Current Affairs

McKinsey & Co. is the world's leading consulting company. But it also does a lot of work that's, well, pretty downright sinister, and it's very secretive about that work. But in the new book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm,Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Times expose the hidden hand of McKinsey across the world. McKinsey has assisted opioid manufacturers, tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, ICE, and authoritarian governments, and in each case has covered up its footprints. Bogdanich and Forsythe show that the firm often advises both the companies that create problems and the governments that are trying to solve them, "playing both sides" and making a tidy sum in the process. In this episode we discuss how McKinsey recruits young elites with promises of doing socially useful work but then tells them that their job is "execution, not policy," meaning that they aren't to question the underlying values of the institutions