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If anyone has friends and family in Chicago, on behalf of the family of the victim, I’d like to invite you to the prayer vigil that’s happening tonight, 6:30pm at the corner of 23rd Street and Princeton Street. Haines Elementary School will be the closest landmark. If you cannot make it, here is the go fund me: https://gofund.me/1c30a4ce Here is the news coverage with the interview of my friends, the children of the victim. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/video/6170804-adult-children-left-heartbroken-and-terrified-after-murder-of-woom-sing-tse/
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Clients are pain in the ass out here
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Very simple:
(1) one of only firms to MASSIVELY over hire in 2023 (firm almost tripled in size) thinking that market will continue growing while complete opposite happened. Yes this was common across firms but not everyone was as greedy / ambitious to 2-3x the size in <3 years. Been rightsizing ever since (instead of doing it all at once) and with each wave a lot of noise happens. This is the MAIN reason.
(2) yes there are low performing partner that are just now getting pushed out (took a while), but wouldn’t attribute laying off ~300 people to just them. All firms have bad partners that made it because of riding the ME consulting wave. Surely we can do better there, but still (#1) holds most weight.
(3) Too much noise. All firms had layoffs. Kearney handled the first round VERY BADLY and could never recover. Partners at other firms learned the lesson and knew how to communicate things better. Also worth noting many people on here have Kearney accounts but work for FTI and love the noise too.
New managing partner hinted this would be the last major correction and from then on it will be back to the normal up & out.
Community Builder
Not that simple, no. As an ex-Kearney, I’ll bring some nuance to your points:
(1) Over hiring was obvious and flagged at all levels, yet pursued by the leadership for personal interest and agenda. One example is the head of MEA back then who pushed for this inflated growth so he could be elected global chair. That was manipulation and mismanagement.
(2) there are mostly low performing partners left, the ones who saw the circus left. To keep their positions, lower ranks were laid off and they were protected by that global chair since they supported his election by playing the fake growth game, till it was no more possible to protect them. Only now they are being kicked out.
(3) Being the competent people that they are, despite the backlash during the first wave of layoff, they kept repeating the same mistakes if not making it worse. It requires basic EQ to manage people with respect and dignity. Yet they failed time and time again. Gives you an idea of their caliber. True leadership is tested during though times. Once that growth was over, you could see what that « leadership » is really worth.
What not to do, is to piss off your top talent and rainmakers and let them go…simple.
It’s an industry where winning is based on capturing top talent. They lost their top talent at end of 2022. Rest is history…
You have to make business decisions that favors your top talent. Kearney took business decisions that favors the old guard, a set of 60+ year old global partners waiting to cash out so they can retire. Top young partners fought back, creating backlashes and eventually flee of top talent to competition happened.
To compensate the loss, Kearney over hired randomly in 2023. Market slowed down in 2024, so the company went bust.
Why did OW, BCG, Mck sustain revenues (even slightly grow) during this market slowdown? Because they have the top talent and they retained it. In fact these companies hired many of the Kearney top guys back in 22/23/24.
But Kearney is not alone. Same thing happened to RB back in 2015/16. Same decision making. Now these 2 companies hire from each other and are both competing at the bottom of the market, fighting for survival.
Yes, definitely a case study!
Mentor
Partially true. Mostly FTI-centric. The firing of one Partner in 2022 was not the end of the world. It wasn’t more than some noise, which the firm more than recovered quickly after.
What I agree is that today’s state of affairs is largely a reflection of the leadership failure. The leaders then created a culture where ill behaviors were tolerated, forgiven and loudest voices were promoted. Instead of making difficult and necessary decisions to clean up the house by removing toxicity, the leaders then stayed too accommodating and unrealistically optimistic. They also failed to create a system that can expose lots of under performing Partners who used their political prowess to hide under someone else’s success as a survival tactic. Worse yet, many of those who had not traveled to the client for years were gifted with generous bonuses because the numbers looked good.
And none of these issues I am sharing now were new to the leaders. Many Partners and staff were screaming for change and nothing was done. The end result was that many important practices like CMT and Digital have been run by clowns and the practice leaders made many poor decisions that got them where they are today.
But I am confident the firm will find a way to move forward and emerge stronger. This isn’t the first existential threat they faced and won’t be the last.
✌️
Community Builder
Is OW hiring ?
Mostly Arabic speakers