WHEN MCKINSEY COMES TO TOWN

“The difference between Enron and McKinsey”, a McKinsey consultant claims, “is our values.” When McKinsey Comes Town’s ambition is nothing short of an attempt at tearing down the institutional behemoth is McKinsey. Their aim reaches beyond just showing a dissonance between their stated values and practices where most exposes tend to stop, as even their technical prowess is cast in doubt.

They drove Wall Street to the securitization processes that led to the crisis in ’08, they ruined insurance and they caused the opioid crisis. They hide behind euphemisms as mass layoffs are veiled under terms as “right-sizing” and slick slide-decks instructing organisations how to reorganise from the ground up. While their process brings short-term profits, the picture the authors paint is one of coming disaster. And if it does not, they advise their competitors shortly thereafter with the exact same strategy.

It is not so much a legacy institution sticking to a clear set of values they have had enshrined since their inception as much as it is a corporate hit-man serving whomever shakes their money bag and pays their exorbitant fees. The prodigious M.B.As straight from Harvard or other Ivy League schools choose McKinsey exactly for their values, but time and time again the authors present them as meaningless and but a veil to hide from criticism, always subordinated to the principle of serving their client. The strategy is the same: accidentally help a few authoritarian regimes assembling, say, a hit-list of their most prominent critics as in Saudi Arabia to showcase the effectiveness of their cutting-edge sentiment analysis, then apologise profusely and double down on their supposed values.

Once those idealistic, bright-eyed M.B.A graduates realise it, they are subtly forced into conforming. Officially, a McKinsey consultant is allowed to turn down any consulting task they want, but internally they are quite aware of the spectre of punishment through the negative performance reviews it entails. The authors recount not one, not two, but three separate employees pulling a literal Jerry Maguire and mass-emailing manifestos against existing partnerships.

But despite the authors stacking example after example, it seems unlikely that this book will convince those not already sharing the authors’ clear contempt for McKinsey. Despite their attempts to get behind the veil of secrecy covering this company, there is no silver bullet that can truly and unequivocally motivate the complete condemnation of McKinsey. The book verges on appearing as nothing more than yet another polemic rambling of a capitalism run amok. There are seldom any clear ties between McKinsey and the crises they link to. While the stories are harrowing, those defending McKinsey can easily maintain plausible deniability. The cohesive thread is just expose after expose of “McKinsey came, crisis ensued”. While narratively effective for the first few chapters, the structure grows tired by the end as you drag yourself through yet another chapter though this time about their involvement in the hollowing out of the NHS instead of Disneyland.

The mosaics painted when “McKinsey comes to town” are skilfully and are overall narratively well-executed, but on the whole, they lack the impact expected by the authors and the book rapidly grows repetitive. The conclusion the authors seem to want to provide the reader is that for all their supposed values, their carefully crafted image of an upstanding institution, they merely represent the “banality of evil, M.B.A edition”.