Exhaustive article on McKinsey & Company from an ex-employee with excerpts.
>https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners
The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide. It has acted as a catalyst and accelerant to every trend in the world economy: firm consolidation, the rise of advertising, runaway executive compensation, globalization, automation, and corporate restructuring and strategy.
McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against. The firm hires from top universities and many of its consultants have graduate degrees, both strong predictors of liberal political tendencies.
Following the assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, many US firms and CEOs boycotted the Saudi Arabia Future Investment Initiative (known as Davos in the Desert). McKinsey (along with many other top consulting firms), however, remained “knowledge partners.” The firm’s ties with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are deep. In 2015, after preparing a report on how Saudi Arabia can move beyond oil, McKinsey began strategizing with the Crown Prince on the privatization of Aramco, the state-owned oil company and, according to Reuters, “the one thing in Saudi Arabia that works well.” The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may be McKinsey’s single biggest client (between 2011 and 2016, they ran 600 engagements in the Kingdom)—
McKinsey is one of the most successful government contractors, with federal contracts worth $613 million between 2012 and 2018, with $150 million from the Department of Defense and $63 million from the Department of Homeland Security. The ICE contracts alone were worth $26 million. Public disclosures do not include the many projects McKinsey does for America’s defense contractors.
From NASA’s establishment, the organizational structure that Glennan and the consultants from McKinsey & Company devised for the space agency promoted the use of outside contractors over building internal expertise… Beyond the bare minimum of internal technical expertise, however, the McKinsey consultants argued that America’s ‘free enterprise society dictates that industry should be given as extensive a role as possible.’”
This approach, “may have dismayed the agency’s engineers, but the response cheered NASA administrators.” By 1964, 90 percent of NASA’s $5 billion budget went to private companies and 350,000 contractors supported 32,500 NASA employees. Bill Clinton’s declaration of the end of big government in 1996 and George W. Bush’s pledge to substitute contractors for half of the remaining federal workforce in 2002 were influenced and made possible by the work that McKinsey did in establishing the contractor state.
The hollowing of NASA was not an isolated event. According to The Firm, in the 1980s, McKinsey helped Carlos Salinas privatize 85 percent of Mexico’s state-owned businesses, Margaret Thatcher do the same in Britain, and West Germany do the same in East Germany.
Not all of these results are wholly attributable to McKinsey—there are many conspirators to these crimes. But no firm has touched more and been seen less.