| Topic Name: |
McKinsey in decline? |
| Message Name: |
Who is the client? |
| Date Posted: |
12/28/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
appreciate your agreements, disagreements and added data points. I do wax on a lot (too laxy to be crisp). But I like it best when I can get a contrast that I learn from. Plus I love hashing this kind of stuff over...one of the dissappointments for me at the Firm was that I wanted to do more of such hashing than others did. But they worked harder...
To clarify my stance (one I think you disagree with...but I just read some more of the thread and want to push my viewpoint):
I'm not worried about the cost of McK studies for work the client could have done. What I'm more worried about is places where McK gives bad advice, where they play into a culture of agency effect (helping CEO's stave off a takeover is the classic example but there are others) or internal politics. Where the appearance of objectivity and premier brand allows recommendations to go forward under a partially false flag. At times I even think McK plays into (or beleives) a philosophy of tendentious textualism which is a negative thing for society. Instead they should be playing into promoting rationality/honesty.
I don't think that they always do this...nor that there aren't clients who do it worse/more. However, I've been on studies and seen reasonable reasoned objections from the client get trampled to push a flawed recommendation. In this sense, McK trades on its aura of honesty and clear thinking to promote something that is the reverse.
Net/net: I could care less about some team doing PMM that was "too expensive" for the client. I think there are few places that we do so much work that we milk the company to death (unlike the IT shops). What bugs me in my client-first heart is things like asset-lite projects at Enron, the dotcom work, Compaq acquisition, etc. |
| Message: |
It seems we agree, but there are thing I do not understand in your comment / you do not explain well enough.
Contrarily to the first impression, McK's clients are not companies: the clients are the CEOs! They have a view on how to conduct their business and McK (just like any other MC firm) is there to help them articulte / implement it.
This is why you will see a McK team sometime provide a "biased" opinion to a company: if the client (the CEO) asks "how do I do THIS?", then the team ill not work on the broadere issue "Should the Company do THIS?"... We would give the CEO the help he asks for, not the "best" advice.
Maybe, maybe, Shareholder representatives at board level should hire McK (or others) to do the work... But then how would the CEO react, and how closely would we be able to work with mid-level managers? If you do have a good answer, please let me (and my buddy Ian D. know ;o) ).
Finally, two quick comments of 2 of your recurring rants about McK:
- Asset-light is not necessarily a bad thing. (I think we already exchanges a few thoughts on that topic ages ago.) A company should have on its books only the assets it needs to keep operations going, and trying to decrease the value / importance of these assets is a good managerial decision (ROCE going up, among many other things). The trap is to enter "virtual" business that has no "asset-backed" reality... Enron is, fro my point of view, much more about fraud than bad advice... (I am not saying that some bad advice were not given occasionally: I don't know enough).
- I've reaf a few PDs / articles by L. Bryant. Thought I question how applicable the ideas are in the real world, I see nohing wrong with the frameworks / concepts he describes. If nothing else, they give a ne perspective on some business concepts are helped me gain a little bit more unerstanding of some issues... No rocket science, no ready-to-use solution, but a nice intellectual complement (at par with a good espresso after a meal, or something like that).
s.
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