Crock gets advice to change his franchise model to lead to extraordinary growth.
They pay the consultants so much, they just HAVE to listen to their misguided advice Listen to a fresh grad with great Powerpoint skills over your own loyal employee with 30+ years of experience
I can't believe John did a show on my career. There are only a few consultant groups remaining, as most went in-house and are now called Organizational Development Consultants. It was much more cost effective for the large companies. If anyone is interested, there is an excellent show with Don Cheadle called House of Lies, that details this topic. All episodes are based on true events, and loosely on the career of Marin Kahin,, the charter played by Cheadle, and undisputed King of consulting. There is so much more to this topic. DOD contacts, the sub-prime housing debacle...better than any fiction. Excellent work John!
think we could convince him to accept paper cutouts of money signs as his salary instead of real dollars? "look at all the money signs you're getting for all your hard work! you have the most money signs!"
They also sometimes are hired to help executives win internal political battles with other executives, as in "See, I'm right, this external company says so".
German government used McKinsey's service alarmingly often. For example they researched the reasons for unemployment once and found out basically that many people don't have an employer. We payed millions for this information and our leaders decided to employ McKinsey more often.
do i have to have some kind of documentation to prove i work for mckinsey or can i just go around billing governments millions of dollars to tell them shit like "the reason people are claiming food stamp benefits is because they lack money to buy food" or "the projected size of the workforce in 20 years is directly proportional to the number of babies being born today"?
I'm skeptical. Could lack of employer really be a determinant of unemployment or is this simply an unexplained correlation? Maybe we could hire Bain and for a second opinion just to be sure. I've got a buddy there who could take the account.
@@dietotaku no need for documentation, because our politicians mostly value the opinions of people they already know and get favor from. So you need to be lobyist with some kind of reputation. Highest league of them have their own acces-cards to Bundestag and other structures of government and know the names of the security (ok... the securitything I only assume)
The one I know is the most pleasant stuck up person I've ever met. He's fun, but you can tell he has spent the majority of his life studying like a mad man to get into McKinsey and when working there he sometimes would go on the treadmill at 3am to at least move a little WHILE WORKING People who get a company car but still are picked up by a company driver so they can start working while traveling to the office... Well they are either workaholics and/or just before a massive burnout. The work culture in there can be and often is absolute insanity.
@@valkor606I don't know where you got that impression. a Wharton or Harvard business school MBA (or one of the other small number of schools you need to attend to have them glance at your resume if your last name isn't Vanderbilt or Rockefeller) is extremely expensive. it pays for itself with the job you can expect, but that's on the back end. on the front end, it's a six figure student loan.
Global consulting firm McKinsey works all over the world, but in South Africa, it faces criminal charges for corruption. The case centres on its role in the country's biggest post-apartheid scandal, known as state capture.
Shouldn't it be a red flag if a company faces corruption charges in South Africa of all places? Just that would probably be reason enough to put the whole company out of business.
@@thewaldfe9763 2012 McKinsey's global CEO was convicted and jailed in the US for insider trading. 10 years later another US partner convicted and jailed for the same thing. Neither of those incidents seems to have dented its reach and influence, so why would you think that corruption way out of the public scrutiny would?
Worked for Bain for six years and this segment is accurate. My main gripe with these firms is the massive chasm between the rhetoric they propagate about themselves and the reality of what they do.
_"My main gripe with these firms is the massive chasm between the rhetoric they propagate about themselves and the reality of what they do."_ That tends to be my main gripe about _every_ company. Heh, heh. But seriously, their hypocrisy really gets to me.
As someone who works in the public sector, it's absolutely appalling to see the work that McKinsey, BCG and Bain (or MBB as the douchey MBA lot love to say) have undertaken globally with BS powerpoints using rehashed scholarly analysis being pretty much the only output. The day governments chose to outsource their work to "management consultants", the taxpayer was fucked and had little knowledge about it. It's both governments and these terrible organisations to blame, the latter only exists because there's a demand for justifying massive cost-cutting and layoffs. Gagworthy organisations. Great communicators but all snakeoil salesmen are. Edit: I’m not even in the US or Europe, clearly this is a global problem. Hopefully this is something most folks can agree on except the ones at the top of the imaginary ladder.
Not just government. Higher ed turned to these people rather than their own members (i.e. faculty) and have wrecked education by turning it into customer satisfaction rather than education. Yet another short-term gain strategy guaranteed to destroy basic institutions and cultural quality.
Public employee here and I can confirm that when leadership decides to use consultants instead of listening to the base-level employees who've been doing this for decades, it leads to horrific changes, discontent, and major staff turnover leading to even more deficiencies. Not to mention rapidly changing policies that are difficult to keep up with and NO public transparency.
Australia has a huge problem with consultancy firms and government. Especially during the Coalition government term they essentially supercharged getting rid of the public service department and using massively overpaid consultants instead. And of course there were conflict of interest scandals that came out of it. Not least a merry-go-round of ex-government getting jobs in the consultant firms and consultants getting jobs in government. Couple that with our famously opaque lobbying laws and it’s been a disaster.
This passion and research is what we need.
Nice
Fantastic one love it too👌🏼👌🏼
Nice
Nice
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John Oliver is literally the only person on Earth who could get me to enthusiastically drop everything to click on a 26 minute video about a business management firm.
Yep.
Truth
Its a 5 star free show for all including $20 phone users
Yep, that's me at 2 am Monday morn on RUclips waiting for his lecture to drop. ❤
I mean. The idea DoD and BEST BUY are linked by these guys... that's one hell of a hook. I gotta know where this goes!
This reminds me of an old joke:
A shepherd is tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a shiny red BMW appears. The driver is a young man in an Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes and Polarized sunglasses. He sticks his head out the window and asks the shepherd, “Hey! If I can tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looks at him, and agrees.
The driver plugs his cell phone into a laptop and connects it to a GPS and starts a remote body-heat scan of the area. During the process he sends some e-mails. After receiving the answers, he prints a 100 page report on the portable printer in his glove compartment, and proudly announces to the shepherd: “You have exactly 1,478 sheep.”
To which the shepherd answers: “Impressive. You can choose one sheep out of my flock”.
He observes the man pick up an animal and load it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?”
“You’re on.” the young man answers.
“You are a Mckinsey consultant,” says the shepherd promptly.
“You are right! How could you possibly guess?” says the man, visibly surprised.
“It wasn’t a guess,” the shepherd replies.
“You drive into my field uninvited. You want me to pay you for a piece of information I already know, you answer questions I haven’t asked, and you know nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog.”
good punch line at the end; it was funny even before that.
😂
Yes, that is Mckenzie.
@@urkiddingme6254 It goes waaaaay back. The first time I heard it the smartest phone available was a Blackberry.
John?..
Apparently McKinsey are into coding as well - when I joined Credit Suisse as a contractor last year I had to rewrite some code their consultants had written in R to Python. It turned out the R code had a bug and didn’t read the data files correctly and the liquidity reports that were being sent to the top management of the bank had been incorrect for years.
You call it a bug, but with a company this shady it might as well have been a feature. :P
So that's why CS no longer exists t is part of UBS now? 😅
It wasn't a bug, it was the plan.
I miss old programming languages. It’s so standardized now
They're also into agile transformations without having a shade of understanding of what it is that makes agile work. I've spent years replacing their "agile playbooks" with new playbooks that are actually useful and replacing their "agile" micro-management, waterfall processes with no feedback loops with proper, flow-based agile ways of working. Good business for me, but certainly much, much better business for them, now that I've seen what they charge.
Whenever he covers a big company, I like to imagine the crisis meeting on Monday morning that starts with everyone watching the show in awkward silence.
What a beautiful thought
And I feel for that one guy in that meeting who cant avoid laughing. its always a guy.
To the contrary, I always find it sad knowing that they will have a big smug laugh about it, and carry on with their business as usual. Knowing (or believing) that no one can really hurt them.
There are two meetings one at the HBO legal team and the other at the HO of the other company
@@prabuddhaghosh7022 Statistically. Statistically always a guy, because who else would be allowed in the room?
Having worked with McKinsey, I can tell you, that Oliver is being kind to them.
@gupta How would you know
@@gupta.vansh2000and you certainly have. The OP said they worked with McKinsey, and you refuted an imagined statement that they didn't make. Harvard taught you well.
Spill the t
Yup! He barely scratched the surface.
@@qwertytv7967😅
In 2010, my company paid McKinney in Sweden $100,000 for 2 consultants for 4 hours to work with the management team on business growth strategy! The consultants just gathered all our own work, organized them in a PowerPoint document of some 20 pages, and gave it back to us. Pure bullshit.
Exactly what happened in our company. We paid them 250k to serve up "air cover" for our executives and BoD. All McKinsey did was "interview" our team and then redo our internal research in pretty charts. And oh, did I mention the guys and gals they airdropped into our office were fresh grad MBAs? (who had no idea what we did)
pretty sure there would be some people in your company that would have asked the question "why did we just do that"
@oksowhat I did ask my manager. That was the start of our relationship going bad.
There needs to be a way to get a refund for this kind of ripoff.
@bumblebootwiddletoes5185 Hardly. It's quite impossible to do that, because you're supposedly buying "brain power" and "advices". You can't just ask for refund for advices, thoughts, discussions and so-called "guidance" when you aren't satisfied with the outcome. It's not like returning defect products. That is what makes the consulting business a scam for the major part of it when it comes to strategies and management. There are other parts, such as financial accounting or other areas, that can still provide value.
My mom was a well liked middle leader in the government in Denmark. She was laid off due to a mass layoff orchestrated by McKinsey. They never even met her. Her responsibilities were passed on to her leader, who broke down with stress after a month.
Thank you. You mom was probably smarter than everyone at the company...including McKinsey. ❤
How do you know he broke down? Did they contact and try to re-hire her, or what's the story there? 😂
@@Retzmag People with good work relationships usually stay in touch. Hell, I'm still talking to some of my ex peers from work 8 years ago. For me its mostly because I enjoyed working with those people, but if that's not enough of an incentive, maintaining your network is always a smart thing to do
@@lesulix9885 I wish I could do that. My last role felt like nobody gave a damn about one another, and my manager was a nightmare to work for. I quit after being diagnosed with CPTSD. It is a lot to take in still and has been four months, but I am so much happier out of there than in there.
@@johnsharestories Very sorry to hear that. Its also the reason why I never really care what product I will be working on, but rather what team I will be working with
As someone who currently works at a large consulting management firm, I can attest that John ABSOLUTELY hit the nail on the head with this episode.
Is your name actually Sunny Day?
that is not exactly a statement that you are a good person, quite the opposite in fact.
@@Frank-dv4zu Like anything, not everyone in one particular field is bad. A lot of consultants actually do great work and are very helpful individuals.
Sounds like you're part of the big capitalist problem which always results in monopolies
@@Frank-dv4zu What makes you think they were trying to claim to be a good person?
I was an engineer in a company which (sadly) hired McKinsey for advice how to increase profits. Employees knew that meant major layoffs, though our Management took pains to deny the obvious. In the end major layoffs occurred, Management seats increased and the company never recovered. Basically, McKinsey's philosophy was: don't trust experienced employees, control everything to the n-th degree, increase profits by decreasing headcount (but never Management). Screw McKinsey and similar "Management Consultants". They're part of the evil which gives our capitalist market system a bag name.
It's an easy pitch to the high table though. The C suite and the upper management salaries go up, the people at the bottom get the stick. For greedy corporate people that makes sense. Rather than doing layoffs the guy at Nintendo took a paycut, meanwhile Microsoft fired 10K people at the same time they spent 68 billion to buy Activision-Blizzard.
And they probably paid McKinsey more for that consulting than the company saved in payroll.
Nintendo's far from blameless since Iwata's passing. Nintendo is very good to its *employees* but shit to its contractors.@@bararobberbaron859
Nonsense. Management consultants do good, hard work. Their work has rescued hundreds of thousands of jobs by keeping firms from going under, and increased profits led to bonuses for staff.
@@TheUrbanEpicure Not my experience though. I'm glad to be retired now and more or less out of the rat-race.
As a rule of thumb:The more a company announces that they aren't evil the more evil they are!
Just like liars using the word "honestly" during interrogations.
Veridian Dynamics: We're sorry. You're welcome.
In Soviet Russia, company is always on your side!! Not the state nope
That makes Dr. Evil the lease evil guy in the world.
You only need to say that you're not evil if your actions don't already say that
I had a McKinsey experience in the 2000s. They came in, cut close to 50% of the workforce in our warehouse and offices, and increased top management 25%. The result was that the "lucky ones"who stayed started to work 10+ hours per day, with peaks of 14 to 16 hours at month end in the finance dept (I was a middle manager in accounting) because the workload was the same but we were 50% less. Actually the workload was a slightly bigger as the new managers were asking for their own reports (they needed to justify they were there). My team started to fall sick after 1 year, I managed to stay 2 years more before falling sick myself and heard that the company was first sold and dissolved one year later. I don't trust McKinsey, if they come in the company I work for now, I will leave immediately.
But they decreased overhead, increased margins and income, and packaged up the company nicely for the private equity folks to pillage. Management got a nice payout. The board and shareholders got a premium on the stock price. The private equity guys got to make a ton spinning off the IP and liquidating the rest. Everyone wins! [Except employees, consumers, suppliers, local governments, etc.]
@@equals42 indeed!
@@equals42 brilliant!
Your mgmt wanted this. And wanted McKinsey to help (take the blame) for wanting to do it
Last year, I worked at a company that hired McKinsey to work on a tech project here in Brazil. After 6 months and millions of dollars spent, they delivered a project so fundamentally shitty that some analysts from my company (me included) had to be brought in to fix the absolute mess they had created. When confronted, they refused to acknowledge their bad job, and according to one of their partners "were very disappointed at us".
The truth is, upper level management loves McKinsey because they are very good at making nice-looking Power Points and easily convince people who don't really know much about anything (such as upper level management). The analysts who are forced to work with them absolutely hate them (and I know a lot of cases that were similar to mine).
And, of course, all of this is just peanuts compared to the actual harm McKinsey does working for governments and morally dubious companies around the world.
Wow. This comes as no surprise. Thank you for sharing your experience!
Hahahaha entregaram um “deck” de 100 slides e uma planilha com algumas abas de cores diferentes e várias tabelas soltas com referência cruzada e cheia de cores?
@@brenoingwersen784 era um projeto de machine learning, entregaram um modelo cuja previsão era pior do que jogar um dado. Mas a verdadeira entrega foi o power point bonito
I have seen the analysis other "big" consultant companies do and charge a fortune for, and I believe you. It is insane the amount of money is wasted.
Main point for upper management to bring those consulting firms in is to cover their ass. If something fails they always can blame it on the advice they received. That's why those consulting firms also get the big contracts from governments and political institutions.
I don't think I've ever heard a more visceral crowd reaction when John talked about McKinsey's involvement in pushing pediatric OxyCotin.
I felt positively queasy at several points
Their ICE involvement was way worse, but John needs a longer show to cover it all.
Me who had oxycodone when I was a kid… Granted, I had a major surgery, though… So you know
Right?? I don’t remember the last time I heard one of his audiences like that
Yeah, I had major surgery on both feet as a kid, and the surgeon had me on a combination of extended-release OxyContin with shorter acting Percoset. It was horrible. I stopped taking it after less than a week, and when I saw him for my post-op and hadn't continued with my pain management he was pissed. I told him I would manage find without it.
I have severe chronic pain now, and I still won't take opioids outside of acute pain for surgery or post injury. I think they have a place, absolutely, but I think our rules were way too indiscriminate with them.
John Oliver is once again trying his absolute best to get sued. Never change.
Have they tried before? 🤔
Well I guess they'd have to prove that any of it was either clearly a lie and not satire, or a lie and presented as truth. Idk how they would sue him for talking about the things that they did and continue to do, presenting opinion on true facts that are documented either in official sources or literally by themselves doesn't seem like something they could sue for.
I guess if any of this sounds outlandish, it's because these people behave like actual cartoon villains since they can just hide behind the corpo name and rarely, if ever, face personal consequences.
Ever since that coal company tried to sue and realized it's a waste of time I think they'll be okay.
Sad because the only people who should be getting sued is McKinsey by literally everybody.
Ikr? I unironically love that they make getting sued a part of their brand.
The Henry Kissenger gag aged hillariously within less than a month
lol dead asshoIe
So John Oliver hates the military ? The same John Oliver who was born in a different country and then came here to become a citizen?
Thankfully, Henry Kissinger himself stopped aging entirely
Totally agree. It's way funnier now.
@@jamespontin860 😂😂😂
As long as John Oliver is on HBO. HBO's legal team has steady employment.
Also Nathan Fielder lol
German Jan Böhmermann tries to catch up since 2016 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair
He’s not on HBO Max anymore, I believe he is on Hulu.
They basically work for him at this point
@@CommentPoster10 Every night they thank whatever deity they believe in for choosing HBO among all the equally appealing choices they had, without knowing what was expecting them.
One of my personal favourite McKinsey ideas: when it was hired by the French government to find ways to spend less, they advised reducing students' aid by 5€ a month. The amount the government saved? Precisely what McKinsey billed them for the advice...
Yes! And the "rapport sur l'Education Nationale" was a joke. I read it when it came out and laughed my head off. It cost something like 400,000 euros. But then again Macron hired the consultants...I rest my case.
McKinsey: Gaslighting for your Goosestepping Greed!
Wow, the French government being robbed in broad daylight, eh? Seems all those karma from colonizing countries came back to haunt them, eh?
They did something similar in Germany if I remember correctly. Slashed some administrative cost in the university student help (Bafög) and 2 years later everyone was surprised that half of the system broke down completely and students who needed the money to pay their rent didn't get it for up to half a year.
Such a scam, wonder what other businesses they have their fingers in around the globe... besides the likes of the Saudis and oil money ofc, who else has an economy based around that and loves to prop up authoritarian regimes? 🤔🤷♂️
I owe a major debt of gratitude to John Oliver and team for putting these segments on RUclips for free. There are few things that give me as much joy as when I see a new episode is available to watch. Doing your part to educate the masses on relatively obscure or complicated topics while being factual, funny, and empathetic. John and team are all saints.
yes!
Truly!!! PREACH!!!
Exactly. They have covered in detail SO MANY obscure topics that most people just gloss over. And they do it in very entertaining ways. I'm a little surprised that HBO even lets them do this. It's probably ONLY because he is a comedian and they think most people won't take him completely serious. I've tried using his videos in arguments before and people just usually wave it off as being from a comedian. 😞
“All saints” but in a good way.😂😂
Yes! Greetings from Czechia
I've had the pleasure of working with them. You spend 75% of your time with them training them on the things that they don't know about your business. Their staff tend to be green new MBAs with next to zero experience. Whatever the problem is, they have a standard formula they will force your problem into - whether it fits or not. And then when the whole experience is done, they will give you basically the same answer you had from the very start. And a multimillion dollar bill.
Totally the same when they were brought in to a company I worked for. They came up with processes and tracking that gave useless data that just averaged everything and gave nonsense results that management pretended was important yet did nothing with. Now we are stuck with all these nonsense meetings called huddles and side by sides. Mostly just to discuss feelings and anything important is taken offline which is another word for we are never talking about this again.
in all the examples I read only here, I remain baffled (as I was for years already) why companies pay HUGE sums of money to these kinds of bs 'consultants' instead of using that money to solve the problem. Because, often, that is what is needed (like Rikers.... 27 mlj pumped into the facility and recourses like library, sports, education, counseling, a.s.o. would have actually improved the situation.)
Because they put ex-McK ppl into these companies and they advocate for them. it is one big circle jerk.@@sachadee.6104
Sounds very similiar to a consultant group my previous employers hired. Those MBA dudes didn't know shit. They just BS'd their way into the contract
As someone who went to a premier B-school, yeah, during prep for management consulting interviews they tell you that the companies tend to already know the problem and what they want to do about it. They bring in external consultants to just put the same into a structured format and to have someone external with perceived credibility to point to when questions are raised later. That, a bunch of guesstimates and frameworks, executive presence, networking skills and ability to confidently keep talking and selling bs for an extended period of time.
My first job after college was for a large engineering company in Germany. The company had 4 divisons serving different industries. From nuclear power to technical consulting. Every division had it’s own purchasing group. The leadership brought McKinsey in and the 4 purchaing groups where centralized to one. You know the synergy, efficiency bs. The result was that we had large projects halted to a stop because of purchasing. You just don‘t by a domestice heaters the same way as a nuclear power plant component.
The leadership brought a consultant back. The first statement: put back smaller purchasing groups, you will be more agile and closer to your market. That company was McKinsey. All of the turmoil nearly killed the company. I left a month later.
What is my definition of a consultant? A consultant is a man who knows 50 sex positions but no woman.
I am a consultant, albeit operational/IT. I am stealing this quote. 😂
My definition of McKinsey: is the big SUCKING sound Ross Perot would talk about --- Money from your wallet to theirs - with no benefit and maybe even harm.
Bad quote as 35% of consultants are woman :D
Most problems arise by bringing non-engineers into anything remotely involving engineering.
@@mr.slyvesteefoxinator3426 I was a class A machinist/CNC programmer, auto mechanic, musician. Don't get me going on engineers. Every engineer should have to work with what they design. Just my opinion of course.
McKinsey is where all of the German defense budget went for many years, because the daughter of the defense minister worked at McKinsey. So McKinsey was hired for hundreds of millions of Euros per year to do "consulting", which has led to the complete destruction of the German Bundeswehr. The current minister of defense has a lot of shards to pick up to get the Bundeswehr into an even half-way viable state... It's ridiculous.
Europa nicht den Leyen überlassen
Wow.
How in the heck can it get to that point?
Not the Bundeswehr! 😱
Came from America to study management in Germany, and the obsession with McKinsey is very alarming, to the point that my university is currently using McKinsey as a consultant for problems that us as students have been writing solutions to for free in our semester feedback forms to the uni. It's scary how idolized McKinsey is here, too.
You nailed it.
They are not there for their expertise.
They are there to isolate the company management from consequences.
That's what they are paid for.
spot on
Yes. We were there to maximize shareholder profits. By definition, it was protecting shareholders. Anything less would be dereliction of our fiduciary duty and insubordination. All other rules were 'flexible'.
And sometimes they are there to isolate a government from consequences, like in France, repeatedly
As a BP employee can confirm.
Exactly. As a former McKinsey consultant, I can confirm that we frequently had directions from clients about the desired outcome (“we need to break the union” “we need to chop 25-40% of workers” “we need to completely outsource these 3 functions” “we need to rationalize giving contracts to these political supporters”) And we gave them the recommendations they wanted, even when analysis indicated it was the exact opposite of what should be considered.
I once interviewed for a McKinsey internship (not in the US). I had great grades from one of the top business schools in my country but was not at all the boastful type. The partner actually accused me of being a liar, because “my grades did not match my attitude”. A friend of mine, who is the smartest, hardest-working and overall best person I have ever met - including really humble - also interviewed and was accused of being an actress. On the contrary, I heard from several people with not necessarily stellar but decent grades but more capable of projecting ambition and self-assurance that they faced no such mind-boggling feedback. These recruiting practices sound like a big red flag to me.
Also, later I worked at Deloitte doing audit. It was still crazy hard work, but I found a much greater respect for honesty and truth, and earned enough respect that when I sent out my farewell email a partner actually came to the staff open space to personally say goodbye. Highly doubt I would be shown the same kindness at McKinsey.
well of cause, they don't want people that can run a company they want people that can sell their services
@@SilverMe2004 which would be great if there was trust on all sides (who wants to buy something different from what is advertised?). When you make accusations such as that, even when it is on the "other side" of the market, all trust is broken - especially when, despite the fact that a CV can be easily forged, there was strong evidence that was not the case. In hindsight, it may have been a technique to dissuade less self-assured candidates.
Big 4 is much better than these BS management consulting firms. At least when Big 4 charges companies an arm and a leg they give more technical advice, and their employees know what they are doing.
Well, they hire what you need. If you are really capable at what you do, why would you go to them? You could go somewhere, where you could actually do what you are good at.
I interviewed with McKinsey in Atlanta in 1994. I was a West Point grad, Academic All-American football player at Army, Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and an infantry platoon leader in the US Army. The McKinsey people I met with were so self-confidently full of themselves, with absolutely no idea or appreciation of someone who actually worked somewhere where life and death was a real thing, that I walked out of the interview and said I was not interested in working there. Of course, they felt obliged to send me a rejection letter saying I was not a good fit for them. I framed it and to this day it reminds me that I'd rather not work at all instead of working for a firm without intellectual integrity or a moral compass.
McKinsey is the answer to "how can I do capitalism in the most despicable way possible?"
The Vanguard Group said hold my beer
💯💯💯 Should look at the dystopia that Russia has become recently 😅😅
Boston consulting group is a top contender!
you very easily can...if you're doing it "right".
@@XCodes crony capitalism is still capitalism :)
I'm 64 years old and having spent my entire adult life in corporate America and having watched some great companies die (Sun Microsystems, Wang Labs) because of arrogance of the leadership who listened to McKinsey and people like them and having spent the early part of my career at investment banks on Wall Street with people just like they portray here .. this is a very important piece of journalism!
It's really sad because usually when an organisation needs changes either to grow or to implement processes, you need a team to examine the whole organisation, listen to the people and summarise solutions for the management. You don't need everyone to stay after the change, so being able to hire consultants can be good. Ideally, I think the team should at least be 50% made up of your own employees and 50% of a consultant company's. In tech, we charge 3 times the price of an average developer. Which is expensive but necessary to cover the cost of when the devs don't have assignments. So I don't understand how Mckinsey charged tens of millions of dollars for a few fresh grads.
it's not the first time this story comes out, and it won't be the last - yet nothing ever changes because the interests are too big ... I've worked for these companies and have seen decisions made 'just because of numbers' and the need for a scapegoat ... I've seen people I knew lose jobs because of a bunch of idiots in a room with no real-life experience nor empathy ... I left when we started working with tobacco trying to enhance the 'addictiveness' through 'secret ingredients' ... there is no oversight and because it sounds like everyone is doing it, companies keep buying this absolutely horrendous garbage from a bunch of nobodies pushed through ivy league schools with daddies' money. End of rant
Very similar to the old movie "Office Space"
They were a part of how the Astros culture came down to banging trash cans, believe it or not.
This is an amazing segment. Oliver just keeps getting better and better.
Having worked for years as a tech architect at a Management Consulting firm, I found many in the team inexperienced yet were good talkers and PowerPoint makers. Some of the recommendations they provided were totally stupid from a technical perspective, however they bull shit their way through. There strategy is to get the C Level Exec in their pockets and rest of team will obey what they say. Extremely unethical business
I LOVE this piece.
I worked for about three years for one of McKinsey's biggest rivals (guess two names and Im prety sure you got it). The doublespeak is intentional and carefully cultivated. And naturally, this sort of self-deception becomes a narcotic. The reason they are successful is that they can write long dissertations on why the employees need to be squeezed. They help companies justify decisions that no soul-possessing human being would want to make.
Thanks John. This was a long overdue discussion of an industry that is actively harming the average working person.
@@johammyThe wife-abusing Canadian dip$hit, Steven Crowder?! No thank you.
As a professor at an Ivy League school, I've been repeatedly heartbroken to lose some of our most gifted students to this crowd. As a society, we're really setting the wrong incentives for where talent goes (and that's not to say that everyone there is incredibly gifted -- there's more than enough privileged duds there, too).
Also, just because they are gifted, doesn't mean they have the experience to advise people/companies who have been in the field/industry for decades.
@@chpslife Oh they absolutely do not have it. I went to a school massively targeted by these companies for recruitment and they do not care about qualifications - have a PhD in 19th century Scottish poetry? Qualified! Masters in eroticism in renaissance paintings? Qualified! As long as those degrees have the right school name on them. The chancellor of the school literally said during a welcome event that one of the most valuable things you would get at the school is a particular accent branding you as attending the school. It is the modern aristocracy, people qualified by name recognition and fancy clothes chatting in backrooms to enrich each other without sparing a thought for the average person living on this planet.
Professor of what, and which school?
oh, sorry. I'm calling you a big fat liar.
Business degrees are basically participation degrees that assholes with rich parents get. I wouldn't call any of those students "gifted" even if mommy and daddy paid to have them go to a fancy Ivy League school.
@@chpslife Experience is generally seen as a detriment for consultants (And higher level managers). Experience means you have habits, ideas, and are less likely to conform to the "company standards" and have limited "company loyalty potential". They want a particular school name, 3 references from family in the industry, and nothing else.
Thank you John for going after these parasites. The fact that Katie Porter is on to their BS should come as no surprise.
Right? Thanks John, for on e again highlighting the rich that should be on the menu.
John is breaking dangerous ground here. These three are all part of the same, BCG was founded by people from Bain (cough, Mitt Romney) and they are all owned by the same small group of oligarchs that own practically everything through the stock market. They are experienced in sending companies into bankruptcy (Toys r Us, Overstock, Sears, attempted GameStop), so that short hedge funds can profit and the monopolies of evil like Walmart and Amazon can maintain their stranglehold.
These "consultants" are the arms of Hydra. They represent the love of money that has completely destroyed our world in every way. And the heads of Hydra don't like them talked about.
@@juliejanesmith57oh god… I bet you think you sound cool when you say stupid a$$ phrases like “eat the rich”. All while you probably don’t add a modicum of value to your community or society. Smh
Checks and balances!!! Unrestrained greed and power always lead to oligarchy like this 😔🪆🪆
Being anywhere near the opioid industry should get you blackballed from anyone who manufacturers or approves drugs after everything was exposed about them and how many people they killed.
I worked for Verizon for nearly 6 years and had to work with McKinsey teams on a multitude of projects. They were the bane of my and my team’s existence any time they inserted themselves into our work. This whole segment was spot on and pure gold.
I worked for Verizon and your post explains a lot.
I work with mckinsey and tbh they suck at everything they attempt to do.
Former consultant (not McKinsey) and I can verify this content. The "secret" to McKinsey's longevity and success is serving as resume builder for unqualified/unremarkable offspring of the ruling class for telling top level executives whatever they want to hear.
There are literally thousands of US consulting firms that achieve better results at a fraction of the cost, but they all lack the real secret of success, giving super-rich a-holes a facade of competence.
as a consultant, did you ever have imposter syndrome?
You were hired to advise on shiit you knew absolutely jackshiiit about, right?
I think you are very correct. I would add that the likes of McKinsey may even serve to promote the Universities endowments and trusts by masquerading as an essential support pillar for the corporate boards that run this world, while providing a connection to the families of the wealthy . Nepotism, western style.
@@kkp4297 You don't have imposter syndrome if you know you are only acting..
@@kkp4297 they do everything to avoid that. In my engineer degree in France, we had some accounting + finance classes that were held by people working at a competitor of McKinsey. From the start of the class, they used the same narrative of their ad. They seduce student with very large salary announcement and exclusive experience (small group teaching, invite to cocktails...). It really is like a tinder for work at the end.
I worked as an engineer consultant (small firm). And even in technical fields I was hired to manage a site that I knew jackshit about. Hopefully, the company that I was "advising" actually trained me on the industry specific and then internalised me. But when I see how a small firm was so good at bullshiting, big ones scares me
Yes. Former consult as well. The recruiting events are insanely and openly pointed. There is value to these old companies remaining loyal to these firms. Their reach is wide and intersects with everyone; public and private sectors.. They deal in information and keep secrets better than any spy. It's crazy to hear John talking about this topic.
I worked for a large telecommunications company. Every 18 months or so we'd go through a restructure. McKinsey was involved every time taking their cut. I did once ask the CEO during a kitchen chat why. "If they're so good at their job, why do we keep having to pay them to undo their previous mistakes every 18 months." The silence was golden. The CEO finally stumbled of some BS no one including himself believed.
I used to be friends with a guy who then started at McKinsey germany. That cult of money and grandiosity turned him into an absolute ghoul. You could see him get more shallow and vapid by the month. He would later pretend that it wasn't his old friends who dumped him for that but instead him leaving his old circle of friends behind because they were too small fish and couldn't even afford to be part of his new lifestyle, so what was the point in keeping us anyway. Some jobs absolutely eat your soul if you are prone to greed and think living your best life means buying and emulating everything from the latest GQ magazine while doing absolutely horrendous and inhumane shit hidden behind cold spreadsheets. Pitiful.
Please, cold PowerPoint decks - they're consultants, not accountants.
@@FallenscionSpreadsheets are used for a lot of stuff, not just calculations.
Jep, I've seen it happen too.
They ran that show in the 80s. It was called "Wall Street." "Greed is good." Nothing has changed.
@@NicoleAZ145 Except, it sounds like that's where they started "creative accounting" 🤣
Hearing the contempt for McKinsey in the audience as Jon talks is rather refreshing
Yes and yet their surprise at the same time shows how truly murky and shady McKinsey is.
@@Beanskiiii You're....happy about this?
It’s a laugh track you know that right? It’s not a real audience sitting there, it’s audio files being added later 💀
@@freddwoord It's not a laugh track. This is taped in front of an audience like most late night shows. You can literally sign up to get tickets online for the show tapings.
@@Asherek doesn’t change the fact that the laughs that you can hear here aren’t live ones but ones that have been added later on. No live crowd sounds like this
Worked at BCG. Can absolutely attest all is true in the management consulting industry
My ex-roommate used to work at McKinsey. I've never seen someone work so freaking hard in my life. It was utterly unsustainable, in my eyes. I barely saw her. She was worked to the bone and the pressure, gosh, as an outsider, I couldn't even wrap my head around it.
A friend of mine worked for them. I went to meet her for lunch when I was visiting London, and (aside from telling me that if she left the office at 8pm her colleagues would give her shit for "taking an early mark") we were 25 minutes through her 'one hour lunch break' before she got a call from someone in the office asking where she was as it was the first time in a year she'd ever left the office on her lunch break. She had to go back up to the office two minutes later to go back to work.
The worst part is..their doing shit that's utterly meaningless and bullshit. If U doing something fulfilling the long hours don't seem as bad.
McKinsey has helped kneecap the company I retired from, 3M. Their continuous reengineering has lead to a 70% decrease in the stock price over the last 5 years and a complete destruction of the innovation culture at a once great company.
Well. TBF. It isn't like 3M has a stellar track record.
They're probably also working for their competitor...
3m is one of the companies that has polluted our waters with PCB's or "Forever chemicals". No, they aren't a "good" company 😂
Pretty sure the huge lawsuit against 3M over their bad products permanently injuring a bunch of servicemen had a lot more to do with it, mate.
@@MC-ls9fsno, that's just the latest disaster. As a 3M shareholder it's been depressing. The biggest outrage to average shareholders, I'm not rich, is that mismanagement never hurts those at the top of the company. They wipe out millions or even billions of shareholder value and walk away with their ridiculously inflated salaries and the life of luxury
as a business graduate, "bullshitting your way into a plausible sounding answer" is what our teachers do everyday
😂 yes! Most of my business classes were common sense put into jargon. That’s also the whole business book publishing industry too.
A business graduate who can't differentiate between "everyday" and "every day"?
Not all of us but certainly there is a complete buy in to public corps because doing research on business is far easier it’s them. Most text books have very little that is really based on the main generating firms of gdp in this country. I used to object..no I still do. I critique what kids are taught while I’m teaching. I refuse to give them pat answers and groom them to comply with corporate party lines.
Except that did not become your life core value... as this company description shows. At least I hope. Percentage is the key in fakenews-ridden social /media age.
How does one even need a degree in business? Earn more then you spend is all you need to know, how to intimidate labor is a plus
I hope they give LastWeekTonight's writers a raise. They deserve it.
Pretty sure McKinsey will have in internal document sent to the Saudi government and those writers will never be heard from again. JMHO.
They did. That's one of things they got to end the WGA strike.
Katie Porter is a national treasure. I wish we had a politician like her.
I don't live in CA, but donate to Katie Porter when I can, because it's a joy to watch her pin down CEOs when they appear before the house. She's running for Senator against some tough competitors, which means if she doesn't win that election, she'll be out of Congress.
We do
When she pulls out the whiteboard it's like watching a wrestler climb the turnbuckle in a match...
Someone is about to get annihilated and we're all going to cheer!
“Reclaiming my time” is such an eloquent way to say “shut the hell up” 😂
This is the most vocal I’ve heard the audience in a good long while. Actively booing McKinsey at points. I love it!
A company that truly lives by the philosophy that the impression of competence is more important than actual competence.
Perfect advisors to those with huge political ambitions.
Arther Anderson says what?
Lots of companies in fact
Frankly, our whole society is under that impression, including tons of RUclipsrs.
At my university’s business school there’s a class called Acting for Business Majors and it was mostly for consultants, I think it’s where they learn how to give off that impression 😂
McKinsey is brought in often to simply confirm a management decision. It helps company management to 'defend' their ideas and get approval from the board.
Rather they're brought in so management executives can say we looked exhaustive for ways other than firing everyone and giving ourselves big fat bonuses...but alas...here we are...BYE!
Agreed. These consulting companies are vultures disguised as humans
Usually when management knows their decision is going to be unpopular within their workforce and they want to pass the blame to someone else
We had this with Return to the Office. We had worked for 2 years from home without hiccups. They brought in consultants, but thankfully incompetent ones. They did big company wide surveys during meetings. The options were skewed towards RTO as the only option at times, but half were missed and they left in some write in answers. They also put the poll results up AS we took them, so you could see the vast majority of people did not want a blanket RTO for 5 days a week. When the consultants wrote a report claiming we ACTUALLY wanted RTO it caused ripples and any manager following the report instantly lost like half their staff. Still have one C suite guy OBSESSED with everyone returning to 5 days a week, makes everyone under him do 3 when company policy is 2. People transfer out and hate him. We even had construction and had to "find office space" elsewhere in the building instead of just taking the week from home. We did this for 2 damn years with rising productivity... now our productivity is suffering so they are blaming WFH.
@@hiphopotamus69 That's the same way Ticketmaster works. Ticketmaster becomes the bad guy instead.
I’m a finance exec and I still don’t understand how a large successful company can think hiring a bunch of MBA students is going to get them some deeper insights or more expertise.
That is not it. They think hiring a bunch of eager MBA students willing to do whatever it takes is going to give them hours and hours of cheap labor they can sell as expensive hours while peddling some ideas a few people came up with that actually do not really work but sound neat. The graduates get a name on their CV, McKinsey a lot of money with relatively big margins and the customer gets advice they can sell as being reliable to upper management. If something goes wrong, McKinsey is the scapegoat. By that time, most of the people working on said project already left to big roles elsewhere, and the new team comes in promising they will fix it. Welcome to consulting.
@@dome8721 Before you tell other people what's up, might want to understand what they're saying. The large successful company he's talking about is the client, not McKinsey.
Nobody questions why McKinsey does this, they make money. The question is, why hire McKinsey to 'solve your problems' when all they give you is the best looking MBA students, who know nothing about your business.
@@dome8721 I believe he meant the company paying for the consultation. but it does sound like they are regularly hired just so they can blame the consultant for the lay offs
there just minimizing their risk and hiring someone they can point the finger at...they are usually way out of their league (peter principle) in the role they are in anyway...
why are so many people at McKinsey Stanford grads?
I graduated from an Ivy League college in 2020. At graduation, the student speaker said something along the lines of "We're going out to change the world. We are the doctors, engineers, and consultants..." The crowd audibly laughed at consultants.
Doctors will soon be AI as will the engineers. Consultants will continue to engage with AI.
@@andrewmclaughlin2701more like the other way around. Management consultants will be replaced by AI more than doctors or engineers.
@@andrewmclaughlin2701Lol consultants are the ones being replaced. Someone’s gotta actually do the engineering for AI to get anywhere, you can already “consult” ChatGPT and have it be more useful than a consultant.
@@mayaram2411uh no.
@@andrewmclaughlin2701are u delulu or the mckinsey bonus rotted the rest of ur braincells away? 😂
I did a case study on them for my dissertation. They have an outsized influence on economic development in Africa and they cause massive harm.
They were invited to a bank I worked for in Kenya: we had to do these ideation labs thrice a week from each dept. They took the ideas put them on their letter head and presented to senior management plus laying off workers... got paid handsomely, the bank reported losses for 6 straight years. Same script for other organizations in my country that I know of.
@@kuchikibyakuya9396 I'm sorry. I can't bring myself to "like" that. They could have used that money to pay workers. Such a waste.
@@kuchikibyakuya9396so they got your good ideas, submitted them to corporate, and then fired you? Is that what happened?
@@smrk2452 I've worked with McKinsey and I would say this is their primary strategy.
I was waiting for the African angle.
Thanks
As a former corporate brainwashed, I am loving to see the downfall of corporate culture as something cool and the exposure of what it really is.
I just wish I wasn't still beholden to them.
I’m still in the golden handcuffs due to insurance and health needs. It’s awful. I hate going to work lol.
It's never the company/firm/corporation. It's the team
But it will not change a thing.
@@vvolfbelorven7084 that’s what people at bad companies say.
Having been a consultant myself, I can attest to the accuracy of this observation: a significant number of F500 executive teams are consulting alumni, and many pivotal corporate decisions are influenced by consulting firms. The essence of our role was rooted in facilitating transformation-we advocated for change, asserting its positive impact, all while recognizing that our firms' livelihoods depended on it. We possessed the ability to propose a strategic direction one day, streamline a workforce based on that direction, only to return two years later with a different strategy, justified by the ever-shifting and intricate landscape of the market. We were trained to communicate and work in certain ways so clients perceive us as experts.
☝️ this... Outstanding comment.
In other words, if it works, fuck around with it till it doesn't, then come back later and charge them all over again for putting it back the way it was.
I love the very specific wording at the end there: "so clients PERCEIVE us as experts."
@@joshmans7307 perception is everything, it is how you get in the door!
So... You are well paid bullshitters?
Katie Porter is a national hero. I'd vote for her for president in a heartbeat. She will never run however, because she knows she can accomplish more in the senate.
Unfortunately the people who run for president have to be somewhat narcissistic to make a bid and the people who should run are too good to waste their time on that. 😞
I wish I could be as assertive and no nonsense in a gentle yet educated way like her.. Good role model.
Can you guys send her over to be Governor of Florida?
@@sniperhare be the change you want to see.
Nah, she's an idiot.
She's another AoC, grand stands for progressive talking points - which is good for her fandom, but ultimately doesn't mean or do anything. When the votes need to come in she gets in-line just like everybody else.
I work in a governmental institute (not in the US) they contracted McK once and implemented it’s proposed strategies. It was a shitshow. After that this institute trained their own consultants and they now help the departments improve which proved to be cheaper and better. I guess McK really helped us better ourselves.
Out of curiosity, where are you from? (If you can't answer that's fine tho, have a nice day)
I bet all the people working at McKinsey are gonna unironically share that last skit with each other 😂
I bet you're right-I also bet they invite Oliver to be the entertainment at their annual meeting, then try to hire him to head up one of their departments.
Already did so. And I don't work at McKinsey
@@drdarkeny
That's the sad truth, ain't it? Capital folds all criticisms of it into itself.
Still, I have faith that John wouldn't go through with something like that.
OH, they know.
I'm a consultant and I'm probably gonna do likewise, lol
Our national broadcasting station in Australia, the ABC, recently did a deep dive on the major consulting companies operating here. One of the stories centered around Governmental reliance on consulting companies, to the point where one company was simultaneously advising the government on Tax Reform whilst advising a private company on how to reduce corporate income tax!
Ah yes good ol PWC
"Send an email, not a F#&!Ing helicopter!!" is a hilariously accurate summary of just how inept and unnecessary typical business procedures are..
And then they apparently ran the idea by everyone *except* the only department that could actually answer the real question "if something happens and we get sued, is it better to have hand-signed, helicopter-delivered invoices available?"
How much do you think they got payed for that advice as well; How to the stupid people at the top that NEEDED that advice got payed? When freaking anyone who gives them their coffee at Starbucks could have figured out that puzzle.
Oliver inspires me.. My parents said if i get 60K followers They'd buy me a professional camera for recording..begging u guys , literally
Begging.
@@nebufabudid that really happen? I'd hope hand signed documents aren't actually considered better legally with the right processes (like a password for verification). They could have a printer and a scanner instead of a helicopter either way.
@@nicholase2868 No idea. But that quote didn't mention them considering legal implications at all, and they may be very different depending on when, where and how it happened exactly...
Having worked in a prison, to fix them:
Add a/c, better food, better housing (these guys are literally stacked on top of each other like cord wood), better heating, give them something to do! Better libraries, activities, recreation, etc. Any of the above mentioned items would being down the violence in prisons especially the overcrowding and the need for a/c!
Careful friend, it sounds almost like you're suggesting we treat prisoners like human beings and actually try to rehabilitate them, that's just not the American way.
No AC in Texas prisons, the current gov thinks it a bad expensive idea. Most GOP prisoners go to Fed prisons!
Hate to tell you this but prisons get paid by the head the more people they can cram in there the more money they get
...I'm pretty sure the jail I toured with my soci 101 class had AC... but after hearing a corrections officer talk about how the institution views detainees? I'm the opposite of shocked (alarmed, but not shocked) to hear they're in the minority. Especially considering that the solitary wing that we got to go into, it was under construction. The construction: removing the (seatless yet kneeling height, too far from the bed) desks & leaving the cells with only the bed and toilet. His response to 'isn't this inhumane?' was roughly 'solitary is a *punishment*'. He also talked about the widespread resistance to seeing mental health professionals like it was no big deal, and definitely not a problem!
The sad part is it feels less unethical to give these useless parasitical millionaires large amounts of money to talk about things community activists would do for free than give homeless people and prisons *basic* amenities. Escaping poverty becomes exponentially more difficult when you have some rich assholes actively kicking you while you are down.
16:00 As a registered Democrat living in California, I _cannot wait_ to cast my vote for Katie Porter in the 2024 Senate race. Politicians like her are all the hope we have left to rein in the corporate malfeasance and abuse of the American people.
she is great
Really!? Did you see her the last time she was with Bill Maher!? What a mumbling buffoon she has become!
Politicians are one part of problem. The people have to push politicians to push change. Lobbyists have too much power. Politicians talk to get elected. I never imagined federal shutdowns being bargaining tool. People cry and do nothing of substance to get change.
I love Katie Porter! Every clip I've seen of her, she's just unstoppable with putting the bs going on into common sense language and pictures that even a kindergartner could understand.
Love Katie Porter!
I’m soo glad that Rep Katie Porter made this video!! Her integrity is something to aspire to!!! She wrote an amazing book, politics is messier than my minivan!! Recommend read!! We need more people like her in our government!! I will be voting for her for CA senate set!!
McKinsey did not invent the bar code. The NAFC with the help of McKinsey developed the standard for it. The bar code was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver.
- And a guy I know helped make them secure.
Yes, excatly. The first barcode was patented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952 (US Patent #2,612,994). Much later trade associations from the grocery industry formed the Uniform Product Code Council (UPCC) which, with the help of consultants of McKinsey & Company, defined the numerical format (barcode symbology) that formed the basis of the Uniform Product Code. So McKinsey helped to define the UPC standard.
He said "helped"
Boosting this
Consults walking by the building where it's being invented: AND WEEEEEE HELPED
Having worked in consultancy, the ‘schrodingers contract’ bit is a perfect encapsulation of how these firms operate.
we can have both ;) :D
There was (and still should be) a scandal in France when it was discovered how much president Macron and his staff paid McKinsey (without declerating it) for useless advices, but it has always been about the money. I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about McKinsey other works, which seems way more relevant and incriminating.
Well, it wasn't just about the money, but also about the utter incompetence of their advice when there are ressources like the "cour des comptes" and many high level civil servant that *do* know their shit and whose work is already paid for. I believe Mediapart had a few articles on the subject...
[responding mostly to boost the comment in the consideration of our algorithmic overlord]
all glory to the overlord @@NouriaDiallo
No wonder he supported von der Leyen to be EU president - they have the same M.O. lol. She had a scandal for the same thing during her tenure as german defense minister.
Macron truly is a massive joke. I mean, he has to be for someone as awful as Le Pen to get as many votes as she did.
Wasn't the Louis XIV regime equally smooth brained?
McKinsey have evolved into full scam artists. But their brand is WEALTH, so other elite tossers and "businesses" hire them for their brand. they don't care what the "advice" is, just that they can say "we got the advice from McKinsey, so obviously it must be correct and you can't blame us for how things turn out". McKinsey is used by failing management to justify looting the treasury before the ship goes down...and McKinsey love being that sort of parasite.
I was a consultant with WSP and Mouchel. We sometimes brushed up against McKinsey consultants - and most of the time they were wrong. Sadly, their reputation is pretty bulletproof - and we found out why. When the clients weren't happy, McKinsey didn't charge them and then made them sign NDAs.
John Oliver’s writing team should be making the big bucks. The research for this episode was incredibly well done
Not to forget the journalists, who's research and information they use.
Those do a great job with often little reward as well.
The LWT-Team is great at putting a big and complex story together in an entertaining and easier to understand way for the general public. Love their deep dives into topics that most of us would never really know about otherwise.
lol who are you kidding, John is what makes the show, put anyone else there and the show will flop, its his charisma that carries this show no matter what topic he talks about.
Not to mention a well funded legal team as I'm sure that a company this powerful is going to take exception to this expose.
A lot of this content is cribbed from PBS report from a year ago, NYT journalists and Pro Publica.
I'm a retired emergency management specialist. I was stunned to learn that British Petroleum and other firms had allowed consultants to write their emergency plans that, expectedly, turned out to be virtually useless when the Deepwater Horizon Spill occurred. A good emergency plan requires input from the people who will actually respond to the emergency, who are the employees and managers themselves, with guidance from an expert in preparing emergency plans. However, the consultant-prepared plans looked like boiler-plate that did not take into account differences between companies in structure, staffing, environment, jurisdiction, and other variables. The same would expectedly be true for advising companies on day-to-day management, which should be closely aligned with disaster roles.
Aboriginal Americans say that Deepwater is still spewing, and that the chemicals used to cover the spill have killed the entire Gulf watershed. I have no way of verifying this.
but have you concidered that a good plan costs money? companies will rather take the gamble then being pro active and it costing them something. I think it was the same with Koch industries, who rather pay fines or court ruling than invest money into safety and enviromental programs.
What did they pay McKinsey? Pretty sure it was a lot of money @@saltking2715
Getting input on a process from the people who are actually using the process? That's CRAZY TALK!
You can't justify $10.5 million payouts to talk to a line mechanic who already works for you!
@@MonkeyJedi99 LOL
Had one of them come to my job. He promised a new future for company and workers, no layoffs. Made it his point to greet every worker, was really sweet. Drove a ferrari. Month later, 50% of the workforce was fired effectively next day with no prior warning. Which, considering that most of them (including me) were migrant workers whose accomodation was paid by the employer, was a total disaster. Gave us a week to leave premises. For me it was either finding a job within that week or going back 1000 km back home with savings only. I found a job, but many didnt.
"Drove a Ferrari" holy shit
Very sad.
What I find extremely confusing about management consulting firms is that they are invariably staffed by people who have never actually run a business in their lives, so how can they possibly be "consultants" to other businesses on how to run their business? They hire right out of university, people who have no real world experience of anything, at all. When I started my technology consulting firm, by that point in my career, I had a full decade of technology management experience, and two decades of experience actually using computers.
I'd founded the first 100% broadband end-user ISP in America in the 1990s, and designed and built wide-area, metropolitan-area, and local-area networks for clients ranging from Fortune 500 firms to high security government installations, and enterprises of over 10,000 users in both the private and public sector, with project budgets in the multiple millions of dollars, working with partners like IBM, HP, and Lucent, among others.
A "consultant" is, or at least is *supposed* to be, a subject matter expert, and no one, absolutely no one, who graduates from college and business school is an expert in anything, at all.
This!
Absolutely spot on!
I agreed with you
Thank you for calling out this company. They were instrumental in the privatization of public schools in the US, charter schools.
Fuck charter schools. They self select and don't do any better when you adjust for socioeconomic status.
Omg. Wow.
This makes so much sense right now 🤦♀️
REALLY?! Did they just have a checklist on the "what awful things can we get our fingers in?"
The state legislatures decided they wanted to privatize and implement charter schools, McKinsey was simply hired to provide a justification for the decision the politicians already made and formulate a plan for carrying it out. So sure they played a part but it would have happened regardless once the politicians decided they wanted to do it.
I used to work for McKinsey. Everything that John says about McKinsey is true. I'll leave it at that, nothing to add here.
On top of all these things one needs to mention that Jeff Skilling, the guy who created Enron (possibly the biggest corporate scam in the history of mankind, for those too young to remember), was a McKinsey consultant of 21 years.
Wow. Reading these comments, it just goes deeper and deeper.
His picture was in the skit at the end.
He created Enron? Wasn't he hired 5 years after the company was created by merging two companies worth over a billion each?
He's definitely responsible for their illegal accounting practices etc, so perhaps you mean he created the scandal?
The South Sea Company scam was much bigger.
every week i fear that john oliver will tell me "oops sweaty that thing you like actually sucks" but this week he was like "i am about to validate the hell out of you"
And right next week they got into chocolate... Sorry honey :/
Pediatric oxycontin is a group of words I never imagined being spoken in the same sentence, and yet McKinsey apparently advocated for them. Wildly irresponsible and deeply heinous.
It is the most horrifying two-word phrase I've heard in a long, long time.
I started to get a bit teary during the Purdue segment. What a gut wrenchingly evil thing they did. For everything they do they are truly accelerating the downfall of society. Not surprised it started at the university of chicago.
I understand it was probably during the time when to the general public it was marketed as a non-addictive opioid, so at least some people in the room probably thought it was harmless. But it’s still recklessly irresponsible and horrifying
Oxycontin in and of itself is safe for use in adults and children when used correctly. The key issue is that correct use of oxycontin turned out to be extremely sparing and in very specific situations involving severe acute pain or cancer, rather than pretty much everyone everywhere like Purdue were claiming.
Get em hooked while they are young = more profit later.
I was a visual analyst at McKinsey and company and was part of McKinsey Global services in India. We were the guys who made these powerpoints and i can say now how shitty they used to pay us eventhough they were this multi-billion dollars company, i can say the slide John showed is a legit one as McKinsey has their own powerpoint identity and i have worked on slides like those for years.
wait, associates and partners do not create their own slides or something??
woah. can't believe this co sells outsourced powerpoint presentations for so much money, capitalists truly are fucking idiots. i'm sorry you were exploited like that too, that fucking sucks.
@@wholequestLMFAO partners spend their days wining and dining clients to make more money and making “pls fix” comments to the analysts until 3 am. they are definitely not the slide monkeys.
@@wholequest"important people" don't do silly grunt labor like their own powerpoints, that's what the 'help' is for
they didn't put the knife on your throat when you sign the contract right? If you sign the contract by your own will, then what is your point here?
I owe McKinsey and other consulting firms my good reputation in Corporate Operations since I was always called to sort out the mess they left behind after a multimillion consulting piece with zero or negative results.
Fellow here, but with some firms. It is just heartbreaking sometimes to see the destruction left behind.
There might potential for a business book on how to approach big4s messes left behind. 😂
@@guzmangonzalez8984 good thought! As you came up with it, I can offer contribution and support. 😁
Yes. Make a problem, solve a problem. Good business.
If there's a way to talk offline I'd appreciate learning a few things from you, or work under you if you're in the same market.
I love John. Bringing shiz to light with great journalists is freaking important. Can’t be sheep.
I'm so glad John Oliver is able to magnify all this great work that PBS, NPR, Propublica and so on routinely do.
You mean "did". These clips (e.g. 9:55) seem to be from the 90s.
@@clivejohnson5645no they’re right. All those outlets do good journalism.
@@junemac7515 - I believe you meant to say "No, they're right." "They all" is also redundant here. I believe you meant to say "They all do good journalism", or perhaps "All those outlets do good journalism."
@@clivejohnson5645 what?
@@clivejohnson5645 Why are you being so insufferable about grammar bro. That person is right - those outlets indeed do great journalism and have covered these topics more recently than you apparently realize. I can't believe I've become "that" person on the internet but after reading your two comments I beg you to take the stick out of your ass
One of the most notorious and epic failure McKinsey made in South Korea was to tell LG Electronics to keep focusing on the feature phone market rather than smartphones facing with Apple launching iPhone. The repercussion was as many of you know, the firm, once the top 5 mobile phone maker had to pull itself out of the market once and all. The catch here in this story is that the consulting firm is still advising the manufacturer. Kudos to have such a loyal client!
I guess Apple is also a client, so overall McKinsey wins.
This totally gave me goosebumps. LG is a brilliant company bar in the phone sector and ended up folding their business. Didn't realize McK is behind the scene... geez.
Then again, if you need a consulting firm to advise you in your core business, maybe you deserve to fail. Some things you should be able to get right by yourself.
Kinda arrogant of you an outside person to criticize them when you're absolutely nobody and don't know anything about it internally don't you think? There is a reason LG and Mckinsey are in bed to this day.
@@howl5813what's the reason?
The saying about consulting "If you can't find a solution there is always money to be made in prolonging the problem." has never been more true...
Can’t find a solution? 🤔 hmm, let’s get a consultation on why we can’t find a solution…and perhaps a consultant can come up with possible strategies on how to move in a differt direction right now while waiting on the findings about why they couldn’t previously find a solution, and they know that didn’t work so easentially, they’ll be back at square one; and the consultants will convincingly persuade them that further consults would ensure that they will come up with the best strategy for them next time! And when that finally works (or doesn’t…!), they have an array of services and consultants too …(you know…)
Brilliant piece. Katie Porter’s clip was the most damning. She’s a national treasure. Even ad agencies implement conflict of interest protocols!
We recently discovered in France that the government was paying 1 billion per year for McKinsey (and other counseling firms that are probably not much better). It was a "McKinseygate" as you would say in America (we call that "affairs" in France). It's exactly the budget needed for sexual and sexist violence prevention, but the right have other priorities.
We know all about the Dreyfus Affairgate in the States.
Same in Belgium between McKinsey and the Postal Service. Postal service, which is 51% or something owned by government, granted McKinsey highly paid contracts without public tender offers which is illegal
to be fair a french consulting firm cap gemini just work with the ministry of finance and used google maps and algorith to go through data of land contracts and building to collect properties tax for big pools, seconds houses and all other tax doging methods. bringing millions of dollars just outside of paris now rolling that out to all of france probably generating taxes dodged double digits billions in just 5 year
@@aaronb1195 Are you referring to the time Julia Louis-Dreyfus faked being blind to win court cases and then slept with Jason Bateman?
Look up Ursula von der Leyen and McKinsey
Worked there. Worst decision I ever made. But yet when I was leaving, so many companies were bending over backwards to have me. Which I actually found disappointing and sad.
It's a simple heuristic to cut recruitment effort. They assume that McKinsey has done all the hard work to identify talent, so they can piggy back on that effort. "If she was good enough for McKinsey...". That's what I'm going to believe because the alternative is too depressing.
@@HundredthldiotIt is also a question on heavy workload. The next employer know that if a person has done 2+ years at Mc Kinsey, they are able to take on crazy hours + pression from client. You can be bad for the society but great to make money and invested worker.
Good for you for getting out. 👏
They love McKinsey for their strategy, on how to make more $$$ and every company definitely wants to make more $$$
Pieces like this are why this show is so good and necessary. Groups like McKinsey dearly need to be exposed. But nobody but John Oliver is interested in doing it in a manner in which a large number of people will see it. Kudos.
Look up Mariana Mazzucato and her work on the consulting industry. There has been a academic case building against the exploitative practices of consultancy firms. So this has been ongoing, however, it is really good that John has finally paid some much-needed attention to it.
One place I worked they brought in McKinsey (at great expense) for several "workstreams". I was in charge of one of these from our pov. We were supposed to be having a week of "workshops" with them. The first meeting a partner and a bunch of bag-carrying flunkies came in and said they wanted to "listen to me", so I told them a bunch of stuff and they spent the entire meeting repeating back what I had said and stroking my ego. At the end of the meeting I said "OK now tomorrow you guys better bring something to the meeting and not just have what I told you put on a bunch of slides". They cancelled the rest of the workshops and said they wanted to "focus on areas where they could add more value". Super clear they knew I had their number and they would instead zero in on people they could bilk more easily.
Also: later in that exercise we were on a late night zoom meeting with like 10 of the top partners in finance in McKinsey and one of the associates on the meeting didn't realise his camera was on. While we were presenting he got up, went to have a shower and came out of the shower naked. In front of his client and all of his bosses bossess bossess.
Their parents and partners are all proud of them tho, that’s what counts, long as they bring home the bacon, it doesn’t matter what bs they do at work
I love that they put Jeff Skilling on the wall of fame. For those who don’t know he was a McKinsey consultant who took over Enron. McKinsey did a lot to shape his outlook on business and he imported the McKinsey culture to Enron which turned the company into an arrogant and wasteful mess. He also was a key player in the Enron scandal and only recently got out of prison.
About halfway through the segment I was sure John would connect McKinsey to Enron. I didn’t know there was a connection but it seemed only natural that there would be one. Glad to learn I was right.
Ten to one Skillings will be back at Texas Energy soon.
Yes, blame someone who simply used to work at McKinsey to somehow make McKinsey responsible or all the fraud that happened at Enron. I guess McKinsey will also be responsible for crucifying Jesus and the Civil War.
A new exec at the company I work for had their "introduction" meeting and in the presentation they said they got their start at Enron, which I thought was funny, but we all work for scummy people, can't really blame them for working there right out of school. Then the next slide they were like "After Enron I moved to McKinsey..." and immediate red flags started popping...
What next, you left McKinsey for Raytheon? Are you purposely trying to find the worst people to work for?
He took out McKinsey's biggest competitor Arthur Andersen with Enron. In the end he was a successful product.
Magnificent episode. As a business graduate who has long resisted the trend of joining a consultant company, this resonates with my soul. I have witnessed many friends and peers chase a nice paycheck and go down the consultant path and they all seem to deny truth or look for excuses. Almost as if they’re brainwashed.
It's a coping mechanism, nobody likes to think of themselves as bad people, even when they are doing or aiding objectively evil things.
Start a consulting firm where you charge significantly less that the "big guys" but plenty for yourself and then just go ask the lowest paid employees what is wrong and how to fix it. Most companies are full of their own solutions, they just simply aren't willing to listen to the peons at the bottom. You'll make millions collating other people's ideas into powerpoints and those people will thank you for it.
Too bad you didn't get in right?
I never applied, my randomly toxic internet-friend@@vio1583 for the reasons I stated
I retired from a major hospital system's IT department about 2 years ago, after 25 years. Shortly after I retired, they brought in McKinsey to review IT's operations and make recommendations. They recommended outsourcing. I can tell you from experience that outsourcing will only make their problems worse. The basic issue the department (and the hospital) has is too much bureaucracy. Outsourcing only adds another layer.
Shocking that the outsourced IT consulting firm recommends MORE outsourcing as a solution.
Outsourcing medical IT when it is broken in the first place is insane. I have worked as a hospital nurse for a few years... and electronic medical records are a mess, all these programs are complicated and they did nothing at the same time. The only reason EPIC is more common these days is because it's not the worst of all of the systems.
And typically glosses over the tacit knowledge that is often the glue that binds organisations together.
Yes but what they really want and wont say out loud is another insulating layer to hide behind.
@@kpepperl319 It's not outsourcing itself that is the problem, but who you outsource to. If it is to a company specialized in software for hospitals, it could work out great. Unfortunately outsourcing most often goes to these large generic companies that in turn outsource 80% of the work to code monkeys in India. Medical data is highly specialized, with very high security and reliability requirements. It does not make a lot of sense for each hospital to handle that on their own.
I strongly recommend reading When McKinsey Comes to Town. It’s an incredible book.
Fun fact: German Railway was once known for its punctuality & reliability. Enter McKinsey: Its lack of punctuality & reliability turned into a runnibg joke for the last quarter century.
That was McKinsey ? No way... They are more than incompetent enough at certain levels to make that happen on their own these days
I had always thought that German Railway must be punctual and reliable until some German friends told me it isn't. I did not understand why, but this would explain a lot.
@@samuela-aegisdottir It was privatised, didn't care about infrastructure, gov bought it back and now there's maintenance work being done everywhere AT ONCE.
As a consultant, this is 100% true. The value a good management consultant has is showing a business something so glaringly obvious that needs to be changed/fixed, but having a third well respected party being the one delivering that message. Guaranteed at least one of the employees of that company had the exact same idea top help the business, but was dismissed.
So in other words, a "good management consultant" preys on businesses with culture problems and out of self-interest, does not solve them. Yeah, that checks out.
@@peterjj416 lol no I didn’t say that. They aren’t “preying” on a business if they fix an actual issue. I am saying that sometimes a business needs a 3rd party consultant to notice an issue. A good example would be in the movie “the founder” where ray Crock gets advice to change his franchise model to lead to extraordinary growth.
As someone who just accepted a job at a consulting firm because I haven’t been listened to by management at my current job… yep
Like kids who won’t listen to parents but if someone else says the same thing, then it’s great.
They pay the consultants so much, they just HAVE to listen to their misguided advice
Listen to a fresh grad with great Powerpoint skills over your own loyal employee with 30+ years of experience
I can't believe John did a show on my career. There are only a few consultant groups remaining, as most went in-house and are now called Organizational Development Consultants. It was much more cost effective for the large companies. If anyone is interested, there is an excellent show with Don Cheadle called House of Lies, that details this topic. All episodes are based on true events, and loosely on the career of Marin Kahin,, the charter played by Cheadle, and undisputed King of consulting. There is so much more to this topic. DOD contacts, the sub-prime housing debacle...better than any fiction. Excellent work John!
i can't believe you publicly admitted your career is capitalist bullshitter.
that show is awesome.
"House of Lies"
Not exactly a glowing recommendation about your line of work is it?
As a Cornell graduate, I really appreciated the...even Cornell LOL
John Oliver is a national treasure!
Bhaaaaaa 😂
*International Treasure (Thanks Britain!)
**International treasure
Universal treasure
a force for systemic good. This mentality is rife through all executive boards. you can tell by their compensation.
Round of applause for the "It's me at the top" guy, that is acting worth all the money signs.
I found him so convincing in just one line !
think we could convince him to accept paper cutouts of money signs as his salary instead of real dollars? "look at all the money signs you're getting for all your hard work! you have the most money signs!"
The sole purpose of these management consultant companies is to outsource blame for bad management decisions
They also sometimes are hired to help executives win internal political battles with other executives, as in "See, I'm right, this external company says so".
Exactly!
I worked for a global energy company and when they told us they were bringing in McKinsey...we all knew it meant lay offs
German government used McKinsey's service alarmingly often. For example they researched the reasons for unemployment once and found out basically that many people don't have an employer. We payed millions for this information and our leaders decided to employ McKinsey more often.
Unemployed people aren’t employed 😱!! 😂 Who would have thought!
do i have to have some kind of documentation to prove i work for mckinsey or can i just go around billing governments millions of dollars to tell them shit like "the reason people are claiming food stamp benefits is because they lack money to buy food" or "the projected size of the workforce in 20 years is directly proportional to the number of babies being born today"?
I'm skeptical. Could lack of employer really be a determinant of unemployment or is this simply an unexplained correlation? Maybe we could hire Bain and for a second opinion just to be sure. I've got a buddy there who could take the account.
@@ross302ci You could never be a McKinsey. A McKinsey would not ask to hire Bain. They would just do it.
@@dietotaku no need for documentation, because our politicians mostly value the opinions of people they already know and get favor from. So you need to be lobyist with some kind of reputation. Highest league of them have their own acces-cards to Bundestag and other structures of government and know the names of the security (ok... the securitything I only assume)
No one is as insufferable as a McKinsey consultant. Nailed it. He should also mention they get paid so much - for their souls basically.
The new consultants are bright kids who got MBA's from Ivies for which they took out massive student loans.
The one I know is the most pleasant stuck up person I've ever met. He's fun, but you can tell he has spent the majority of his life studying like a mad man to get into McKinsey and when working there he sometimes would go on the treadmill at 3am to at least move a little WHILE WORKING
People who get a company car but still are picked up by a company driver so they can start working while traveling to the office... Well they are either workaholics and/or just before a massive burnout.
The work culture in there can be and often is absolute insanity.
@@communitygardener17 an MBA is basically a paid for degree
@@valkor606I don't know where you got that impression. a Wharton or Harvard business school MBA (or one of the other small number of schools you need to attend to have them glance at your resume if your last name isn't Vanderbilt or Rockefeller) is extremely expensive. it pays for itself with the job you can expect, but that's on the back end. on the front end, it's a six figure student loan.
Oliver Weyman is up there too
Global consulting firm McKinsey works all over the world, but in South Africa, it faces criminal charges for corruption. The case centres on its role in the country's biggest post-apartheid scandal, known as state capture.
He should do a second video on that
Shouldn't it be a red flag if a company faces corruption charges in South Africa of all places? Just that would probably be reason enough to put the whole company out of business.
@@thewaldfe9763 2012 McKinsey's global CEO was convicted and jailed in the US for insider trading. 10 years later another US partner convicted and jailed for the same thing. Neither of those incidents seems to have dented its reach and influence, so why would you think that corruption way out of the public scrutiny would?
@@georgecurrie4808and still people idolize McKinsey what is wrong with the world
THAT McKinsey ad was bloody hysterical! Had to watch it a couplde times to appreciate the nuance!🤣🤣
Worked for Bain for six years and this segment is accurate. My main gripe with these firms is the massive chasm between the rhetoric they propagate about themselves and the reality of what they do.
"for six years"
_"My main gripe with these firms is the massive chasm between the rhetoric they propagate about themselves and the reality of what they do."_
That tends to be my main gripe about _every_ company. Heh, heh. But seriously, their hypocrisy really gets to me.
@@Stossburg that's plenty of time to stare at the abyss in the chasm
As someone who works in the public sector, it's absolutely appalling to see the work that McKinsey, BCG and Bain (or MBB as the douchey MBA lot love to say) have undertaken globally with BS powerpoints using rehashed scholarly analysis being pretty much the only output. The day governments chose to outsource their work to "management consultants", the taxpayer was fucked and had little knowledge about it. It's both governments and these terrible organisations to blame, the latter only exists because there's a demand for justifying massive cost-cutting and layoffs. Gagworthy organisations. Great communicators but all snakeoil salesmen are.
Edit: I’m not even in the US or Europe, clearly this is a global problem. Hopefully this is something most folks can agree on except the ones at the top of the imaginary ladder.
Not just government. Higher ed turned to these people rather than their own members (i.e. faculty) and have wrecked education by turning it into customer satisfaction rather than education. Yet another short-term gain strategy guaranteed to destroy basic institutions and cultural quality.
Amen to that... but then again,every corporation exploits loopholes and deals BS and uses snakeoil strategies for ever (specially after WW2)
Thanks to all those public servant/public sector employees who decided to do something other than being a corporate shill
Public employee here and I can confirm that when leadership decides to use consultants instead of listening to the base-level employees who've been doing this for decades, it leads to horrific changes, discontent, and major staff turnover leading to even more deficiencies. Not to mention rapidly changing policies that are difficult to keep up with and NO public transparency.
Very true.
For a company whose policy is to hide in the shadows, this is their worse nightmare.
🤣
ok
This is A1 reporting
Australia has a huge problem with consultancy firms and government. Especially during the Coalition government term they essentially supercharged getting rid of the public service department and using massively overpaid consultants instead. And of course there were conflict of interest scandals that came out of it. Not least a merry-go-round of ex-government getting jobs in the consultant firms and consultants getting jobs in government. Couple that with our famously opaque lobbying laws and it’s been a disaster.