1w ago

Sell consulting services. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, what matters is that you're paid.

108 comments

Well, consulting is often used because they need an answer to a question. That may be open-ended like:
"What moves should we make to expand our business?"
But other times they just want confirmation:
"Should we merge with Discovery?" (Sure, I guess. Here are some reasons you could. cha-ching)
"Should we split with Discovery?" (Sure, I guess. Here are some reasons you could. cha-ching)
Other times they just need to pay people to give them excuses to lay off people. McKinsey's always available for that.
- When Chipotle got a new CEO (Brian Niccol, who has since become the Starbucks CEO) a few years back, they were headquartered in Denver. But the CEO lived in Newport Beach. So they brought in a consulting management firm to examine where the best place in the country was for them to have their corporate headquarters.
  After weeks of analysis - surprise, surprise - they determined that the best place they could possibly have a corporate headquarters was in Newport Beach, where the CEO lived.
  So they fired most of their corporate workers and moved the office to be closer to the CEOs house.
  
  “Sorry we don’t do remote work and you’ll have to come into the office.”
  “Counterpoint: …”
  
  I have experienced this where I work. There is a consulting company that gets rolled out to make packets full of "data", graphs, summaries, and surveys that always manages to support the unpopular thing the boss wants.
- Other times they just need to pay people to give them excuses to lay off people. McKinsey’s always available for that.
  What would you say... you do here?
  
  Get paid to do the work of someone who could be employed for a reasonable salary, but the board or CEO wants the answer to come from someone outside the company to avoid taking any blame.
  
  Look, I already told you: I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that!? What the hell is wrong with you people!!
  
  Bob, Bob.
- McKinsey:
  For when you have no fucking clue how to do your job, and want authoritative, plausible deniability about that.
  
  Obviously you should keep paying my $1.3 million annual salary. We just paid McKinsey $30 million to say how vital my department is
  
  When you used to work for them and hope to return someday as partner, so you push as much business their way as you can.
- Sounds like a job that would be easy to replace with ChatGPT.
  
  Guess what the guys an McKinsey are doing...
- How should we defend Athens?
  Consultancy says "A wooden wall will save Athens"
  We've been doing this forever...

Consulting services are vital because they improving corporate synergy by utilizing market solutions and relocating potential where it is needed most.
- Don’t forget that they also leverage institutional assets to extract value using best practices!
  
  We'll circle back to that.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3ETgAvQrw
- I know it's a joke, but executive and analyst are oxymorons in the corporate world.
- Gotta efficiently operationalize that strategy.

TLC used to be The Learning Channel. Before it was “here’s a bunch of children who are being sexually abused behind the camera,” it was educational outreach. Vocational training. Satellite college courses for people in Alaska and Appalachia.
Then Discovery bought it. Fuck Discovery.
- One of my favorite channels. I liked learning new stuff. Factual stuff. Not conspiracy theories disguised as history.
- Why do I associate TLC with, like, Trading Spaces and other domestic not-quite-a-game shows like that? Am I conflating it with something else? Also I haven't had "television" in decades now.
  
  Because that’s the slop it turned into. It was a place for documentaries and educational content, just like MTV used to have music. But watching Kate torment her brood of children or Honey BooBoo eat sketti makes the kind of money airing a college lecture doesn’t.
  
  It used to be PBS for adults. I remember turning it on and there would be a documentary about like piano players and the connection to the brain.
  Went down hill thanks to reality TV.
- Yep. I thought for ages that it was a spinoff of discovery but no, it was a whole thing that went back to the 80s. After Discovery acquired it blam.

"What's your advice?"
"My advice is to not take my advice. That'll be 63 million dollars, please."
- "Certainly Sir! Money well spent!"
  You have to understand why they are employed though - somebody stands to gain from doing some thing, so the way they get to justify doing that thing is to hire these people, so they come in, deliver a report that says the thing is the best thing to do with graphs that go up, and it happens, McKinsey gets paid, the beneficiary gets what they want and life goes on.
  
  That plus there's a massive incentive for overpaid executives to farm out any actual decision-making to consultants. They could lose their cushy jobs if they did something unpopular that made the news and hurt stock prices. But if the decision was promoted by an expensive consulting firm, that launders the blame. It hurts the business in a fundamental way, obviously, but publicly traded companies have not been very focused on fundamentals up until lately. Tighter monetary policy should have changed this, but the paradigm has been slow to shift for many.
- That would unironically be good advice which means he couldnt give it.
  
  But if he did, would they take it?
- More like "tell me what you already decided to do, and pay me out the ass to create a justification for it so you can pin it on us if it's a giant fuckup after the fact'.

In, fire 30 percent of the workforce, new logo, boom, out.
You are now a fully trained management consultant.
- Lean leader certified
- I had a friend who did consulting right out of college. Half the time he said it was his job to suggest layoffs so the people in charge could pretend it wasn't their idea.
- Is that normal shitposting you're doing?

They've developed a perpetual consulting loop. Genius.

I don't know who this person is but something tells me he is the son of a wealthy family who has connections to all of those brands.
How far off am i?
That job does not sound like a real job, it sounds like a job title that is a thinly veiled excuse to arrange perpetual exclusive socialism for the rich.
Thank you for reading my analysis, the bill, regardless wether i am correct is about 69.420mil
- Mckinsey is a company with over 45,000 employees.
  
  So many morons getting paid way to much money to make stupid decisions.
- You aint wrong, McKinsey is the ultimate job farm for mid grade nepo babies and/or elite school graduates.
  For example, Ursula von der Leyen hired McKinsey for German Army re-org...
  then both of her children got plush jobs at the firm, her daughters 3 years there then leveraged into elite degree a Stanford
  https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/johanna-von-der-leyen
  Johanna joins the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy from McKinsey’s Sustainability Practice. During her 3.5 years at the management consultancy, she advised private sector clients from various industries on sustainability strategies and developed reports on climate risk with the McKinsey Global Institute. During her parental leave from McKinsey, she received a Master of Philosophy in Environmental Policy from the University of Cambridge (UK). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Economics from the University of Münster. At Stanford, Johanna hopes to deepen her knowledge in integrating environmental policies into the dynamics of international policymaking. Her academic interests also include nature- and climate-related risk assessment and adaptation, and particularly the role of nature-based solutions. Johanna is an outdoor enthusiast, a passionate dressage rider who participated in competitions on the highest national level in Germany, and she enjoys running and gardening in her spare time.
  There is a club, and most people see it before their eyes and still somehow manage to not see it for it is.
  Just work harder!
  
  Wait, she went on parental leave from her job, as in having a newborn baby, and used that time to get a master’s degree? Either the baby didn’t spend much time with mom or the degree is a joke, because I have a really hard time imagining having the energy to work on a serious master’s degree in a year or less while taking care of an infant!
- McKinsey is a company not a person
  
  Ackshually, they're considered moral persons. ☝️🤓
  I know, it takes a second for the vomit to slide back down one's throat.
  
  Companies are made of persons
  Checkmte

From my (fortunately) brief experience in software consulting, I can confirm that is an important unwritten rule of the job. It doesn't matter what exactly you sell to customers, as long as they are willing to buy it and come back. It explains why a lot of software is dogshit.
- "I can't produce anything, so I'll take money away from other people doing business" ~consultants

Isn't the google ceo a McKinsey stooge?
- Yes, he is. It explains a lot.
- I don't care if you're wrong, I will propagate it anyway.
  
  I mean no need to spread misinformation. This information in easily verifiable.
  Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, worked at McKinsey for ~2 years and then joined Google in 2004, eventually working his way into the position of CEO.
  Pichai's fuck ups are unlikely a result of McKinsey, at least not directly. That isn't to say that McKinsey is completely off the hook. They work with plenty of "top" companies and I'm certain Google is one of them.
- So is Buttigieg, but sharing that information seems to be unpopular.

All consulting is like this. It’s a way to offload blame for your decisions by not making any in-house.
- Our company paid a consulting firm 100k to deliver the same message our internal had been saying for 5 years.
  Oh yes. The board member used to work for that consultancy.
- Sounds like they still get paid then!

And if you are wondering why the German military is being made fun of so much: it's McKinsey again. But no worries, we took care if it. The minister of defense in charge back then is long gone. Cause she is the president of the European Commission now. Multiple of her children have worked for McKinsey in the past. What a coincidence!

Legends.

Fuck McKinsey.

On the other hand, they're grifting Zaslav, who is possibly the worst person in show business, so...maybe let them cook.

Why are consulting companies so successful? Is it all connections? Their role in appeasing investors by external intervention and change (no matter how useful)?
- It is all connections and a box checking for the board and/or CEO.
  The CEO can deflect bad outcomes on the consulting company for suggesting doing what the CEO had in mind to do, but didn't have the board's approval.
  Corporate consulting is such a giant fucking grift and they are responsible for the enshitification of so much.
  Why are there no employees to help you on the sales floor or at the register? The CEO wanted to hit a performance metric to maximize their bonus and brought in a consulting company to advise. The consulting company looked for low-hanging fruit, which is cutting costs in the form of payroll. The CEO dips when there is no meat left on the bone. The next CEO hires a consulting company to maximize the bonus and then you get fake sales to mask a following price increase. CEO dips and the next CEO's consultants gives the consumer a rewards program to harvest data to sell and drive sales through psychological manipulation(See Kohl's cash).
  Corporate consultants are horrible people with business degrees looking to harvest marrow from a stripped corpse.
- Consulting companies are just esoteric quacks but for businesses.
- Prestige and the perception of impartiality, alongside the ability to serve as fall guys. And to a significantly lesser degree they can tell you things you actually don't know or make recommendations when you're stuck because they're an outside set of eyes.
  What this means is when you decide to make a controversial decision they can take the heat in place of experts, and unlike internal experts you don't wind up in a particularly flimsy situation when you inform them of what they'll be suggesting. And if it all goes as poorly as it might you can blame them. (And everyone knows this so the consultants are shielded)
  And for the situation where you don't actually know what to do, theoretically thet may or may not be bad at it. If you're stuck you're stuck and not only can they possibly help, they can definitely provide cover for a bad call or an unwinnable situation
  To a certain degree they're a result of people in a position to spend large amounts of money whose job is to make calls.

It's not the conclusions that are important. It's how snazzy the PowerPoint presentation is. If you pay them more, there will even be bar charts.

Business consultations always look like such huge grifts. Here is the reason why they are so expensive though: many times startups and companies that take consultation fail and declare bankruptcy and don't pay the consultancy fees they were supposed to pay. So they charge others extra to (over) compensate. I wonder how they justify their existence, probably by coming up with some made up statistics about how they make many companies more successful. I am pretty sure they are also behind AI enshittification by suggesting companies to jump on the band wagon.
- They’re expensive because they’re cover for the executives to make a move. The executives can shield liability and justify any change by saying they did it in consultation with a big firm. It’s virtually impossible to pierce that with a lawsuit.
  
  Results are good:
  Business CEO takes credit, shareholders are happy with CEO
  Consultancy got paid, shareholders are happy
  Results are bad:
  Business CEO blames consultancy, shareholders don't blame CEO
  Consultancy got paid, shareholders are happy
  absolutewin.jpg
  
  Worked at a company that would give money to McKinsey frequently for decisions. When the decisions went well, they would pay themselves on the back for their insight and leadership. When they went wrong, well they just got bad into from the consultancy.. not their fault

TIl, I could do this job.
- A lot of high paying decision making jobs could be done much better if they were actually given to people based on their talents and not who they know or are related to.
  The hardest part about the job is getting it

I think it was Last Week Tonight that covered Mckinsey's consultation history and, shocker, they almost always recommend increases to executive compensation.

A critical part of being a consultant is personally knowing rich people who will pay you millions of dollars for your advice, regardless of what it is. "Giving good advice" is barely relevant.

The real skill isn't the advice - it's convincing executives that contradicting your previous $100M recommendation somehow validates hiring you again.
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱

Consulting services rarely are there to help figure out what to do, they're there to help convince other people that what you want to do is the right move.

I thought CEOs commanded wildly exorbitant salaries because they were super smart and made all the decisions. Why would a consulting firm exist?
- Consultants are paid to provide outside consensus. They strengthen the CEO's perceived smartness. They give it validity. McKinsey, because of its brand, provides the most value to a CEO in the boardroom.
- In theory they provide advice in areas that the company is not expert in. E.g. a pharmaceutical company would ask a consultant to recommend and implement an accounting system.

I wish I could be paid that much to be wrong all the time.

Do this, do that, now go back the way you started. That'll be $155 million. Be sure to smash that Like button and don't forget to Subscribe!

Man I wish I knew how to grift rich people like this

Insane how quickly the HBO brand went from penthouse to basement.

This company also advised multiple large opiate manufacturers.

So, this bastard and Zaslav are the reason I can't watch older seasons of Expeditions Unknown on HBOMax. Fuck 'em both.

Their new company split is not splitting Warner Brothers from Discovery though. They are splitting the company in a different way.
- For your added nuance and insight, submit an invoice for a couple hundred K. Seems about right for a full minute of work.

To be fair, every single one of those changes was probably done by an intern and approved by a boss that didn't read it, but thought because the intern was young they had the "pulse of what's cool" in their hands. Also, we don't know know if what was done was the actual advice given. That would be a great game though, "guess who came up with that idea."

108 comments