In a masterpiece of investigative journalism, Bogdanich and Forsythe pierce McKinsey’s 'culture of secrecy' — a process they describe as 'akin to chasing shadows' — to expose conflicts of interest, corruption, hypocrisy. and strategic blunders that read like a prosecutor’s indictment ... The fact that neither the regulators, the public, nor most of McKinsey’s employees were aware of these sordid episodes until the media threw them into the limelight is testament to the authors’ prowess as investigative reporters ... The main thing missing from this great book is context. Determining whether these violations represented a minor part of McKinsey’s commitments or played a central role in McKinsey’s operations would have provided a better understanding of the magnitude of the wrongdoings. With only passing references to Boston Consulting Group and other competitors, it’s also hard to gauge whether these ethical flaws have made McKinsey an outlier in the industry.
... deeply reported ... the authors of When McKinsey Comes to Town are not subtle about their views. The portrait this book creates is one of a company chasing profits, spreading the gospel of downsizing and offshoring, its leaders virtually unmoored from any guiding principles or moral code. If there is a pro-McKinsey case to be made — one imagines it would be based on arguments about promoting 'efficiency' in the economy — it won’t be found here ... Yet laying out McKinsey’s most morally compromised assignments, like a series of damning Harvard Business School case studies, creates a clear and devastating picture of the management philosophy that helped drive the decline of a stable American middle class over the last 50 years.
It’s a pleasure to see a couple of serious journalists set about giving McKinsey a good kicking, for the firm is so irritatingly smug ... The thrust of the book’s attack on the firm, though, is not just that McKinsey has made individual mistakes, but that while claiming to make the world a better place, it has made it a worse one. The argument doesn’t quite persuade. Certainly, McKinsey has worked for some companies, such as tobacco and fossil-fuel companies, that harm people and the planet; but since the authors claim that its customers include most of America’s Fortune 500 that’s not really surprising. Certainly, it has encouraged firms to cut costs, but there are no smoking guns to establish its responsibility for the deaths at US Steel, Disney or anywhere else. Certainly, plenty of its customers have sacked lots of workers after it has given them advice. But many firms are inefficiently managed and need to fire people. McKinsey’s job is not to tell them to be nice to their workers and generous to their customers but to help them beat the competition ... To accept the book’s argument, the reader must buy into the notion that modern capitalism is bad, and therefore a firm that makes it work better is making the world worse ... The authors’ politics lead to selective reporting ... the line that McKinsey is a force for evil precludes examination of another, possibly more fruitful, argument: that it doesn’t make much difference, either for good or for ill. Bosses and governments hire it to justify things they wanted to do anyway ... Given its vast fees, the question of whether McKinsey is a waste of money would reward investigation. It might also provide some detail, which the book lacks, about what goes on inside the firm. After 300 pages, McKinsey remains a bit of a mystery to the reader. Had the book concluded that the firm’s expensive consultants are pointless rather than wicked, it would be just as damning and far more annoying to its target.
... a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation ... One gets the sense that Bogdanich and Forsythe think the consultants they write about are rotten apples, but the barrel is sound. Their own material makes clear, however, that all the services often spoken of as merely helping businesses and government departments run more efficiently... are in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation.
That this internal turmoil has come to light is testament to the depth of sourcing of journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe ... The downside of stringing these incidents together into a book is that it feels lopsided and unfairly negative, rather than a fully rounded account of the firm. At times it seems there is no corporate ill that cannot be laid at McKinsey’s door.
This detailed account of the firm’s activities provides an often devastating insiders’ story of the ways in which McKinsey fails in that mission ... In this, as in the other cases studied, the book’s scrutiny – and measured sense of outrage – is overdue and, you hope, only the beginning.
Bogdanich and Forsythe assemble a damning indictment of McKinsey’s practices through an excavation of its confidential (and controversial) business recommendations ... The curious tension between the most antisocial aspects of the McKinsey model and the earnest commitments that appear to motivate its consultants undergirds the story. Bogdanich and Forsythe, for their part, believe the company’s pronouncement that it ultimately seeks to improve the world ... But as their scrupulous reporting suggests, the very nature of both the consulting business and profit maximization has always ensured that McKinsey was going to do damage if it was to succeed, despite all the good intentions in the world.
