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When McKinsey Comes to Town
The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
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"Meticulously reported, and ultimately devastating, this is an important book." —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing
McKinsey & Company is the most prestigious consulting company in the world, earning billions of dollars in fees from major corporations and governments who turn to it to maximize their profits and enhance efficiency. McKinsey's vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, and its reputation for excellence and discretion attracts top talent from universities around the world. But what does it actually do?
In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Often McKinsey's advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company's stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey collects millions of dollars advising government agencies that also regulate McKinsey's corporate clients. And the firm frequently advises competitors in the same industries, but denies that this presents any conflict of interest.
In one telling example, McKinsey advised a Chinese engineering company allied with the communist government which constructed artificial islands, now used as staging grounds for the Chinese Navy—while at the same time taking tens of millions of dollars from the Pentagon, whose chief aim is to counter Chinese aggression.
Shielded by NDAs, McKinsey has escaped public scrutiny despite its role in advising tobacco and vaping companies, purveyors of opioids, repressive governments, and oil companies. McKinsey helped insurance companies' boost their profits by making it incredibly difficult for accident victims to get payments; worked its U.S. government contacts to let Wall Street firms evade scrutiny; enabled corruption in developing countries such as South Africa; undermined health-care programs in states across the country. And much more.
Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money.
When McKinsey Comes to Town is a landmark work of investigative reporting that amounts to a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 4, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780385546249
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780385546249
- File size: 6571 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 1, 2022
New York Times investigative journalists, Pulitzer Prize-winning Bogdanich and George Polk Award-winning Forsythe pool their talents to explain what it means for businesses and government agencies when international consulting firm McKinsey Comes to Town. Chronicling the murder of often-censored Mexican journalist Regina Mart�nez in 2012 after she uncovered shocking evidence regarding the disappearance of thousands of Mexican people, former AP Mexico bureau chief Corcoran plumbs crucial issues of freedom of the press with In the Mouth of the Wolf (60,000-copy first printing). From a Bronx culinary collective, John Gray and others' Ghetto Gastro Black Power Kitchen celebrates Black cuisines and cultures (100,000-copy first printing). Determined to make her immigrant family proud, Higgins worked hard enough to become a managing director at Goldman Sachs; Bully Market describes her encounters with a toxic environment characterized by extravagantly high living and, most disturbingly, discrimination against women and people of color. With My People, celebrated Emmy Award-winning journalist Hunter-Gault collects five decades' worth of reportage, from the Civil Rights era to today, to offer an overview of recent Black American history (75,000-copy first printing).
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from October 17, 2022
New York Times reporters Bogdanich and Forsythe peel back the layers of secrecy surrounding management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in this revelatory and often shocking account. Drawing on interviews with “nearly one hundred current and former McKinsey employees,” as well as client and billing records, the authors uncover a devastating pattern of harm caused by greed, conflicts of interest, and unethical behavior. The company’s “long-standing policy” of advising competing organizations with conflicting interests is a recurrent theme: McKinsey simultaneously advised a Chinese engineering firm responsible for building military bases in contested waters of the South China Sea and the U.S. Defense Department, which is opposed to those incursions, and helped develop Illinois’s plan to privatize Medicaid services without disclosing its ties to managed care companies that profited from those changes. The authors also delve into McKinsey’s “deeply political” work helping the Saudi Arabian government to “smoke out influential malcontents” on social media; its entanglement with government corruption in South Africa; and its plans to help Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” OxyContin sales and vaping company Juul to avoid FDA regulations while selling millions of its devices to teenagers. Scrupulously documented and fluidly written, this is a jaw-dropping feat of investigative journalism. -
November 1, 2022
Two award-winning New York Times investigative reporters take down the world's leading consulting firm, counsel to mega-corporations, dictators, and union-busters everywhere. "There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company." So wrote one former McKinsey employee of an organization whose consultants develop strategies to market share and evade legal culpabilities, playing all sides of the field whenever possible. For example, write Bogdanich and Forsythe, McKinsey counseled Purdue Pharmaceutical to boost market sales of OxyContin by organizing sales contests among reps and making claims that patients using the drug would be happier, "a suggestion health officials called ludicrous." During the Trump years, McKinsey was also awarded millions of dollars in contracts with federal agencies specifically charged with monitoring drugs. Indeed, when Alex Azar left his job as president of Eli Lilly, the authors allege that he went to McKinsey in search of job-seeking advice and soon found employment as the secretary of Health and Human Services. The conflict-of-interest bindings with baneful substances are one thing, but it gets worse. In one damning scene, the authors depict McKinsey helping Disneyland get around the ugly accidental death of a young customer on a ride at the same time the company sought to lay off high-paid maintenance workers who could keep the contraptions running safely. Even more disturbing are the authors' revelations about McKinsey's work to improve the reputation of the Saudi regime, taking advantage of "a political phenomenon the royal family wanted desperately to ward off: the Arab Spring," which was "potentially an extinction-level event for the royal family." The company, the authors show clearly and disturbingly, suggested the regime give the impression of modernizing by, say, allowing women to drive while cracking down on dissent--which likely led to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi within the Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018. A startling case study of how unchecked corporate power affects world affairs--and all of us.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from October 15, 2022
The nearly century-old McKinsey & Company describes itself as the world's largest consulting firm. Sounds benign, doesn't it? Yet McKinsey's sway over some of the most influential industries and domestic and foreign government agencies is a manifestation of corruption and greed down to the molecular level. Cleverly employing a panoply of NDAs and other protective legal tools, McKinsey further cloaks itself behind a thick scrum of obfuscating corporate-speak peppered throughout its infamous PowerPoint slide decks. With clients in energy and entertainment, the FDA and the NBA, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, McKinsey touts its skill at increasing profitability and efficiency, chiefly through draconian, often dangerous, staff cutbacks and price-cutting. Such advice, however, comes with a hefty price tag, yet when a client becomes mired in scandal, often resulting from McKinsey's recommendations, the company's fingerprints are nowhere to be found. Recipients of multiple prestigious prizes for their far-reaching investigative journalism, Bogdanich and Forsythe pull back the curtain on the unseen depths of McKinsey's pernicious and insidious influence. Thanks to their unprecedented level of access to crucial records and key insider accounts, this monumental corporate expos� will do for management consulting what Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain (2021) did for the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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