23 Comments
Apr 5, 2021Liked by Matt Stoller

Lord. The two Bobs from Office Space is uncomfortably accurate. I work in IT and IT LOVES to hire consultants (or should I say service firms). I finally figured out this is b/c most executives (especially the business/finance/lawyer types) really don't know how to do anything but accounting and find financial loopholes to make their numbers. So hiring fancy named consultants is a way to cover up this fact (that no one really knows wtf they are doing). And most important pass blame around around when things don't work out. I can't tell you how many crap products I have had to use after agonizing 1, 2, 3 year projects. And everyone is too embarrassed to admit that nothing is better, just different. How can someone who has multiple clients and who works on your stuff part time at best be trusted to know your company and customers better then you do. Guess what. They don't (especially since they are mostly overpaid recent college grads and have barely worked doing anything! Academically smart. Absolutely. Fix my company or product smart. Absolutely not). It is all so idiotic but you just accept it and move on. I am not sure what the answer is between consultants and the Kafkaesque nightmare that big government can be. I wish I could be as optimistic as you. But my narrow anecdotal experience doesn't give me a lot of hope.

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Apr 6, 2021Liked by Matt Stoller

I've come across numerous multi-million dollar PowerPoint presentations from the big four and their peers. None of which represented anything remotely resembling value for money. Most people in my industry know this, including many in government, but that doesn't stop the flow: e.g.

https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/mckinsey-to-help-government-maximise-economic-social-opportunities-20210325-p57dvt

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The McKinsey's and other corrupt business should be properly penalized. Fines should be some multiple of the amount of any fraud (10X), they should not be allowed to bid on government business for some length of time (5 years) and the CEO should be prosecuted and the BoD replaced.

When some CEO's in the US finally go to jail some of the crap they pull will stop. I nearly gagged last week when Cramer was singing the praises of Jamie Dimon because he called for more equality and fairness. That's rich coming from the overpaid CEO of one of the most corrupt corporations in all of the US who has paid billions of shareholders dollars in fines to keep him out of jail. You want it to stop -- start putting crooks in jail for lengthy stints.

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Hmmm... When did the united states annex Nova Scotia?

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Lawyers and Finance are the root of all evil.

Adam Smith observed that there are two classes of Labour. One is productive and the other unproductive. Productive labor creates usual material goods that people need and buy. Unproductive labor exists only because of the surplus wealth created by productive labor. Lawyers and Finance would not exist without the environment afforded to them from the surplus wealth of a civilization. Without that wealth, populations would be dramatically smaller, the Anthropocene period would not exist, and the earth would "heal". However, civilization as embodied by art, literature, music, science would also not exist.

Organizations like McKinsey are stuffed with Harvard and Yale grads who know little to nothing about the actual process of creating useful material products. Their education does not afford them the skill set to appreciate let alone minimally grasp complex systems.

At this Easter season reflect upon Christ's purging the Temple of the money changers. How many interest groups within and outside the Temple did he threaten? Which interest groups did he threaten the most?

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Excellent read.

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Terrific essay and you are on target as usual. Accountability should rule. Otherwise, we will probably see half a trillion of that money spent on analyses and reports that conclude we need a "Billy Idol fix "- more, more, more. Biden should focus on existing infrastructure now. Let contractors pay the McKinseys of the world for reports justifying the more fuzzy projects.

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You're looking at it the wrong way. Hiring fresh-out-of-college consultants is just an (in)expensive way to train your company's future C-level execs. How else are they going to learn the workings of your company? Hire and promote them from within? Ha ha! What a laugh.

At least when they do eventually become those C-level execs they'll know what doesn't work, because they tried it with your company when they were a consultant.

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Could not agree more.

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I came to read your article after reading in Politico that the Biden admin is slow to appoint attorneys general supposedly because of a turf skirmish with Merrick Garland. I have to say it seems to be shaping up as an unfettered opportunity for unscrupulous contractors and consultants to make $2 trillion disappear without doing any good. You seem to try to find some optimism in your writing, because otherwise we all sink into the slough of despond. But so many people in gov come from McKinsey - Buttigieg anyone? Are there any voices within gov to sound the alarm? Do you have anyone's ear in the administration into which you can pour your wisdom?

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Hi Matt, unrelated to the article, but what is your take on the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Google earlier today in the long running Oracle vs Google lawsuit?

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