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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world
"Meticulously reported, and ultimately devastating, this is an important book." --Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing
McKinsey & Company is the most prestigious consulting company in the world, earning billions of dollars in fees from major corporations and governments who turn to it to maximize their profits and enhance efficiency. McKinsey's vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, and its reputation for excellence and discretion attracts top talent from universities around the world. But what does it actually do ?
In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Often McKinsey's advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company's stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey collects millions of dollars advising government agencies that also regulate McKinsey's corporate clients. And the firm frequently advises competitors in the same industries, but denies that this presents any conflict of interest.
In one telling example, McKinsey advised a Chinese engineering company allied with the communist government which constructed artificial islands, now used as staging grounds for the Chinese Navy--while at the same time taking tens of millions of dollars from the Pentagon, whose chief aim is to counter Chinese aggression.
Shielded by NDAs, McKinsey has escaped public scrutiny despite its role in advising tobacco and vaping companies, purveyors of opioids, repressive governments, and oil companies. McKinsey helped insurance companies' boost their profits by making it incredibly difficult for accident victims to get payments; worked its U.S. government contacts to let Wall Street firms evade scrutiny; enabled corruption in developing countries such as South Africa; undermined health-care programs in states across the country. And much more.
Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money.
When McKinsey Comes to Town is a landmark work of investigative reporting that amounts to a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times reporters Bogdanich and Forsythe peel back the layers of secrecy surrounding management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in this revelatory and often shocking account. Drawing on interviews with "nearly one hundred current and former McKinsey employees," as well as client and billing records, the authors uncover a devastating pattern of harm caused by greed, conflicts of interest, and unethical behavior. The company's "long-standing policy" of advising competing organizations with conflicting interests is a recurrent theme: McKinsey simultaneously advised a Chinese engineering firm responsible for building military bases in contested waters of the South China Sea and the U.S. Defense Department, which is opposed to those incursions, and helped develop Illinois's plan to privatize Medicaid services without disclosing its ties to managed care companies that profited from those changes. The authors also delve into McKinsey's "deeply political" work helping the Saudi Arabian government to "smoke out influential malcontents" on social media; its entanglement with government corruption in South Africa; and its plans to help Purdue Pharma "turbocharge" OxyContin sales and vaping company Juul to avoid FDA regulations while selling millions of its devices to teenagers. Scrupulously documented and fluidly written, this is a jaw-dropping feat of investigative journalism. (Oct.)
Booklist Review
The nearly century-old McKinsey & Company describes itself as the world's largest consulting firm. Sounds benign, doesn't it? Yet McKinsey's sway over some of the most influential industries and domestic and foreign government agencies is a manifestation of corruption and greed down to the molecular level. Cleverly employing a panoply of NDAs and other protective legal tools, McKinsey further cloaks itself behind a thick scrum of obfuscating corporate-speak peppered throughout its infamous PowerPoint slide decks. With clients in energy and entertainment, the FDA and the NBA, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, McKinsey touts its skill at increasing profitability and efficiency, chiefly through draconian, often dangerous, staff cutbacks and price-cutting. Such advice, however, comes with a hefty price tag, yet when a client becomes mired in scandal, often resulting from McKinsey's recommendations, the company's fingerprints are nowhere to be found. Recipients of multiple prestigious prizes for their far-reaching investigative journalism, Bogdanich and Forsythe pull back the curtain on the unseen depths of McKinsey's pernicious and insidious influence. Thanks to their unprecedented level of access to crucial records and key insider accounts, this monumental corporate exposé will do for management consulting what Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain (2021) did for the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.
Choice Review
Bogdanich and Forsythe, investigative reporters for The New York Times, break through the secrecy sustaining the elite consulting firm McKinsey's mystique to report in vivid and disturbing detail on its clients, advice, methods, organization, operations, and "culture." In outstanding research reported through the lens of individual stories, they recount the myriad problems that undermine the company's claims to be guided by ethics and values, including their dubious client selections, blatant conflicts of interests, hypocrisy, secrecy, revolving door relationships, suppressed dissent, and relentless focus on profit, often confusing cost-cutting with efficiency. Grounding abundant, revealing information in a critical yet restrained and balanced journalistic account of the company's business, the authors leave theoretical analysis largely implicit. If Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking Like an Economist (CH, Oct'22, 60-0636) analyzes the micro-history of neoliberal economization in the public sphere, Bogdanich and Forsythe concretely describe how consultants such as McKinsey diffused economistic practices throughout the private and public sectors. This highly readable narrative should alert general readers and undergraduates to be skeptical of McKinsey's philosophy that the private sector can solve public problems, perhaps spurring searches for competing explanations and alternatives. Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty, professionals, and general readers. --A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College