People have a natural aversion to consultants. They're expensive and accomplish things that feel like they should be easy but in practice are hard. It's also difficult because the opioids work is bad, and there have been other things that are just bad. I don't think its especially representative of the work most people do but its still there and the harm is real. A piece of bad work is probably 12ish people doing their own thing that the majority would tell them not to do. I feel good about the work that I do, not just in that it doesn't harm anyone but in that I think it has positive side effects for society. The opioids work doesn't really affect me, and was hardly financially relevant for the company (before the fine). To give a throwaway fictitious answer, if my job was aiding COVID vaccines or helping education in poor countries, things that I don't have direct knowledge of, but would probably guess McK is involved in without any particular knowledge, I don't know how many "bad" actors or incidents it would take in other unrelated aspects of the firm to get me to not want to work there anymore.
There's no big picture. I can't say my work "enables" others to do other work that I may disagree with. On the whole of it by my personal set of values, I enjoy being able to make the contributions I do and would be wary of loosing that. So long as the tone at the top of the org is condemning of things I consider bad (and it is), I think it deserves a level of understanding for how difficult it is to run a network of thousands of partners and avoid things like this. I'm optimistic that the newly enforced sets of checks and balances will prevent such at least some of these kinds of studies from happening again. For now at least, it feels less like "McKinsey" did the bad thing and more like "a group of people who work here" did. Others will disagree, and I get it. I know a couple folks who left on ethical grounds and they retained the support of all their colleagues.
There's no big picture. I can't say my work "enables" others to do other work that I may disagree with. On the whole of it by my personal set of values, I enjoy being able to make the contributions I do and would be wary of loosing that. So long as the tone at the top of the org is condemning of things I consider bad (and it is), I think it deserves a level of understanding for how difficult it is to run a network of thousands of partners and avoid things like this. I'm optimistic that the newly enforced sets of checks and balances will prevent such at least some of these kinds of studies from happening again. For now at least, it feels less like "McKinsey" did the bad thing and more like "a group of people who work here" did. Others will disagree, and I get it. I know a couple folks who left on ethical grounds and they retained the support of all their colleagues.