McKinsey has a weird structure where there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
Everybody there is reviewed on client impact, meaning it ends up being an everybody-for-themselves situation.
So as a developer you have little guidance (in fact, you're still being reviewed on client impact, even if you have 0 client exposure).
Then a (Senior) Partner comes in with this idea (that will get them a good review), and you jump on that. After all, it's all you can do to get a good review.
You work on it, and then the (Senior) Partner moves on. But it's not done. It's enough for the review, but continuing to work on it doesn't bring you anything, in fact, it will actually pull you down, as finishing the project doesn't give immediate client results.
So what does this mean? Most products of McKinsey are a grab-bag of raw ideas of leadership, implemented as a one-off, without a cohesive vision or even a long-term vision at all. It's all about the review cycle.
McKinsey is trying to do software like they do their other engagements. It doesn't work. You can't just do something for 6 months and then let it go. Software rots.
The fact that they laid off a good amount of (very good) software engineers in 2024 is a reflection on how they see software development.
And McKinsey's people, who go to other companies, take those ideas with them. Result: The UI of your project changes all the time, because everybody is looking at the short-term impact they have that gets them a good review, not what is best for the project in the long term.
McKinsey was on a spree to become the best tech consulting company and brought a lot of great tech talent but the 2023 crisis made leadership turn 180 and simply ditch/ignore all the tech experts they brought to the firm.
All the expertise has left the firm and now they are more and more becoming another BS tech consulting firm, with strategy folks that don't even know that ML is AI advising clients on Enterprise AI transformation.
The tech initiative was a failure and Lilli's problem is just a symptom of it.
I wonder what was the experience at Bain and BCG
And if the latter is the case, then that sort of stamps the case closed from the get-go...
an absolutely wild statement to 99.9+% of the world
Partners get 300-400k and senior partners get closer to 600-800
I mean, it doesn't work for their consulting gigs either. There's a reason McKinsey has such a bad reputation.
It’s really about bypassing the existing power structure of the company. Competence of the work itself is a secondary objective. Most in-house initiatives can be slow rolled by management.
The fresh faced consultant with 2-3 steps to access the CEO neutralizes that. It seems grifty but is really exploiting bugs in corporate governance.
The current fad of firing the managers is a riff on this. Every jackass C-level is coming up with the novel idea of flattening.
Most of the times, the business decision has already been made long before McK is hired. It’s all about legitimizing that decision and making it happen.
You can also wield them as a weapon against internal competitors or opponents. Look up how they were used to kill off Cariad for example.
Pre-AI, I always said McK is good at analysis, if you need complicated analysis done, hire a consulting firm.
If you need strategy, custom software, org design, etc. I think you should figure out the analysis that needs to be done, shoot that off to a consulting firm, and then make your decision.
IME, F500 execs are delegation machines. When they wake up every morning with 30 things to delegate, and 25 execs to delegate to, they hire 5 consulting teams. Whether you hire Mck, or Deloitte, or Accenture will only come down to:
1. Your personal relationships
2. Your company's policies on procurement
3. Your budget
in that order.
McK's "secret sauce" is that if you, the exec, don't like the powerpoint pages Mck put in front of you, 3 try-hard, insecure, ivy-league educated analysts will work 80 hours to make pages you do like. A sr. partner will take you to dinner. You'll get invited to conferences and summits and roundtables, and then next time you look for a job, it will be easier.
1. How do I build a datacenter
2. How is the industrial ceramic market structured, how do they perform
3. How does a changing environment impact life insurance
Strategy:
1. Should I build a datacenter
2. Should I invest in an industrial ceramics company
3. Should I divest my life insurance subsidiary
Specifically in the software world this would be "automate some esoteric ERP migration" or "build this data pipeline" vs. "how can we be more digital native" or "how do we integrate more AI into our company"
It has to be some kind of higher level protection racket or something. Like if you hire the consultants there is some kind of kickbacks to the higherups or something with more steps involved where those who previously opposed it will now accept it if it's rubberstamped by the consultants.
Or perhaps those other players who are politically opposing this person are just dummies and don't know about this trick and actually trust the consultants. Or maybe it's a bit of a check, that you can't get anything and everything rubberstamped by the consultants, so it is some kind of sanity filter that the guy isn't proposing something that only benefits himself and screws everyone else.
And if it's the latter, then it is genuine value, a somewhat impartial second opinion. Basically there is a fog-of-war for all the execs regarding all the internal politics going on, it's not like they see through everything all the time and simply refuse to take the obviously correct decision for no reason.
McKinsey challenges graduates to use AI chatbot in recruitment overhaul: https://www.ft.com/content/de7855f0-f586-4708-a8ed-f0458eb25...
And require a chatbot to be used that can be easily gamed by asking a model of how best to navigate it lol.
Implementing the past of AI practices is requesting something that will be easily outdone.
They look to package up something and sell it as long as they can.
AI solutions won't have enough of a shelf life, and the thought around AI is evolving too quickly.
Very happy to be wrong and learn from any information folks have otherwise.
Many, many, many companies are very happy with the consulting firms they hire.
Of course, those are the consulting firms that aren't publicly traded and in the news all the time (for all the wrong reasons).