Wednesday, February 01, 2023

New To The Blog Crawl...Cory Doctorow.

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I have no idea why it took me so long to get Cory Doctorow's post-BoingBoing blog called 'Pluralistic' up on the crawl over there on the left sidebar (phone folks, you have to switch to the 'View web version' link at the bottom of the page to see that stuff).

Anyway...

It's there now and I, for one, look forward to perusing Doctorow's pretty much daily musings and link mining efforts.

Yesterday he had more, much more, on all that our federal government is paying those super fine folks like those from McKinsey and Co. to do and not do (and/or just do shabbily) so that our public service doesn't have to (and/or will no longer get to do):

...The Liberals have become embroiled in a series of scandals over the explosion of lucrative, secretive private contracts awarded to high-flying consultancy firms who charge hundreds of times more than public sector employees to do laughably bad work.

 Front and centre in the scandal, is, of course, McKinsey, consligieri to opioid barons, murdering Saudi princes, and other unsavoury types. McKinsey was brought in to "consult" on strategy for the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), a Crown corporation that gives loans to Canadian businesses.

 While there, McKinsey performed as per usual, veering from the farcical to the grotesquely wasteful. Most visible was the decision to spend $320,000 on a livecast fireside chat between BDC president Isabelle Hudon and a former Muchmusic VJ that was transmitted to all BDC employees, which featured Hudon and the host discussing a shopping trip they'd taken together in Paris...

{snip}

...After campaigning on a promise to reduce outside consultancy, the Trudeau administration increased consultant spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion. This shadow civil service is not just more expensive and less competent that the real civil service – it is also far more opaque, able to fend off open records requests with vague gestures towards "trade secrecy."...



Imagine that!


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5 comments:

NVG said...

I have to wonder if this McKinsey (the same outfit but for profit?? from Trudeau) adheres to their advice on how nonprofits groups track their performance ...

"Most nonprofit groups track their performance by metrics such as dollars raised, membership growth, number of visitors, people served, and overhead costs. These metrics are certainly important, but they don’t measure the real success of an organization in achieving its mission. ....."

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/measuring-what-matters-in-nonprofits

RossK said...

NVG--

That 'real success' in their super-duper secret sauce is part of the schtick.

As are their supremely superior values...Allegedly.


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Lew said...

I can’t be the only one who thinks the Liberals will seek to extract themselves from this situation by hiring a team of consultants to investigate and propose a solution. Can I?

RossK said...

Lew--

Ha!

But...

How do we know the extractavists haven't already been hired?

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NVG said...

as to your recommendation reading of: Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow hmmmmm if I choose to read slowly ..... rather than ...

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