Couldn't happen to a nicer consulting firm

It was axiomatic, even back in the long ago and far away day when I was in business school, that the best and the brightest students go into some form of finance (Wall Street, VC/private equity) or consulting (with gold standard consultancies like Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen, or McKinsey). 

Needless to say, I didn't. 

My first post business school job was with a quirky little Cambridge tech firm that built forecasting models. Hoo boy.

Anyway, it was the perfect place for me, and there I met some of my dearest lifetime friends.

But it wasn't a big time, blue chip company where I got paid bucks to fly around the world being smart.

My experience with the big time consulting firms is largely through the lens of working at a company that paid big bucks to fly in consultants to be smart. Or pretend to be smart.

At one company, I actually got to work closely with the outside consulting term that was going to SAVE US. Friends, you may be surprised to learn that, even though these consultants were the best and the brightest - and even had the I-crewed-for-Yale cufflinks to prove it - these consultants did not save us. But I was able to catch on to their technique.

As the project wrapped up, the fancy-arse consultants made their Big Final Presentation to executive management. But first they previewed it to the rank-and-file in-house schnooks who'd contributed to it.

And so, to my surprise, I saw flashed up on the screen a slide describing a niche, sub market we were targeting. And there, up on the screen, were the numbers that I had given them. Numbers about market size, competitive market share, etc. Numbers that, I had clearly told them I was pulling, if not out of my ass, then out of my head, based on what I kinda-sorta knew about the market. Best guess and all that, but backed up by nothing other than my intuition. And there they were, with the official imprimatur of the consulting firm, being delivered as definitive. No surprise that they didn't indicate the source for their "data."

Anyway, while I do recognize that consulting firms do tend to hire "smart" people, what they deliver to their clients is often colossal hooey. And while much of that hooey is usually harmless, in some cases it's out and out evil.

Such is the case of McKinsey & Company - not, by the way, the consultancy used in my anecdote - which has recently settled a regulatory action. The company:

...will pay $573 million for what prosecutors have described as their role in “turbocharging” the opioid crisis with “cynical and calculated marketing tactics” that helped Purdue Pharma target doctors they knew would over-prescribe the painkillers.

“They knew where the money was coming from and zeroed in on it,” New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote in a statement. (Source: Law and Crime)

Certainly, there are a couple of other things I'd rather see Tish James working on, and when split across the 49 states covered in the agreement, $573K isn't a lot of dough. Still, it's something.

Here's what McKinsey was up to (emphasis mine):

McKinsey “sold its ideas” to OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma for more than 15 years beginning in 2004, according to Massachusetts court filings, which note that McKinsey carried on efforts to expand opioid sales even after an affiliated company, Purdue Frederick, pleaded guilty to misbranding OxyContin, its flagship opioid. McKinsey was intimately involved in the drugmaker’s push to expand its market, according to the states, helping to fend off Food and Drug Administration restrictions and, at the height of the epidemic, developing a multipoint plan for the drug company to “turbocharge” sales. (Source: WaPo)

McKinsey isn't admitting anything, of course. They're expressing regret and mealy-mouthing (that's legal talk) about how they're settling just to put things behind them. 

Not the first time (and probably not the last) that McKinsey has been involved with some unsavory clients. They worked closely with Enron. (Enron jailbird CEO Jeff Skillings is a McKinsey alum.) And they do a lot of work with the Saudis.

Personally, I'm delighted to see a slap down on value-free (morals-free?) consulting. And I'm delighted to see someone being held accountable for their BS. Just because it's the "smart" thing to do doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. 

Not that the rest of the gloriously prestigious consultancies are any better, but this couldn't happen to a nicer consulting firm.