“McKinsey’s advice can be expensive and obvious, its predictions can be deeply flawed, and it’s arguably helped supercharge economic inequality.” — John Oliver 1
In the 22 October 2023 episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took aim at the mainstream “Big Con” management consulting firms, with a special focus on brand leader McKinsey & Company. 2
Presented in his trademark style, Oliver delivers an important message: Big Con firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain and others wield so much influence they should be forced to be more transparent and not be allowed to hide behind cloaks of secrecy.
Had McKinsey been more open, it would have been easier to spot that they were not only working for Purdue pharmaceuticals to help “turbocharge” (McKinsey’s word) sales of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin, but that at the same time the very same individual McKinsey consultants were working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — whose job is to regulate firms like Purdue. 3
McKinsey has since paid out some $870,000,000 dollars for their role in the opioid epidemic that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, without as yet admitting any responsibility. 4
When directly asked about this “playing both sides of the fence” by US representative Katie Porter, McKinsey head honcho Bob Sternfels tried to deflect her question by saying “we made clear to the FDA that the individuals involved had experience in both areas”.
The not so easily fobbed off Rep Porter replies: “Mr Sternfels, you’re wasting my time — they were exactly the identical humans working for both at the same time”.
As Oliver points out, that’s like the difference between telling your wife about a previous girlfriend, and telling her about your current girlfriend…
Oliver addresses other headline grabbing McKinsey misdeeds, such as:
the massive inflation of executive pay — which exacerbates the Double Disconnect that destroys organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness… 5
how following a $28,000,000 McKinsey intervention, violence at Rikers Island jail increased by 50%, not a 50% reduction — as McKinsey claimed by fiddling the data…
having done so much work for the Saudi Government that the Planning Ministry was dubbed “The Ministry of McKinsey”, McKinsey produced a graphic detailing leading dissidents linked to journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was subsequently assassinated by Saudi agents… 6
In response to a New York Times article on 20 October 2018 about the graphic, McKinsey claimed that its “intended primary audience was internal” and that they were “horrified by the possibility, however remote, that it could have been misused in any way”…
Oliver reports that a former McKinsey consultant called this “internal use” claim “utter horseshit”.
The Five Fatal Habits
Oliver’s exposé is an important milestone on the long journey of organisations waking up to the antics of McKinsey and other Big Con firms.
Hopefully this will eventually lead clients to the realisation of how hiring these firms systemically undermines the fitness of their organisations for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future.
A few years ago, I produced a 22-page summary of Five Fatal Habits that have consistently prevented organisations from creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, systemically exacerbated by hiring Big Con firms.
The Five Fatal Habits are:
Habit #1: “One Best Way” Thinking — a legacy that stems from the Scientific Management principles of the early 20th century and avidly promoted by Big Con firms. Overcoming this habit allows an organisation to leverage its own unique opportunities to achieve greater success with less effort and risk.
Habit #2: “All or Nothing” Thinking — a legacy that stems from the Strategic Planning era of the 1960’s to 1990’s, a leading source of revenue for Big Con firms. Overcoming this habit enables more people to make pragmatic, low risk, high leverage, iterative contributions to growing organisational innovation and agility.
Habit #3: Leadership that Creates Followers — a legacy that stems from traditional and now woefully out of date notions of what it means to be a leader, amplified and propagated by Big Con firms. Overcoming this habit develops an organisation’s capacity for agile leadership.
Habit #4: Wasting People’s Strengths — a legacy that stems from traditional HR practices rooted in Habits #1, #2 & #3 rolled out by Big Con firms. Overcoming this habit unleashes the collective human capacity for innovation & agility.
Habit #5: Hired Help that Hinders — a legacy that stems from more than a century of traditional ‘help’ from Big Con firms based on the finders, minders, grinders business model. Overcoming this habit is absolutely essential if an organisation is to break free from the most debilitating systemic reinforcement to the other four fatal habits.
Download the free 22-page summary of the Five Fatal Habits by clicking the button below — NO signup required.
From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Ep 14: October 22, 2023. The episode is not available in all countries on this link, so use the one in the body of the article above.
Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies” (2023) — is the name of a book exposing the antics of the big management consulting firms written by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. The Big Con on Goodreads
It turns out that at least four McKinsey consultants were working for Purdue and the FDA at the same time.
See this earlier article on the toxic myth of culture as shared values for more detail.
For more on the Double Disconnect see this previous article.