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Responsibility Clawbacks (McKinsey and Purdue Pharma)

In recent weeks consulting firm McKinsey has been back in the news because of the advice it gave its client Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin. The advice blatantly looks like increasing drug sales at the expense of patient health and a worsening opioid epidemic. As a result, McKinsey has been fined $573 million.

But even if the Purdue Pharma-related fine is extreme, the example is just one example of McKinsey’s many bad client outcomes. A short list of other bad outcomes or questionable clients include:

  • Advising badly-run government coronavirus responses.
  • Advising financial firms to increase their debt load in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Advising Enron in the lead-up to its financial scandal.
  • Advising Riker’s Island jail on ways to improve safety with the outcome a more dangerous situation.
  • Advising authoritarian governments including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China.

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Categories of Unintended Consequences


There are many frameworks with which to evaluate unintended consequences. So far in my writing here I’ve looked at examples arranged around a theme (species introduction, food, government policy, human behavior etc) where there is a somewhat clear relationship between cause and effect (even if sometimes only in hindsight). I haven’t yet touched frameworks of complexity and won’t do so until I go deeper into more second-order effects.

This week I step back and look at basic categories of unintended consequences and call out potential new areas of exposure to second-order effects.

Unintended Consequences Categories
General categories of unintended consequences

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What Are Unexpected Benefits?

When studying unintended consequences and second-level thinking, the least common category of example is the unexpected benefit. This is a positive, yet unexpected or unpredictable outcome from an action.

Compare against the unexpected drawback (unexpected detriments that occur in addition to the desired effect of the solution) and the perverse result (the “solution” makes the problem worse).

And a scan of common examples makes me believe that some of what we call unexpected benefits are improperly classified.

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