Helping Authoritarian Governments Around the World
December 16, 2018 1:06 PM   Subscribe

The NYT investigates management and consulting firm Mckinsey & Company's role in helping autocracies like China, Russia, Saudia Arabia and others. At a time when democracies and their basic values are increasingly under attack, the iconic American company has helped raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe, sometimes in ways that counter American interests.
posted by blue shadows (46 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
" At a time when democracies and their basic values are increasingly under attack, the iconic American company has helped raise the stature of authoritarian and corrupt governments across the globe, sometimes in ways that counter American interests."

I can literally think of numerous American companies that sentence describes. If people truly want to believe the American business community hasn't had an authoritarian mindset since at least the 1970's, well, I'm not one to stop them from totally fucking deluding themselves.

From Shell knowing Climate Change was a real thing to Johnson & Johnson pushing asbestos on store shelves across the country, does anyone in this fucking country actually believe that corporations give a fuck about any kind of moral or ethical compass as long as it makes a buck?

Bottom line: Capitalism is antithetical to democracy. Period.
posted by deadaluspark at 1:09 PM on December 16, 2018 [57 favorites]


So, who do you think paid for this hit piece?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:33 PM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


"So, who do you think paid for this hit piece?"

The New York Times.
posted by el io at 2:00 PM on December 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


"Hit piece," like somehow McKinsey had a sterling reputation before now.
posted by Yowser at 2:18 PM on December 16, 2018 [22 favorites]


“iconic”?

Really?

Take 100 Americans at random, and I wouldn’t bet that 10 have heard of McKinsey, nor that two could tell you what they do beyond “consulting”.
posted by Etrigan at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


Lol Deloitte just passing some cash under the table

We need actual corporate penalties and actual criminal liability for the people involved. “Oh, but that will make business more difficult.”

Yes that is precisely the idea
posted by schadenfrau at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2018 [16 favorites]


nor that two could tell you what they do beyond “consulting”

To be fair you could probably say that about a nontrivial amount of McKinsey employees?

Opacity has never hidden the work of angels.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:25 PM on December 16, 2018 [14 favorites]


Deloitte compete with McKinsey in the way Ringo competes with Paul.
posted by Damienmce at 2:35 PM on December 16, 2018 [18 favorites]


Take 100 Americans at random, and I wouldn’t bet that 10 have heard of McKinsey, nor that two could tell you what they do beyond “consulting”.

My job is researching and writing about the minutae of federal government policy and I couldn't tell you who they are or what they do.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:40 PM on December 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


Well, Saudi Arabia is a platinum-tier member of Team Liberty Eagle, because they* fought against the Godless Commies during the Cold War, so they get a pass.

* or, more precisely, their money and oil
posted by acb at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


That seems pretty accurate.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:54 PM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


No idea who they are. Been in the corporate world 20 years.
posted by freecellwizard at 2:59 PM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hard to imagine anyone who went to a top U.S. or U.K. school professing not to have heard of McKinsey. (Almost wrote Kinsey here, which would've been much funnier.) "Finance" has crowded out "consulting" as the top choice for "guys who don't have any particular skills but want to make money" since I was in school, but still.
posted by praemunire at 3:06 PM on December 16, 2018 [15 favorites]


I mean, Ford and GM collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Show me a large corporation that isn't making the world worse on the whole.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:06 PM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Take 100 Americans at random, and I wouldn’t bet that 10 have heard of McKinsey, nor that two could tell you what they do beyond “consulting”.

As someone once said, the target audience of the NYT is anyone who lives within a 15 minute drive of a Saks Fifth Avenue.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:09 PM on December 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


"See, now, 20% of your citizens pay 80% of your taxes, so it's hardly worth serving the needs of the rest of them. We can help you eliminate useless citizens and focus on your most productive taxpayers."
posted by clawsoon at 3:18 PM on December 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


I mean, Ford and GM collaborated with the Nazis during WWII.

If you believe Edwin Black, so did IBM.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:19 PM on December 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


Little-known fact: an earlier incarnation of McKinsey was responsible for the Golgafrinchan B Ark.
posted by acb at 3:20 PM on December 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


McKinsey is basically a bunch of wet behind the ears B school grads who come into your company and provide cover for them to do something unpopular, such as mass layoffs. That they have extended into this sphere seems hardly surprising.
posted by caddis at 3:21 PM on December 16, 2018 [16 favorites]


They sound like a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:32 PM on December 16, 2018 [13 favorites]


I once worked for a company that had McKinsey come in and do lots of surveys then produce and present this big report about how we should be doing business. It was a complete load of crap from the beginning to the end, and we ended up ignoring all the advice they gave us and we did just fine.

But McKinsey was financed by the same oligarch who backed Mr. Manafort, and it wrote an economic plan that Mr. Yanukovych wielded to disarm his critics — before discarding much of it after becoming president.

Sounds like they are still making money by giving bad advice that is later discarded.
posted by eye of newt at 3:45 PM on December 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


I've spent a lot of time in the past 20 years dealing with Deloitte, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Akamai, and a handful of other such specialty consultants groups.

They can do a hatchet job. They can reorganize a whole company. They can straighten out a balance sheet. They can also bring a company up to speed - even ones that are 15-20 years behind. They can make a company significantly more efficient.

Yes, they are cold hearted bastards hired explicitly to not make friends as well as make some very unpopular decisions. They are unconcerned about the wellbeing of people, but are extremely concerned about the wellbeing of the shareholders.

If D&T shows up and you arent a top performer in a cutting edge initiative... make sure you have your 1 minute elevator speech about what you do prepared and polished. As a fallback, have your resume in order too.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:47 PM on December 16, 2018 [17 favorites]


Sounds like they are still making money by giving bad advice that is later discarded.

The real money is rarely in doing stuff. It's in financing doing stuff, or telling people how to do stuff.
posted by praemunire at 3:47 PM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


They can make a company significantly more efficient.

For those of you wondering, "efficient" here means "robbing other constituencies of the company to increase salaries of top executives and fund stock buybacks [which, incidentally, also effectively increases the compensation of top execs]."
posted by praemunire at 3:50 PM on December 16, 2018 [17 favorites]


For those who genuinely don’t know what these companies do: think of them as business mercenaries, with all that implies.
posted by schadenfrau at 4:13 PM on December 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


After all the hot takes, the basic issue that the article illustrates (glosses over?) is that firms like McKinsey may be nominally headquartered in the but they simply aren't, and haven't considered themselves to be for many years, culturally or institutionally American.

Their staff, operations and clientele are global. This enables them, quite correctly, to perceive that the NY Times-favored conception of liberal democracy isn't observed in many places, and hardly seems ascendant versus a variety of alternatives. No serious global organization can or would condition their business that way. At most you get the tribute-vice-pays-to-virtue of all the US based tech and media executives denouncing Trump while dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" they are required by the CCP to do business in China (or devoutly waiting to be allowed to do so, as in GOOG, FB, and NFLX).
posted by MattD at 6:10 PM on December 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


(The "vice" being the self-righteousness ... as far as I am concerned Americans aren't in any position to dictate to the CCP how business ought to be done in China, when you compare the relative economic progress of the two countries over the past 20 years.)
posted by MattD at 6:12 PM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm not even sure they're really good at what they profess to do, which is advise companies on strategy and change. Nearly all that I've ever see the Big 3 come in and do to companies is cost-cutting (sometimes dressed up in various guises), which is sort of like the corporate version of giving yourself a big shot of morphine. It'll make you feel better, sure, for a while. But shareholders do like it because it's the single fastest way to profitability. But a fair number of times when I saw them get brought in to do reorg work, it was like watching Kitchen Nightmares. Lots of drama, lots of new lipstick on the pig, bunch of people losing their jobs, but at the end of the day once they leave it's still the same business. And it eventually goes back, plus or minus whatever damage was done and whatever knowledge was lost in the process.

It would be a mistake to think that the people who work there are idiots, though. The Big Three hire a lot of very talented people, particularly young people, which frankly makes the suspiciously low-value-add of what they ultimately do all the worse. The amount of human potential in these big firms, doing nothing or worse, is astonishing. Between them and the big I-banks, you wonder what problems we could solve as a civilization if we put the same number of people and the same degree of ambition on more useful tasks. But there's no money in that. On the other hand, all you'd have to do is put money in that, and they'd be all over the task.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:57 PM on December 16, 2018 [20 favorites]


I got made redundant after a business review by McKinsey management consultants and ended up divorced and unemployed in the middle of a recession; thanks McKinsey management.
One compensation was that the head of Elders Australia eventually went bankrupt. He was a management consultant Walter Mitty.
I heard of one person who got made redundant 3 times by this stupid company.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 9:01 PM on December 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


OMG. My company brought McKinsey in a while back ostensibly to help us sort out our product direction. No one I spoke to was very impressed with their work; seemed to be due to the inexperience of the recent college grads they assigned to us. Seemed like a waste of money.

Right after they delivered their flimsy report, we had our first of a series of layoffs. It never was explained to us how we decided which roles to cut. Things are making so much more sense now. Thanks, Metafilter!
posted by mantecol at 9:36 PM on December 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


Between them and the big I-banks, you wonder what problems we could solve as a civilization if we put the same number of people and the same degree of ambition on more useful tasks.

I think about this a lot. We have such a wasteful allocation of talent right now, it's heartbreaking.
posted by praemunire at 9:41 PM on December 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


After all the hot takes

Pssssst...a "hot take" is not just a take you don't like.
posted by praemunire at 9:42 PM on December 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


Their staff, operations and clientele are global. This enables them, quite correctly, to perceive that the NY Times-favored conception of liberal democracy isn't observed in many places, and hardly seems ascendant versus a variety of alternatives. No serious global organization can or would condition their business that way.


You know, I was going to push back on deadaluspark's statement "Bottom line: Capitalism is antithetical to democracy. Period" but you've essentially outlined a supporting argument.
posted by wildblueyonder at 10:44 PM on December 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


i haven't read TFA yet, but i'm prepping my popcorn. nothing about this 'expose' is new to my neck of the woods, which is civil service. :/ consulting groups muscling into development work just because of... something... is a fuckin' cancer. the worst is hearing the same pablum now being sincerely parroted by ppl in USAID/CIDA/DFID/AUSAID/UN etc
posted by cendawanita at 12:16 AM on December 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh look, my country gets a nice section to itself.
posted by cendawanita at 12:26 AM on December 17, 2018 [2 favorites]




So who here is a shareholder in this or a similar company? (I reckon zero, but I'm prepared to learn otherwise.) So imagine what we could do if large companies were obliged to give (as in free of charge) a significant portion of their voting stock to the voting public? Sort of a nationalisation, but bypassing the government of the day.
posted by rustipi at 1:28 AM on December 17, 2018


I have a question. Does anyone here think that the CIA is unaware of the work that they do? Does anyone here think that the CIA is unhappy with the work that they do? If the answer to both of those questions is 'no', then does anyone think that a portion of 'international consultants' are actually CIA assets?

I was once asked if I had or was willing to get a US security clearance. My answer was 'no'. It would be awesome if sometime in the future that answer was the 'correct' answer to a job interview question.
posted by el io at 2:21 AM on December 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


"So, who do you think paid for this hit piece?"

I am a subscriber, so hopefully I did.
posted by krautland at 3:56 AM on December 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


So who here is a shareholder in this or a similar company? (I reckon zero, but I'm prepared to learn otherwise.)

McKinsey is owned by its senior directors so I suspect zero is correct.

So imagine what we could do if large companies were obliged to give (as in free of charge) a significant portion of their voting stock to the voting public?

Right, or the voting public could elect governments to pass laws that companies have to follow. When the United States government doesn't want companies based in the US (or indeed companies that do any business there at all) to do business with particular countries, companies, on individuals it has a whole range of powerful sanctions tools to use. These tools can lead to massive fines and prison time for the people involved as well as penalties for the companies.

The vast majority of what is described in the article is normal, uncontroversial advisory work for people or companies who are a bit dodgy rather than the work itself recommending anything untoward. Given that their core advisory work in developed market sometimes leads to people losing jobs, I don't see how this work is particularly worse.
posted by atrazine at 4:31 AM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


normal, uncontroversial advisory work for people or companies who are a bit dodgy rather than the work itself recommending anything untoward

There are a lot of people who have been trying to make it controversial for a very long time.

Are they hot takes if they're just the latest in at least 150 years of criticism?
posted by AnhydrousLove at 4:58 AM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Big 3

The big 3. Savage burn.
posted by Damienmce at 6:23 AM on December 17, 2018


McKinsey gave us Enron. That's about all I know, and about all I think anyone else needs to know.
posted by hwestiii at 6:42 AM on December 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


McKinsey is the worst kinda consulting thing. They have a prestigious name, so kids wanna work for them. They legitimately hire really clever people and then put them to work reinventing all kinds of wheels, sometimes for evil people. They haven't been exposed for the dumb dumb thing they are, so they ruin the clever people and cast them into the world as capitalist lackeys, who then ruin the world further.

The ostensible aim of them, as I understand it, is to come into a situation and understand it and figure out how to make it work better. I like this aim and would like to do it, myself. In the world as it is, they come into a situation and then break it down through stupid self-made means and then just break it. They've got levels and levels and levels of Peter Principle bullshit.

Anyway, all of you professional people who are actually doing useful work, keep on. If you haven't heard of McKinsey, that's probably really good.
posted by lauranesson at 8:49 AM on December 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


The big 3. Savage burn.

Huh? Big three (or MBB) is the typical grouping for consulting. It's accounting that has a big four.
posted by mosst at 9:11 AM on December 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


McKinsey defends its work around the world, saying that it will not accept jobs at odds with the company’s values.

Seems legit.
posted by chavenet at 3:17 AM on December 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


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