One common characterization of McKinsey work is that they will do all sorts of ridiculous levels of analysis, even if the outcome isn't cogent to the actual case. A harsher view would say that McKinsey hangs audacious ideas onto that analysis to push the client into pursuing their recommendations, even if they won't work in reality (i.e. "Ted Airlines").
Consider the article that fell into my reader today:
Consultant Ninja Analyis: Power curves have interesting properties that I remember from undergraduate circuits class. McKinsey's going to use an interesting mathematical formula to tie economics and nature together. Great, let's see what they do!
Consultant Ninja Raction: All this lady has done is sort a few statistics according to size. Once you sort a population by size, it almost inevitably follows a pareto distribution. And a pareto distribution can almost always be fitted by a power curve function.
If this consultant wrote "bank crises by size show us that you should focus on 'Build flexible business models'" she would be challenged by the client. If she instead writes "a power curve analysis with an R-squard of 0.96 shows us that bank crises are dynamically unstable. Therefore you should "Make the system the unit of analysis'", the client, who can't possibly understand her 2 weeks of work in a 60-minute meeting, would blandly nod his head.
Bottom Line: A common (and fair) criticism of consultants it that we whip up terrificly complex analysis for the purposes of intellectually bullying clients into just blindly going along with the larger message we construct. McKinsey is guilty of it here.
PS. What the hell is the Y-axis on the banking chart, anyways?
