Often referred to as a prestigious or elite consulting firm, McKinsey & Company is known for its strategic reviews that are targeted to reengineering the business models and operations of major worldwide companies, organizations, and governments. Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, New York Times award-winning investigative reporters and the authors of When McKinsey Comes to Town, would no doubt use much less flattering terms to describe the firm. In the book, they take McKinsey to task for its many conflicts of interest and for advancing the causes of sleazy industry and government clients (although they don’t use that exact descriptive phrase).

I previously reviewed a book on the “Big Four” accounting/​consulting firms (“Are the Big Four on Their Last Legs?” Fall 2019). McKinsey belongs to, and is the largest of, the “Big Three” firms solely dedicated to strategy consulting. Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company are the other two firms and are mentioned throughout When McKinsey Comes to Town.

Exemplary case? / The book’s title is explained in the introduction. As the authors tell it, one of the towns where McKinsey applied its magical consulting formula was Gary, IN, infamous for its economic ups and downs. It was a boom town, thanks to US Steel’s presence, in the first half of the 20th century, and it peaked in population at a “high of 177,000 in 1960.” The city is now a shell of its former self, crime-ridden and with a population of just 69,000 as of the most recent census, notwithstanding US Steel’s continued presence.

Mario Longhi was US Steel’s new chief executive in 2014 when he hired McKinsey to turn around a company burdened by old and inefficient methods. According to Bogdanich and Forsythe:

McKinsey came to U.S. Steel with the goal of restoring the steelmaker to its iconic status as a company that built the nation’s bridges, buildings, and weapons that defeated America’s enemies. With McKinsey’s help, U.S. Steel promised to recapture that spirit through “a relentless focus on economic profit, our customers, cost structure and innovation”—all without sacrificing safety or harming the environment.

But the authors claim McKinsey’s subsequent plan was simply a well-disguised scheme to “cut costs—a plan that workers said jeopardized their safety.” By 2017, large losses were posted and Longhi departed the firm with a $5 million golden parachute.

McKinsey lingered on at US Steel, pulling in $13 million in fees from 2018 to 2020. Today’s headlines reveal the most recent twist in the US Steel saga: Japan’s Nippon Steel has been pursuing the steelmaker, shareholders have approved a purchase, but the Biden administration has expressed opposition to the deal. (See p. 8.)

Obvious conflicts? / In a chapter entitled “Playing Both Sides,” the authors lay out McKinsey’s history of simultaneously advising both the state and the regulated entities under state oversight.

The saga starts in 2017 with newly elected Illinois Republican governor Bruce Rauner clashing with the state’s Democratic comptroller, Susana Mendoza. Rauner appointed a former McKinsey official, Leslie Munger (whom Mendoza defeated in the 2016 election), as his deputy governor. Illinois’ Medicaid director at the time, Felicia Norwood, also had a history with McKinsey, having worked with them during the mid-1990s to assess the organizational deficiencies in public assistance programs. Amid a fiscal crisis, Illinois had no approved budget and the governor and state comptroller were at odds on fiscal issues:

Mendoza wanted to know why private consultants appear to be prioritized for payment ahead of critical services like senior centers, hospice care facilities and educational institutions…. With lifesaving services starving for money, Illinois officials were quietly shoveling millions of dollars out the door to McKinsey consultants…. [S]he froze $21.6 million the state had agreed to pay consulting firms for technology advice—most of it earmarked for McKinsey.

Bogdanich and Forsythe also were able to get their hands on a previously secret client list useful in determining conflicts of interest, and “it showed McKinsey’s deep financial ties to the managed care industry.”

The tales of US Steel and the State of Illinois are only the beginning. The chapters that follow are dedicated to a laundry list of McKinsey’s relationships with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Chinese, Saudi Arabian, and South African governments; the tobacco, opioid, and coal industries; the financial services industry before the global financial crisis; dodgy insurance companies; Enron before its spectacular collapse; and Britain’s National Health Service. All those stories cannot be covered in a review of this length, but what follows are a few snippets of McKinsey’s motives as seen by Bogdanich and Forsythe.

ICE / Tactics applied by ICE in collecting and deporting immigrants have drawn criticism across the spectrum of policy experts. In the waning days of the Obama presidency, the agency awarded a contract “worth more than $20 million” to McKinsey, and the Trump administration “awarded dozens of consulting contracts across the landscape of government agencies, producing millions of dollars in revenue for” McKinsey.

After a 2019 New York Times article made public McKinsey’s work for ICE and another article gave specifics about the consultancy’s recommended budget cuts to “food, medical care and supervision of detainees,” an uproar ensued both within and outside the firm. McKinsey downplayed its involvement in ICE policies, noting the scope of work was limited to “administrative and organizational issues…. We don’t do policy, we do execution.” Pete Buttigieg, a McKinsey alumnus and then an aspiring Democratic presidential candidate building up to his surprise showing in the 2020 Iowa caucuses, called the firm’s work “disgusting.”

The authors run through a range of areas where the firm consulted: “McKinsey had success at ICE doing what it does best—cutting costs.” They also chronicle an internal town hall meeting where McKinsey staff aired their own grievances. One staffer developed a “jaundiced view of the firm he had so enthusiastically joined, buoyed by the promise from recruiters that he would be ‘uniquely positioned to do something that does on occasion help move society forward.’”

Foreign governments / Bogdanich and Forsythe dedicate separate chapters to McKinsey’s work with China, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.

The work with China included a heavy concentration in 96 state-owned “central enterprises,” zhongyang qiye, that are so vital to the country’s national security and economic growth that decision-making is concentrated in the Beijing government with enterprise leadership chosen by the Communist Party Organization Department. According to the authors, “McKinsey has advised at least twenty-six” of the central enterprises and they provide a case study for the hiring of McKinsey to advise China Communications Construction Company, “a relic of the days of Chairman Mao,” that directs “massive government resources into favored industries.” The authors also raise the question of whether McKinsey’s work with a Chinese company that “builds islands in disputed waters” conflicts with McKinsey’s work with the Pentagon. Notwithstanding recent deterioration in the relationship between Beijing and Washington after the ascendancy of Xi Jinping, McKinsey’s work continues unabated, “business as usual.”

McKinsey’s cash-cow client in South Africa was the state-owned power company, Eskom, which had difficulty maintaining reliable power. According to Bogdanich and Forsythe, “If all went well, McKinsey stood to collect more money from Eskom than virtually any other company in the world, with a potential value of $700 million.” Notwithstanding the lucrative work, the optics were awful: “a predominantly white firm seeking that amount of money without competitive bidding from an impoverished government.” The early work on the contract revealed one disaster after another: poor communications with South Africa’s Treasury, questions about the legality of the McKinsey contract, subcontractor due diligence and quality issues, and cases of clear potential conflicts of interest. Just six months into a three-year contract, Eskom terminated the arrangement, citing irregularities. A series of investigations ensued.

The story of McKinsey’s work in the Middle East started with an office in Dubai in the 1990s, when Saudi rulers wanted to “replicate the success of Dubai, then emerging as a multicultural global transport and financial center.” By 2009, a Riyadh office was up and running and working for Saudi Binladin Group, founded by the father of Osama bin Laden and Aramco, the state-owned oil company. By 2016, two projects had developed into 137, leading some to apply the moniker “the Ministry of McKinsey” to the Saudi Planning Ministry. Meanwhile, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was gaining political power: “MBS was ruthless.… [He would] silence his perceived enemies.”

One major McKinsey project was focused on “weaning the kingdom off its dependence on oil,” which envisioned “a $4 trillion investment splurge in areas such as mining, tourism and finance.” The authors summarize the result of the firm’s handiwork: “McKinsey was helping ensure the viability of a brutal, authoritarian regime.” The reader is then told of McKinsey work focused on how Saudi citizens were reacting to government policies. The follow-up by the Saudi government was a surveillance program conducted on citizens like Omar Abdulaziz, who McKinsey fingered as “highly influential in shaping the public’s opinion” based on his tweets on government policy that put the Kingdom in a negative light. While under this surveillance, Abdulaziz would later communicate with Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist. Khashoggi was later murdered, and American intelligence agencies determined that MBS was behind the murder.

Conclusion / This book is chock full of details on each of the topics, based on painstaking research. The authors make the case that McKinsey is a consulting firm that has only its bottom-line profits in mind when it enters consulting engagements.

For the reader expecting an epilogue pulling together the book’s concepts, with discussions of how McKinsey is worse than other firms, there will be disappointment. The unwinding of the full book narrative takes less than two full pages. The problem with not giving a wider perspective of all consulting firms is that the presented narrative is too narrow.

My experience with government-focused consulting firms in the Washington, DC, area is that they are mostly of the “Beltway bandit” variety. They rely on governments (foreign and domestic) for an outsized share of their consulting income, with ever-present pressure to bring in new government clients and, when those clients are in the door, to maximize revenue from each one. These firms don’t apply a particular ideology to the type of work they pursue (as the authors would prefer), but rather they focus solely on keeping the revenue flowing. Whether it be consulting government agencies about nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq (which dragged on for decades) or the work cited by the authors for ICE and other foreign governments, the incentives are set by governments and the firms are just responding.