McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

This reminds me of an old joke: A shepherd is tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a shiny red BMW appears. The driver is a young man in an Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes and Polarized sunglasses. He sticks his head out the window and asks the shepherd, “Hey! If I can tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looks at him, and agrees. The driver plugs his cell phone into a laptop and connects it to a GPS and starts a remote body-heat scan of the area. During the process he sends some e-mails. After receiving the answers, he prints a 100 page report on the portable printer in his glove compartment, and proudly announces to the shepherd: “You have exactly 1,478 sheep.” To which the shepherd answers: “Impressive. You can choose one sheep out of my flock”. He observes the man pick up an animal and load it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?” “You’re on.” the young man answers. “You are a Mckinsey consultant,” says the shepherd promptly. “You are right! How could you possibly guess?” says the man, visibly surprised. “It wasn’t a guess,” the shepherd replies. “You drive into my field uninvited. You want me to pay you for a piece of information I already know, you answer questions I haven’t asked, and you know nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

John Oliver is literally the only person on Earth who could get me to enthusiastically drop everything to click on a 26 minute video about a business management firm.

My mom was a well liked middle leader in the government in Denmark. She was laid off due to a mass layoff orchestrated by McKinsey. They never even met her. Her responsibilities were passed on to her leader, who broke down with stress after a month.

The Henry Kissenger gag aged hillariously within less than a month

Whenever he covers a big company, I like to imagine the crisis meeting on Monday morning that starts with everyone watching the show in awkward silence.

As long as John Oliver is on HBO. HBO's legal team has steady employment.

I had a McKinsey experience in the 2000s. They came in, cut close to 50% of the workforce in our warehouse and offices, and increased top management 25%. The result was that the "lucky ones"who stayed started to work 10+ hours per day, with peaks of 14 to 16 hours at month end in the finance dept (I was a middle manager in accounting) because the workload was the same but we were 50% less. Actually the workload was a slightly bigger as the new managers were asking for their own reports (they needed to justify they were there). My team started to fall sick after 1 year, I managed to stay 2 years more before falling sick myself and heard that the company was first sold and dissolved one year later. I don't trust McKinsey, if they come in the company I work for now, I will leave immediately.

Apparently McKinsey are into coding as well - when I joined Credit Suisse as a contractor last year I had to rewrite some code their consultants had written in R to Python. It turned out the R code had a bug and didn’t read the data files correctly and the liquidity reports that were being sent to the top management of the bank had been incorrect for years.

John Oliver is once again trying his absolute best to get sued. Never change.

As a rule of thumb:The more a company announces that they aren't evil the more evil they are!

I've had the pleasure of working with them. You spend 75% of your time with them training them on the things that they don't know about your business. Their staff tend to be green new MBAs with next to zero experience. Whatever the problem is, they have a standard formula they will force your problem into - whether it fits or not. And then when the whole experience is done, they will give you basically the same answer you had from the very start. And a multimillion dollar bill.

Hearing the contempt for McKinsey in the audience as Jon talks is rather refreshing

Having worked with McKinsey, I can tell you, that Oliver is being kind to them.

One of my personal favourite McKinsey ideas: when it was hired by the French government to find ways to spend less, they advised reducing students' aid by 5€ a month. The amount the government saved? Precisely what McKinsey billed them for the advice...

As a professor at an Ivy League school, I've been repeatedly heartbroken to lose some of our most gifted students to this crowd. As a society, we're really setting the wrong incentives for where talent goes (and that's not to say that everyone there is incredibly gifted -- there's more than enough privileged duds there, too).

I once interviewed for a McKinsey internship (not in the US). I had great grades from one of the top business schools in my country but was not at all the boastful type. The partner actually accused me of being a liar, because “my grades did not match my attitude”. A friend of mine, who is the smartest, hardest-working and overall best person I have ever met - including really humble - also interviewed and was accused of being an actress. On the contrary, I heard from several people with not necessarily stellar but decent grades but more capable of projecting ambition and self-assurance that they faced no such mind-boggling feedback. These recruiting practices sound like a big red flag to me. Also, later I worked at Deloitte doing audit. It was still crazy hard work, but I found a much greater respect for honesty and truth, and earned enough respect that when I sent out my farewell email a partner actually came to the staff open space to personally say goodbye. Highly doubt I would be shown the same kindness at McKinsey.

I don't think I've ever heard a more visceral crowd reaction when John talked about McKinsey's involvement in pushing pediatric OxyCotin.

McKinsey is the answer to "how can I do capitalism in the most despicable way possible?"

Had one of them come to my job. He promised a new future for company and workers, no layoffs. Made it his point to greet every worker, was really sweet. Drove a ferrari. Month later, 50% of the workforce was fired effectively next day with no prior warning. Which, considering that most of them (including me) were migrant workers whose accomodation was paid by the employer, was a total disaster. Gave us a week to leave premises. For me it was either finding a job within that week or going back 1000 km back home with savings only. I found a job, but many didnt.

A young consultant spent a graveyard shift with me at a paper mill. We were told to answer any questions they had, so I did, using my office computer to look up the data. The report came back that engineers spent too much time in the office, and not on the floor! Hell, we did what we were told…