McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ต.ค. 2023
- John Oliver discusses the oldest and largest management consulting firm: McKinsey & Company.
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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?..
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?
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 😂😂😂
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
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 TH-cam 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!
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.
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!
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.
@@NPCSpotter 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
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? 🤔🤷♂️
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
It’s also often a good ol’ boys club where consultants like McKinsey often essentially get their contracts on a golf course, etc. instead of being the right choice or even when no consultants are needed at all.
Yup! He barely scratched the surface.
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'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.)
@@sachadee.6104 Because that's how you preserve your job if the advice flops. McKinsey is just an untouchable scapegoat with flashy title. Imagine Rikers management took the initiative themselves and tried to fix it. What if it didn't work out? Then they would be in the crosshairs for wasting all this money. But since they "hired a consultant" (read "hired a professional bullshitting scapegoat"), pointing that finger is easy and job is preserved.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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...
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.
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
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 :)
A young consultant spent a graveyard shift with me at a paper mill. We were told to answer any questions they had, so I did, using my office computer to look up the data. The report came back that engineers spent too much time in the office, and not on the floor! Hell, we did what we were told…
Sounds about right ..the consultant never worked a day in their life yet is going guide how to improve business performance
@@billthecat129 after 30+ years in industry I saw so many consultants come in, charge millions, then say the same things. “You guys need less people”, “you pay too much”, “you top managers are so smart so listen to us”.
It was a joke until we got old, expensive and tired. Then we became the targets. As we got older and more experienced, we made our work look too easy apparently. I saw the pattern and started saving money like crazy. Glad I did. I ‘bought’ my freedom and retired at 57. Not rich but ok and way more relaxed now. Corporate leaders have no soul. We reward narcissism and pay for it eventually.
OMG. So typical!
The fact that McKinsey's wall of alums had a picture of Jeffrey Skilling hanging was comedy gold! If anyone is interested in learning about the monster named Jeffrey Skilling I'd recommend watching the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room".
can you provide the cliffnotes?
"enron" should give it away, my friend @@FranzFerdinand55
Lol, right?! I was having a smoothie and literally almost choked at the site of Jeff Skilling haha.
@@FranzFerdinand55Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison (ultimately serving 12) for his role in the massive fraud committed by energy company Enron, where he was CEO. They used a bunch of accounting tricks to hide the fact they were in enormous debt to mislead their investors for years, which collapsed when the company ran out of money and the misled investors sued the shit out of them.
ah so the usual type of scam. thank you.@@noesunyoutuber7680
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?
This passion and research is what we need.
Nice
Fantastic one love it too👌🏼👌🏼
Nice
Nice
👍🏻
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
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.
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.
"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...
John Oliver you are an international treasure - keep doing what you do!
I mean I agree, but that would mean america is going strong and things like this going strong too, it's like asking for further failure on earth so John can work? Do you work for McKinsey?
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” 😂
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.
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
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"
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 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.
I owe a major debt of gratitude to John Oliver and team for putting these segments on TH-cam 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
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?
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.
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
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.
Brilliant piece. Katie Porter’s clip was the most damning. She’s a national treasure. Even ad agencies implement conflict of interest protocols!
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
And tonight I learned horrifying information about the inner-workings of a company I knew nothing about - I’ve missed this show so much. ❤
I'm also glad they're back. I missed the chaos
absolute nerd fest... i love John oliver very much
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.
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!!
I worked for a global energy company and when they told us they were bringing in McKinsey...we all knew it meant lay offs
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 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.
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.
I strongly recommend reading When McKinsey Comes to Town. It’s an incredible book.
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.
Having worked in consultancy, the ‘schrodingers contract’ bit is a perfect encapsulation of how these firms operate.
we can have both ;) :D
They've become very famous in France over the last few years, because of how involved they were with Macron and how much he outsourced to them. The word "corruption" has been thrown a lot concerning their relationship...
“We impact people lives” - true especially all those made redundant based on your reco 👍🏻
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 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.
@@beachvacay3184 Except, it sounds like that's where they started "creative accounting" 🤣
"You're working in one of the Rootin'st Tootin'st Journalist Shootin'st regimes in the Middle East..." - 😂😂😂
20:26
Watching this entire thing as an employee at McKinsey was an experience 😂
In what? Waggling your buttplug and carrying on with business doing the same to the world, asked or not?
You know what you need to do to repent. Start on Monday. Save your soul.
What did you think? I’m genuinely curious. Is it fair and true to your experience?
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!"
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.
Business consultants: if you can’t be part of the solution, there’s a heckuva lotta money to be made prolonging the problem!
"Paediatric oxy" got a hell of a reaction
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.
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.
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.
That salt bae burn was amazing
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 TH-camrs.
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
I recruited for a bunch of smaller IT consultancies and some actually did good work. Actually there was a project involving the german prison system. They built them an inventory management system which allows them to order stuff before they run out of it. It used to be paper based, and screwups were frequent. Being stuck in prison sucks, but it sucks more if the place runs out of toilet paper. Then they order toilet paper in bulk so that doesnt happen again, and then the prison store runs out of noodle soup and cannot order any because the volume they would need to order to get a good price is rather big and they have no place to store it because the storage is full of toilet paper.
So the consultancy built them a custom inventory management system and went to all the prisons to implement it and train staff how to use it. I do not know the outcome but i guess it may help.
One project that also raised eyebrows at first was in nuclear energy. It turned out to be a system to manage the more or less radioactive stuff you get when disassembling and decomissioning a nuclear reactor. Stuff gets sorted into big plastic boxes with barcodes and a serial number and then you test the whole box for radiation. Turns out you can even recycle much of the highly irradiated steel if you sand-blast off all the paint, then put it in another box, test it again, and now its good to be sold to recycling and you are left with a much smaller amount of nuclear waste in the form of some paint dust and metal dust.
The big consultancies are all about corruption and playing both sides. Much of the business is: So your company has a problem, and your competitors have the same problem, and you see they somehow fixed it, and you have a reasonable suspicion that a consultancy was involved. Then a sales representative for a consultancy comes along and pitches you to fix your problem just as it fixed the same problem for your competitors.
Here i also have an example that is not even too unethical if you disgregard the environmental impacts of air travel: You know these self-checkout things at the airport, where you can weigh in and tag your luggage, scan your documents, and get your boarding pass? One small consultancy in Germany does these. For ALL the airlines, globally. They did it once, for one airline, sourced/developed the hardware, developed the software, and now they sell it to every airline at a high price. At every airport, affecting almost every airline and almost every passenger, these automated stations are all from one tiny consultancy, less than 5000 employees, in Germany. You do not know their name and i will not tell and its not so easy to research, but whenever you fly as a passenger anywhere i see a 90% chance of you interacting with their systems. They could put their name on all of those machines, but that would attract attention, people might have ideas about competing, or entering the market, people might compare prices. So thats why all these self-boarding machines at every airport are so conspicuously unbranded.
As an ex-conultancy worker, I'm somewhat embarassed to say that the thing which suprised me the most about their involvment with Saudis wasn't their pact-with-the-devil work ethic, but the fact that that slide at 19:28 is ABSOLUTE SHEIT. Come on, dividing titles into syllabes? And the boxes on the bottom are not even alingned
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)
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.
One of the Big Four consulting firms once gave us our revenue projections, which included sale of certain items which are banned for sale in my country.
I worked at Deloitte and it's basically the same
What I've learned: Consulting firms are needed to communicate management decisions to the workforce without management having to take any responsibility.
Yes. And in the process they make the managers (and themselves) a lot of money, that is why they are hired so often.
That's really what these companies are paying McKinsey for. Pass the tough decisions off to a third party and absolve yourselves of any guilt.
Kind of sad that you learned it only now. Approximately 90% of every consultant's "work" is signing off on decisions the company leadership had already made but had not wanted to sign off on themselves. This is just common knowledge.
@@wraith_youtube whoooosh
@@wraith_youtube Haha, I should have been more clear with this in my initial post: "What I've learned in my career so far:" :) We had a PWC team in-house in one Fintech startup I've worked for; it basically was a bad joke... instead of actually verifying the numbers, they were dining and getting papered for many, many billable hours ;) "Audit completed". One of the best examples of something like this happening in recent history is probably Wirecard...
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.
RIP Swissair, one of many casualties after following McKinsey's advice.
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.
This is the most vocal I’ve heard the audience in a good long while. Actively booing McKinsey at points. I love it!
I have worked with 2 of these champion firms. Every day I'd be amazed at the lengths they'd go to confuse the living daylights out of you. Even better, when I looked around the room, everyone would be nodding thinking that if they disagreed, it would sound stupid.
This video was the most savage read I have ever heard, lol. He tore that company to pieces.
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
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.
That was amazing. Thank you John and Last Week Tonight team. I was laughing and horrified at the same time.
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 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 am watching this during my office break, and oh boy not regretting a bit.
This episode is sooo satisfying to watch
Worked at BCG. Can absolutely attest all is true in the management consulting industry
For a company whose policy is to hide in the shadows, this is their worse nightmare.
🤣
ok
This is A1 reporting
Kudos to John for John @6:40 with "British Empire Smug"!
This is the first time in a while where Jon seems actually angry.
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…)
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?
This episode was hilarious. Great job writers.
Just brilliant… I look forward to new episodes every week.
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
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?
@@rustylee1836yeah, he implemented the mark-to-mark accounting that got them in such a scandal. he was a longtime mckinsey consultant and thats how he learned his practices and gained notoriety. if you’re interested in this i suggest reading “the smartest guys in the room”, its a great narrative history of enron.