When You See the Words "McKinsey & Company" --
 

in company email, how quickly do you polish your resume?

I had to look up who they were: McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm that serves leading businesses, governments, non governmental organizations, and not for profits. We help our clients make lasting improvements to their performance and realize their most important goals. Over nearly a century, we've built a firm uniquely equipped to this task.

Even after reading that, I don't understand the question.

They are The Bobs. This is the second time I've been graced with the opportunity to witness their work.

Depends how much of an asset to the company you are. When they came through here some people's jobs would be the job of 2 or 3 people...

I don't understand either

They are a consulting firm that comes in and 'leans out' the business. Watch the movie 'Office Space'

Would probably be best for them to chop the mgmt who can't figure out how to run their own business --

Exactly my thought. Would you want to work for management that willingly pays someone else hundreds of thousands of dollars to do their jobs for them?

Chainsaw Al Dunlap?

The Bobs.

http://klipd.com/watch/office-space/...two-bobs-scene

con·sult·ant
kənˈsəltnt/
noun

1. The most expensive solution to a problem that never existed with people that don't even work for you company.

2. Someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, keeps the watch, and then sends you a bill for it.

All jokes aside, I've seen my share of consultants and my opinion is that they are all glorified lot lizards. They are very skilled at repeating the correct buzzwords into the right ears at any given company. They propose these grand solutions filled with paradigms with exotic names meant to impress the naive. The consultants leave after their "solutions" are implemented. Then about six months of living with the solution, everyone realizes what BS and waste it all was.

By then, the consultants are long gone, and on to the next schmuck.
But the real issue is that the upper management guy that brought in the consultants usually take any criticism of the consultants very personal, so you are left with a giant elephant in the room that no one talks about.

We had a consultant come in a few years ago pitching the "lean manufacturing" deal.
All it did was make it 5 times longer to get anything done.

Thank you for the laugh! That was pretty funny. Yes, I got what you were saying right away... McKinsey has a pretty big presence out there. They have a consultant's PowerPoint template deck that I have access to - 100 pages of snazzy looking template arrows/graphs etc. Gives senior management wood when they see that stuff.

...Bob

Just make sure your TPS reports are all in order

My company made the great decision to hire a consulting firm a few years back.
I work in a commercial printing company. One day one of the slime balls was watching one of our pressman run a job on his press. The press speed was about 10,000 sheets an hour,the job was very small,less than 1000 sheets. The maximum press speed on that machine is 13,000 an hour. The slime ball with the clip board in his hand walks into the managers office. The manger comes out a few minutes later and tells the pressman to speed the press up. Pressman tells manager "Oh,you mean on the job I finished 5 minutes ago!?" Do the math. Save 30 seconds or so on a short run,increase the odds of wrecking the job by about 500%,and they PAY someone to come up with this genius idea!!??

The best part is the invitation to take a voluntary and confidential (some might take this to mean anonymous) online survey to help The Bobs with their activities. Yeah right. I’ll get right on that --

Very quickly. Start networking and talking to your contacts outside your company.

"Hope for the best and expect the worst".

They are paid to make change recommendations.

And watch out for Milton ;)

http://www.bripblap.com/uploads/milton.jpg

There's a name I haven't thought about for years. Brings back some horrific memories of a guy I used to report to.

I worked for a company that had Mckinsey consult with us for 3 years in a row. The output for our experience was ways to reduce duplicate effort and costs on an annual basis. There is of course a point of diminishing return when the staff is gutted to the point that the work cannot be accomplished any longer.

My $.02. If you are in an individual contributor role, be prepared to offer thoughts on efficiency and other duties you can incorporate into your daily work or ways to streamline tasks. This will go along way if their decision making time comes your way.

If you are in a management role, be flexible and open to their questions and ideas. A good company will consider their recommendations but enact only those that are consistent with company leadership ideals and objectives. From our experience, we used only about 30% of their recommendations but probably would have taken the actions anyway only at a later time period.

Good luck and as others have stated, it never hurts to reinforce your networking activity and begin looking at what is available. New endeavors can be quite exciting and rewarding.

I keep mine polished at all times, just in case.
I'm in the pharma industry and have seen McKinsey and Co come through before. The joke in this business is that we are always one consultant away from a reorg. As screwed up as the pharma industry is, it's amazing that they keep listening to these guys. I'm sure McKinsey is just sitting back and laughing (all the way to the bank).

You know that's right. Maybe the smart move is to form a consulting firm.