When McKinsey Comes to Town

When McKinsey Comes to Town
By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published in October 2022
624 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

This book is a very mediocre leftist attack piece against a target that deserves much more serious criticism.

The book jumps hastily from example to example about why McKinsey is evil. I agree with the authors and overall also think that McKinsey is probably evil. However, we have completely different reasons why.

I’ve worked with companies very similar to McKinsey, and although I haven’t worked with McKinsey I’ve interacted with their people quite a few times.

The authors blame McKinsey for behavior such as firing workers, offshoring, and high executive pay. However, all of these are natural results of market forces and government regulations outside of the control of McKinsey. Blaming individual companies for responding to government regulations is like blaming drug dealers for the war on drugs (when in fact drug dealers only exist because drugs are illegal in the first place).

At the same time, the authors argue that McKinsey lobbies for Ayn Rand’s dog-eat-dog form of capitalism. Every McKinsey report that I have seen, every single LinkedIn post, and every employee suggests the opposite to me. As far as I can tell, they are all crypto-Marxists pushing for an economic system predicated on state control of industry. McKinsey’s front page is full of SDG language indicative of government regulations.

The authors suggest that McKinsey makes companies more profitable, at least in the short term, but destroys them in the long term. I’ve come to the conclusion that McKinsey is a scam company that just takes money without doing anything. When my father worked at Apple, he came right after McKinsey had consulted. He, and other executives, discovered that McKinsey had been charging Apple high consulting fees for copy-pasted templates that they circulated at other Bay Area companies. He was ecstatic when Steve Jobs did not renew their contracts.

I quit reading halfway through this book because it is clearly written by people who have not done any business at a high level. It is written by outsiders, rather than insiders. The authors don’t understand how McKinsey actually works, or how business works, and are trying to piece together a narrative based on sob stories and news reports.

​