How McKinsey Is Making $100 Million (and Counting) Advising on the Gov't Bumbling Coronavirus...

[Nevilledog]

How McKinsey Is Making $100 Million (and Counting) Advising on the Government’s Bumbling Coronavirus Response

https://propublica.org/article/how-mckinsey-is-making-100-million-and-counting-advising-on-the-governments-bumbling-coronavirus-response

In the middle of March, as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down the country, McKinsey & Co., the giant management consulting firm, saw opportunity. The firm sprang into sales mode, deploying its partners across the country to seek contracts with federal agencies, state governments and city halls. Government organizations had been caught unprepared by the virus, and there was a lot of money to be made advising them on how to address it.

That month, a partner in McKinsey’s Washington, D.C., office, Scott Blackburn, got in touch with an old colleague. Deb Kramer had just been promoted to become an acting assistant undersecretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Blackburn, whom McKinsey declined to make available for an interview, had held senior roles between 2014 and 2018. During that period, the two had overseen a major overhaul of the agency called “MyVA,” a project McKinsey had worked on as well. Blackburn had worked at McKinsey before going to the VA, and he returned to the firm afterward. He and Kramer were in touch repeatedly in the middle of March, according to a person familiar with the exchanges.

On March 19, Kramer made a highly unusual request: The VA, she said, needed to hire McKinsey within 24 hours. The VA runs a sprawling health care system that serves 9 million veterans, many of them older and plagued by chronic health problems, and typically takes many months to solicit and accept bids and vet bidders for a contract. The health system’s leadership wanted to sign a multimillion-dollar contract with McKinsey to spend up to a year consulting on “all aspects” of the system’s operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kramer told a VA contracting officer, Nathan Pennington. Pennington memorialized parts of the exchange in a public contracting document.

“There is no time to spare,” the contracting document stated, “every day wasted by a lack of situational awareness down to the community level, and the inability to model scenarios and test alternative courses of action, increases the risk to the citizens of this nation, to include Veterans and our own employees.” The VA, the document observed, needed help with “life-and-death decision-making today.”

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[hedda_foil]

1. I ran a boutique (aka tiny) consultancy 20 years ago, sometimes sharing clients with McKinsey's team

Their business plan seems to be to flood a business with as many snot-nosed MBAs on site as possible to maximize their billing, while mostly using google to dig up as much minimally applicable information as possible. Meanwhile, we were running circles around them in terms of improving customer retention and value ($$$ spent by their customers). After running into them three or four times, it was my distinct option that they relied on their PR department to make them look impressive because at best, -their work product was cookie cutter "re-engineering."