McKinsey: The Group Secretly Running Every Company (And Government?)

Optimist: The glass is half full. Pessimist: The glass is half empty. McKinsey: Use a smaller glass.

Thanks for this. I'm 60 and have been watching McKinsey destroy companies for most of my career & never get blamed for anything. They are a horrible cancer in our economy.

CEOs getting paid millions, and STILL they need to hire consulting firms to tell them what to do. You would think that for millions of dollars, a CEO could actually do the job themselves. Why are we paying CEOs so much money? For what?

Here in Canada McKinsey was being used a lot as well for Government consulting etc. but my understanding is that they are no longer being used by many companies because of the scandals. My wife works for a Crown Corp and they were told last year that McKinsey has been banned from all future consulting.

So, they help corporate leeches be as leechy as possible.

We need to clean up corporations. It's clear this company is working against average Americans.

I work in government, and I work frequently with consultants. I can tell you that the primary reason that they are used is because if employees or even management have recommendations, neither the public nor elected officials will be willing to accept those recommendations unless they are verified by a consultant. You can be saying for 20 years that a particular change needs to occur and no one will take it seriously, but once a consultant comes in and says the same thing, it's taken as gospel truth. I think the same thing probably happens in private companies as well; shareholders (and CEO's by extension) just won't take action based off of the recommendations of their employees unless a third party comes in and makes the same recommendation. 95% of the time, the consultant will just come up with a report that pretty much says exactly what the organization wanted the report to say.

Consultants are generally hired to come up with the solution that management already wants.

Deloitte is similar to McKinsey in many ways. Back in 2010 I worked for a bank and they paid Deloitte several million dollars to come in and tell them how to "improve" their business. The employees had been telling the leadership all along what needed to change, but Deloitte came in and said the same things and got a big payday for it. I anonymously had to vent about that one on the company feedback page.

I worked for a large competitor of this company. I was a data analyst. They kept trying to fit the data to their conclusions rather than the other way around. They were creepy and exploitative. There were some good people there, but they didn't last long. Most of the people at these places are...not people I'd ever choose to be around again.

I work in consulting. These days I feel like consultings primary purpose to give corporations justification for decisions they were going to do anyway. Consultants just provide a layer of justification for an action but often have little impact over the actual decision being made in the first place

I used to be a corporate consultant. My last job dealt with "dead peasant insurance" - a company putting life insurance on their officers and workforce to be paid out to the company, not to the family, as a method of raising capital in the event of death - and that was enough for me. I'm poor now, but at least I have self-respect.

Love seeing real investigative journalism

John Oliver did a piece on McKinsey. It's worth looking up.

If a Disney park never have a failed ride injury because of adequate maintenance, that child's death after firing the maintenance is on Disney. Since they were warned, it's effectively murder by willful neglect.

This is what people need to be talking about, we need more voices like this.

“You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices” is such a cold line. Mayo Pete puckered up REAL quick

Great reporting. The layers upon layers of corruption in this country is staggering!

Never ask a man his salary a woman her age what a McKinsey consultant was doing with that pharma company

Idk if the kid was from McKinsey, but he came to my workplace at a construction firm and every one of us field workers knew he had NEVER been on a construction site after just 3 minutes into his "consulting" speech. Long story short: the company wasted our time and thousands on his utterly useless "services"