I went to NYU years ago in a program that interacted with a lot of people like this. So many bright minds wasted to an industry (+ financial sector like BlackRock etc) that does literally nothing, brings nearly zero value to the world, and helps no one but their shareholders.
There's nothing more disturbing than watching a highly intelligent person, who could simultaneously find a meaningful job while also making decent money, choose instead a bad job where they can make millions.
This is why UK unis are better, all local students pay the same amount of money so people can actually choose to do good things with their degrees without having to worry about joining a big bad company to pay off their student debt. Student debt is structured in such a way if you never earn enough to pay off your student loans, you basically never have to as well...
@@zurzakne-etra7069 a lot of these students are loaded to begin with, especially at NYU in 2023. That said I’ve noticed this career choice trend within all business, economics, or management programs in the US, even at state-funded schools (which can be free or affordable). It’s definitely not a trend isolated to NYU or private universities
It really is astounding. These people are, in general, much smarter than I am. They are simply by nature more intelligent. However, they lack absolutely any moral backbone.
Yeah they go into Purdue Pharma and tell them, "push higher doses and bribe doctors to get more people on it", well obviously you make more that way, but having McKinsey come in and tell you that kind of takes the guilt out of it and gives an excuse to go through with it. They tell insurance companies "deny more claims, be very difficult" which of course is an obvious to jack up profits, but it adds no value.
Don't forget they are people who have a one track education and no world/life experience. Their whole world view is being a privileged person with an education focused on them being better than everyone, fucking over everyone, and maximizing short term profits. They are prone to perpetrating unethical scams that destroy companies and countries economic diversity and resilience. Whether these scams are intentional for personal gain at customers detriment or the logical product of entitled people who have the view short term profits are the only value in the world really is irrelevant. They are destroying the whole world and should never be given a penny. If every one of these MBA consultants and ceos spent the rest of their life in a hobo camp under a bridge we would be half way to fixing the worlds problems
Wow 😮 very very well said. As an accountant I’ve worked with consultants and a lot of times they don’t add much value. They just repeat what I said in a business language
How does this explain their wealthy clients who continue to hire them? Are they not getting benefits that to them outweigh the costs? Are these clients in general being suckered, while you know the truth that's escaped them in their years of business? By the way, I haven't seen the referenced segment from _Last Week Tonight._
@@CornyBumyou should watch it, they go into it. Basically McKinsey allows businesses to deflect blame (such as layoffs)among other things. Or at least that’s what I saw as the major incentive to hiring them.
@@CornyBum The consultants are good at making upper management and shareholders ever more disproportionately wealthy, but it's at the expense of the employees, and often the customers, even the business itself and also society in general.
What these students reflect is how intelligence and ethics get superseded by money, where the clients and the public get much less than their best, except in that it allows McKinsey and the other big consulting firms to bill large amounts of money. The people who run those companies are patently unethical, which keeps them aligned with the interests of their unethical clients.
"There is room at the top they are telling you still; but first you must learn how to smile as you kill." -- John Lennon he wrote those lyrics 54 years ago and it's so sad how meaningful they still are.
The student debt these students are sandaled with is a big part of the problem as they have to work for McKinsey to pay them back. They are not paying back 200k working for a non-profit.
I worked at McKinsey & Co, and.....we were just bonafide interns. Associates are the worker ants, next is a Manager and you just make sure the worker ants do what they are supposed to do, look busy. And if you want to make it past Manager you need to bring in "billables" - basically sell work hours to clients, which are other companies. And thats it, if you are a good sales person you can make it to MD and make a few million, no problem.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" -Upton Sinclair In light of this quote, are these business students' responses really all that surprising?
The fact they staunchly support CEO compensation seems to indicate a motivation to hire them by CEOs if they are trying justify a raise. Getting a third party involved also helps justify a strategic direction especially if its unpopular. I remember a study I was involved with by one of these firms. There was a lot of handholding given the technical nature if the business. I mean, they are business majors afterall. It looked like captain obvious wrote the report.
I have seen my share of so-called consulting companies come into our business and I have yet to what value they brought. All I have seen is millions of dollars spent on uselessness.
If you keep hiring consulting companies and they can't fix your problem then the problem is not them. its a lack of willpower of your company to make effective changes.
I worked in a call center of a small dotcom that was always in the red. I made some suggestions about improving data, and paying vendors on time, to make sure we weren't selling products at a loss and reign in canceled orders due to vendor holds. Nobody would take my lowly opinions seriously. So they hired some expensive suits to come evaluate the business. I don't know what they charged but I am sure it was hefty. At the end of their several weeks evaluation they gave the CEO the exact same advice they got from me at no additional charge. I should have been a consultant
I work at a big 4 consulting firm, you’d be surprised at how many of your favorite companies or well known banks and institutions are on the verge of collapse! It’s actually crazy - many are hanging by a thread. Many organizations are understaffed and under skilled, and consultants can come in temporary to quickly solve an issue or help push small changes forward.
Consulting is a money laundering operation. Businesses hire consultants for huge fees and the consultants pay kickbacks to the top executives of the company that hired them.
Not true at all. They hire consultants because we are disposable, can't sue them for sexual harassment, and require no benefits, or 401K matching. No one is laundering money and there is a bunch of oversight to prevent that. Political consulting.....thats a whole other story
I was initially going to swipe past this because it's not really in my wheelhouse of interest but I'm glad I took a chance on it and took the time to listen. Overtime it holds true that there's a great big club of these people sloshing money around and people like me aren't in it. I get the impression that these students and future wealth holders come from super zip codes. I'm glad that labor has won some important victories in the last year because soon we will all be victims of the consulting over class if we don't act now.
blame your parents. this is why the elites care about selecting good dna to mate with because no matter how good the laws are, if your child is stupid, it aint going anywhere.. the disney "love marriage" is for the plebs. rich people have always arranged marriages because that is how you ensure influence.
I worked for one of mckinseys competitors. It is insane what kind of money corporations throw around. Companies would pay over 100k for consultation sometimes. People with masters in psychology would start at 250k a year and work up to 500k per year. Based on performance but that was the expectation. I never regretted STEM until i learned that.
I don't understand your second paragraph. Do corporations hire psychologists? What company pays them so much? Or is it just a scenario you are saying? I'm in STEM too but I don't see many corporations paying that much for them. Unless you are saying they are consultants so they are in I/O. I'm genuinely asking because I'm confused with what you are saying.
As someone with a master's in sport & performance psychology, where should I be looking for these amazing jobs cause my PhD application journey has been a struggle
@8000lah Im not sure about the typical consulting firms employee structure, but the one i was in (although i was in no way a part of consulting) the companies would hire us to give an evaluation on someone you they were going to hire/ promote to a big role. So if you wanted to hire a ceo you are going to pay 5million a year, it might be worth spending 100k to get the right person, sense that is a tiny fraction of the salary.
@@all_bets_on_Ganesh ok, makes sense. So I/O psychology gets those positions or just regular psychiatrists can get those positions? I'm sorry, these things aren't really common. Idk if you watch billions but your basically talking about a Wendy character and I am wondering how common these jobs are and how difficult it is to get into these positions in order to be hired.
@@Dr.Beetlejuice110 I actually don't know. It's possible they were psychiatrist, although I thought psychiatrist focused more on the biological side of behavior but I could be wrong about that as well. I was not hired for that role nor for that salary, I was a programmer for some internal work they had but I went to orientation and one of the new consultants sounded like she had internships and otherwise straight out of masters program. If I had to guess I would assume jobs at these companies are competitive and there are probably not many of them across the consulting firms. But I know nothing about what it would take to get one. In my field as a software developer there are also people making 500K / year, but 99% of jobs pay way less, some below 100K.
I was expecting to hear some intelligent interpretation being that these kids are on track to occupy space in these places. I’d assume they’d at least be adept at deflecting the line of inquiry in a skilled way. But every one of these arguments had massive logic holes in them. It’s so obvious they get generic talking point platitudes thrown at them to distract people and zero critically thought out arguments to undergird them.
@@eemoogee160 Lee mentioned in the segment, that the diversity of interest to these power centers like McKinsey, and the rest of the consultant class, is the superficial variety. Not ideological diversity. Which was reinforced by the degree of trepidation each one of these kids had about saying anything critical at all about the industry as a whole.
Bingo. Nail on the head. Listening to their rhetoric, their vague descriptions, the complete absence of nuance, and their overall thought content leaves me reeling. The real sharks, the real heavy hitter students, are too sharp, too busy, and declined commenting that day. I will not believe this is the quality of minds who are interning at McKinsey.
Brutal! Nice reporting James. I also watched John Oliver's segment. Consulting basically gives permission for corporations to do "gray area" things while McKinsey plays the bad guy and takes the heat. That's the real value exchange.
James Li is the shining star of Breaking Points. Wish I could get the notification bell like I can on 51-49. I worked for a consulting firm for many years. And yes, there were a few projects where I had to help corporations save money by screwing over workers. Since corporations can hire consulting firms, workers do need to organize and form employee organizations to safeguard their interests.
Consulting? It's unsustainable and a revolving door for most. Unless your in the winners circle with a sweet deal. I've worked on several long term projects, definitely too long given the circumstances, where college students and younguns from law firms where hired just for their... malleability when it comes to honesty and undying commitment to the check.
McKinsey is one of the worst consulting firms on the planet. We are constantly going in behind them and cleaning up their mess. However, consulting, especially IT consulting is critical. Most of the things you use today were built by consultants. I have been doing IT consulting for 12 years and no way skilled people are going to go sit in a cubicle farm when they can make 2 to 3x the salary and work from home.
Would not exist at this level without access to everyone’s data. Some of these people being interviewed do not understand the sacrifices they will have to make, one being able to see others as human beings. This generation does not understand what happened when corporations were allowed to be people too and who were the people pushing that.
One of the reasons why LG was thought to have lost the smartphone race is the consultation advice from McKinsey, who told them to focus on feature phones. This made them late to the market and hurt their brand.
These students have already made their decision to do whatever it takes to make the most money. Hard to blame them because money is highly regarded as the most important aspect of our lives. But...these people will have nice lives and make life worse for so many less fortunate people all over the world. It was nice to hear that one guy talk about sticking with his morals. We all make trade-offs to remain alive in this world. I happen to believe it is the next world that matters most and what we do here now will define our experience there. I say start cleaning things up now!
As someone with an MA in African American & Black Studies, and currently enrolled at Columbia Business School out of sheer practicality, this piece is awesome.
I was an experienced hire for Accenture and was shocked at the number of kids who were put on client sites to run programs like training, etc with no experience!!! They were also flying folks from the USA to the UK to do TESTING!!!! It’s a mix of lots of overpaid worker bees and a few who actually are very good at true consulting / problem solving.
I went to school for engineering hoping to work in design. However, there were simply not enough engineering (non-software) jobs compared to consulting and the money was 50% more than the salary of an entry level engineer. I decided to work for a major management consulting company due to the student loans I had.
Ok Boomer. What do you know about micro targeted social media blogs that will expand your online profile among hashtags and tweets?!? I've taken a lot of classes with theoretical application to the real world. What's your experience? Actually running a business???
Best segment you've done! Much prefer this different style of content. I typically find these segments too overflowing with details and exposition so I click off. This shows as much as it tells and has a great sense of pace.
I love it when people like this say it's such hard work, like @3:46 . "So taxing!!!" Believe me chile, I've worked blue collar and I've worked white collar - you want taxing, try blue collar.
You mean like when you develop a solution for a company then sell the same solution to another company and bill them the same as the first company and keep the massive profit because you didn't need the same expenses.
In the public sector, consultants are routinely called “coaches” now. They make more money than everyone else while attending meetings so they can agree with leadership while using an ungodly amount of jargon. They provide little to no value and jump from contract to contract. It feels like another jobs program…
Consulting has its place with getting expert advice and man hours without the commitment that comes with hiring new staff. That being said, expertise is developed from experience, and I have a very hard time believing that fresh grads with zero work experience (internships aside) are an expert in anything. But on the other hand consultants with decades of experience and training can be an asset to help with a project here and there.
NYU - they have to work there, they have no other choice. Have you seen the tuition fees there? I think the Wall Street Journal did a Great job outlining the ridiculous amount of money. These kids are paying. One lady was selling her eggs to pay off her tuition.
Sure I want to pay for someone’s professional opinion. 😂 Especially if I have been in the business for over twenty years, they have some advisors who just graduated from some top colleges who may know more about my business. 😂 Maybe I should just vacate the driver’s seat altogether. If you have to teach someone your business, so that they can help you aren’t you doing something wrong?
Nothing wrong with consulting outside experts to provide insights. But that is not what consulting firms provide, the primary exist to sell corporations on their ability to make it rain or provide legal cover for a decision that has already been made.
Detest McKinsey!!! Have been on the receiving end of their downsizing efforts a couple of times now. The sendup of the Bobs in Office Space is spot on.
"The market decides" guy has no idea how anything really works in finance. He actually thinks market forces determine how money flows to people and how much money the get.
“If you’re not part of the solution…. There’s always good money in consulting.” I think that was in a Dilbert cartoon I saw years ago. True now as it ever was.
I think we should also examine the pay of television hosts like John Oliver and people in the “entertainment” industry. Really, why are jesters being paid millions upon millions of dollars while people who keep the country running struggle to make ends meet?
Management in big companies use consulting firms as scapegoats for bad decisions. Often the decisions are obvious, but it is always nice to have someone to blame if things go awry. CYA. "It wasn't me!"
I worked for BCG for years (a McKinsey competitor) and I felt John Oliver and James Li missed the mark. To be frank, I was a pretty lefty/liberal person, but after working for C-Suite engagements as a management consultant I don't think people realize how much Corporate America bends to Government influence (it's not the other way around like people say). We are at a point where it makes more sense for companies to appease government over consumer interests. I believe that's where we are seeing the influx of the inequality, we are essentially creating a protective class of politicians who's friends and children are running businesses. It's in the governments best interest to have less competition and help establish monopolies. As consultants we are mercenaries, who see progressive policies as a means rake in money for corporations.
So what emerges is that the corporate machine does not turn you into a soulless, sociopathic ghoul - it selects soulless, sociopathic ghouls like these idiots. They also don't seem to be particularly bright, inspite of the glibness.
The last point is key and kinda obvious. Anyone who raised concerns about the selling of sub-prime mortgages was marginalised as being 'bad for business' or being negative. You can't have diversity in thought in any organisation especially one that is rapaciously profit dirven.
it is ironic that in a country like the u.s. people would have blind faith in the system: why would you have a mortgage to begin with? these criminal institutions exist because there are enough victims to scam.
My understanding is that these folks do two things: Eliminate jobs of the little people that work in companies and recommend the purchase and use of computer systems.
The initial premise was are consulting companies worth the expense. Well, what kind of consulting companies? My son is a consultant in the gas/oil/chemical/energy sector. He's consulted for governments, both Federal and foreign, banks, and businesses. Many a deal vannot get off the ground w/o his approval. As to business reorganization consultants, having experienced the changes wrought under these types of consultants first hand, I would say they are worth the monies paid inost cases.
It's crazy how you can live in a city of immigrants, filled with homeless and think that ceo pay is good right now.. how, when those at the top couldn't do more 90% of the jobs at the company. They aren't worth that at all
Ha! The naïveté of youth. Keep those guy’s info and interview them again in 5 years… Little do they know, their MORALS have already been compromised.✌🏼😊🇺🇸
I think this definitely is tough to gauge the accuracy of - roughly 40% of the people you'd talk to from here are going to work for these companies, and likely many more both try to when they graduate or later. But I still appreciated their thoughts.
