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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bogdanich and Forsythe, investigative reporters for The New York Times, break through the secrecy sustaining the elite consulting firm McKinsey's mystique to report in vivid and disturbing detail on its clients, advice, methods, organization, operations, and "culture." In outstanding research reported through the lens of individual stories, they recount the myriad problems that undermine the company's claims to be guided by ethics and values, including their dubious client selections, blatant conflicts of interests, hypocrisy, secrecy, revolving door relationships, suppressed dissent, and relentless focus on profit, often confusing cost-cutting with efficiency. Grounding abundant, revealing information in a critical yet restrained and balanced journalistic account of the company's business, the authors leave theoretical analysis largely implicit. If Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking Like an Economist (CH, Oct'22, 60-0636) analyzes the micro-history of neoliberal economization in the public sphere, Bogdanich and Forsythe concretely describe how consultants such as McKinsey diffused economistic practices throughout the private and public sectors. This highly readable narrative should alert general readers and undergraduates to be skeptical of McKinsey's philosophy that the private sector can solve public problems, perhaps spurring searches for competing explanations and alternatives. Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty, professionals, and general readers. --A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College

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. (Oct.)

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 exposé will do for management consulting what Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain (2021) did for the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.