Bonfire of the Consultancies

Key Highlights

• Management consulting has “largely escaped blame for the sins of modern capitalism” — a global industry grossing up to $900B a year that has evaded public scrutiny.
• Two books reviewed: When McKinsey Comes to Town and The Big Con — both highlight conflicts of interest, hypocrisy, and fee-driven avarice.
• Historical origins: Taylorism even found support in the Soviet Union. Lenin and Trotsky eventually embraced it, contracting US consultant Walter Polakov for advice on the first five-year plan.
• By 1968, McKinsey’s name was “becoming as synonymous with managerial reform as Hoover is with vacuum cleaning.” A journalist wrote: “If God were to remake the world, he would call upon McKinsey for assistance.”
• McKinsey’s Saudi Arabia work: consulting on Vision 2030. Working with Bain and Cambridge Analytica, McKinsey appears to have promoted “sentiment analysis” to track public attitudes — mined social media posts were subsequently used by the Saudi regime to track political opponents.
• “McKinsey has long behaved like — as one Economist headline put it — the smuggest guys in the room.”
• The firm’s collapse in standards: excessive focus on fees, partners chasing dubious government mandates, failures of oversight that led to leadership departures. “The disconnect between the firm’s high-minded public image and the grubby pursuit of profit was unsustainable.”
• David Cameron railed against “government by PowerPoint” — but outsourcing to consultancies accelerated during austerity. Companies like Carillon, G4S, and Serco became responsible for cleaning hospitals, school meals, and Olympic security.
• The grunt work of consulting is routinely handed to overstretched junior teams to save money, undermining the premise of “senior expertise.”