> In what ways do you see McKinsey’s actions with Purdue Pharma as being bad?
I think it's mostly self evident.
> In what ways were they typical of McKinsey’s behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors been addressed?
McK is large and very decentralized, and there's a culture of not talking about work to avoid creating conflicts of interest, so it's easy for one partner to end up doing their own thing in a way that the majority would not agree with. The Opioid work had a spin on it with the rebates that I recall had a mind towards preventing them, but I cannot remember the details so I won't pretend that's supposed to be compelling at all.
The work with Opioids, and I would also call out ICE, were high profile struggles internally that have been addressed numerous times by top level leadership on global calls, in a way that I thought was emotionally empathetic to the situation. Voicing dissenting opinions is encouraged, and I think people were free to voice grievances. They have since created a committee whereby other unrelated partners need to review proposals for ethics before it gets approved.
If you work for facebook, you build facebook. If you work for mckinsey, you may work on improving access to renewable energy, automaker margins, oil and gas marketing, or pro bono human rights work. Most people will fall into one of the neutral categories. To what degree are you accountable for a few guys doing something completely different that have no particular connection to you? I don't know. It's a weird dynamic but I would say "a bit, but less than a more traditional centralized company". I feel convinced that top level leadership is taking reasonable steps to address ethical issues and the the broad general population of the firm wants to encourage this. I don't know if it's possible to fully prevent bad decisions in the long term. From an external perspective, there's always going to be just one McKinsey, and that's tough to reconcile.
I think it's mostly self evident.
> In what ways were they typical of McKinsey’s behavior with other clients? In what ways do you see the actions with Purdue as being exceptional for McK? What factors allowed the company to act as it did? Have those factors been addressed?
McK is large and very decentralized, and there's a culture of not talking about work to avoid creating conflicts of interest, so it's easy for one partner to end up doing their own thing in a way that the majority would not agree with. The Opioid work had a spin on it with the rebates that I recall had a mind towards preventing them, but I cannot remember the details so I won't pretend that's supposed to be compelling at all.
The work with Opioids, and I would also call out ICE, were high profile struggles internally that have been addressed numerous times by top level leadership on global calls, in a way that I thought was emotionally empathetic to the situation. Voicing dissenting opinions is encouraged, and I think people were free to voice grievances. They have since created a committee whereby other unrelated partners need to review proposals for ethics before it gets approved.
If you work for facebook, you build facebook. If you work for mckinsey, you may work on improving access to renewable energy, automaker margins, oil and gas marketing, or pro bono human rights work. Most people will fall into one of the neutral categories. To what degree are you accountable for a few guys doing something completely different that have no particular connection to you? I don't know. It's a weird dynamic but I would say "a bit, but less than a more traditional centralized company". I feel convinced that top level leadership is taking reasonable steps to address ethical issues and the the broad general population of the firm wants to encourage this. I don't know if it's possible to fully prevent bad decisions in the long term. From an external perspective, there's always going to be just one McKinsey, and that's tough to reconcile.
I can't say I know anything about Enron.