from Hacker News

Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower

by meany on 9/20/23, 11:39 PM with 23 comments

  • by Aurornis on 9/21/23, 3:24 AM

    This article wasn't what I was expecting. His complaints are primarily about ICE. His work was to put together a hiring plan to hire more ICE agents, but that was never actually put into place.

    He pulls some examples of poor McKinsey behavior from other stories that he wasn't part of, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of McKinsey whistleblowing in this article.

  • by glaucon on 9/21/23, 2:43 AM

    > A senior partner once told a writer, “There is no institution on the planet that has more integrity than McKinsey"

    Perhaps a well meaning individual who wanted to make it entirely clear that whatever they said on the company's behalf should not be taken even half way seriously ?

  • by Noumenon72 on 9/21/23, 6:25 AM

    I'm probably on the opposite side from this person on ICE so their moral concerns with McKinsey don't matter to me, but I do appreciate the perspective of someone seeing that for every issue you do personal activism on, there are institutions full of people going to work every day making sure the opposite keeps happening. You have to do more than change opinions to win.

    Still, I'm glad they left the company. I think it's better to have institutions you can aim at goals without the people inside it working against you.

  • by palata on 9/21/23, 4:31 AM

    I don't get how such companies exist. At best they are clowns, at worst criminals. Why would one hire them?

  • by smartbit on 9/21/23, 9:54 AM

    But by the end of that summer, I had grown to like many of the people running Rikers, bonding with the jail’s most senior uniformed officer over our mutual love of Led Zeppelin. It was an early lesson that interpersonal kindness is not the same as actual goodness.

    Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality...

  • by rayiner on 9/21/23, 2:14 AM

    > In the end, the city spent $27.5 million on McKinsey’s services, with precious little to show for it. McKinsey, on the other hand, collected its money and moved right along.

    Speechless.