McKinsey? Not Wonderful? What?
September 1, 2020
Our esteemed leader (who is now Lord Stephen E Arnold. Believe it or not.) used to be a management consultant. Although I have worked on his research team for more than eight years, I have no idea what he did or does. Every time we meet, he’s playing with his computers. Helpful, right?
What do management consultants do? Slate knows and reports that management consultants “sell what you’re buying, as opposed to what they’re selling” in the article “How McKinsey Helps Companies Avoid Responsibility.” At least the only management company that is following this modus operandi is McKinsey and Company. McKinsey and Company is a top blue chip management company and has been in business for almost a century.
Accounting professor James McKinsey founded his namesake company on basic accounting principles: use financial records to project future revenue and costs. This concept is standard today, but no one practiced it in 1926. McKinsey was selective about his client list and become legendary among top-tier clients. When Marvin Bower took over the company he added another mantra to the company: always putting clients’ interests above McKinsey’s.
In the 1950s, a new slew of problems arrived with the postwar economic boom and McKinsey took it upon themselves to help companies succeed even more, This included wading through middle management and telling companies to fire people if needed. McKinsey consultants are happy to be scapegoats for downsizing:
“‘And the McKinsey consultant who gives the manager that advice also gets to avoid having to feel responsible for putting people out of work. ‘If I’m working at McKinsey, when I decide to give the best professional advice I can, following the principles of integrity that McKinsey insists on for its workers, I don’t characterize myself as having fired 50,000 people,’ [Yale professor Daniel] Markovits explains. ‘What I’ve done is give the best professional advice that I can. And that’s a perfectly apt way to think about your life, but from a systematic or a structural perspective, it insulates everybody from responsibility for terrible outcomes.’”
This led to massive layoffs from the 1970s-1990s, but it did keep companies afloat and cemented the concept that a company’s only responsibility is to maximize the value of shares. McKinsey expanded into government and public sector work, including the Trump Administration, and foreign countries: China, Turkey, Russia, and South Africa, Saudi Arabia. McKinsey consultants advised corrupt regimes about “better business practices” that resulted in harming humans and quality of life.
McKinsey is always interested in serving their clients’ best interests, but it has dirtied their hands to the detriment of harming others. How evil is DarkCyber own Lord Stephen? He pays for lunch, but that may be his sole saving grace. (Yes, he wants to be called Lord Stephen. Maybe he will tell the team how he went from rural Kentucky to “lord”?
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2020
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