Reject the McKinsey Mindset

‘T he trouble with socialism is socialism,” said Willi Schlamm, a former National Review contributor. “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” Conservatives, confronting the conundrum of woke capitalism, have had especial reason to consider this adage of late. Examples have abounded, but one pithy expression of woke capitalism was a letter, signed by hundreds of corporations and executives and published in the New York Times in mid April, reflexively and baselessly condemning election-integrity legislation such as that passed by the Georgia legislature.

Among the signatories was McKinsey & Company, the consulting behemoth. Its employees are hired the world over, ostensibly to improve other organizations’ internal operations. But the true nature of the company, as well as its recent history, gives its presence on that list an irony dark enough to be worth singling out even among the many corporate hypocrites and virtue-signalers who signed that letter.

McKinsey is one of the premier firms in the consulting world, with annual revenue of $10 billion and 2,600 partners. Its business model is more or less that of a typical consulting firm: Its employees parachute in to an enterprise that has decided itself needful of improvement, study that enterprise’s operations and imbibe its goals, then advise it on how best to go about achieving those goals. With such a remit comes quite an ego; ergo, McKinsey employees, whether consciously or not, partake of the essence of a kind of technocratic capitalism that can be difficult to distinguish from its public-sector counterpart. “Its partners like to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room,” as The Economist put it. The best and the brightest, you might say. And with that tendency comes an inclination to view one’s fellow humans in the abstract, as cogs in various machines — projection, perhaps, on the part of many consultants who are themselves cogs in a machine.

Some consultants, I assume, are good people. Or at least one would hope so, given that the people in leadership roles in society seem increasingly cast from this mold. McKinsey alumni in government include Pete Buttigieg, Susan Rice, and even Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, a welcome traitor to his elite class. Maybe there is at times a need for their services. At other times, though, they can seem simultaneously arrogant and useless, showing up at a place they know nothing about, repeating back what they are told on-site, and then providing a pedigreed, credentialed gloss on marginal efficiency improvements or on the hiring (or firing) decisions a given organization’s executives hoped to make before they showed up. Think less Manhattan Project whiz kids and more the Bobs from Office Space. Unsurprisingly, champion meritocrat Pete Buttigieg excellently displayed this characteristic of the consultant mindset in the following exchange at his Senate confirmation hearing for Transportation secretary. Senator Ted Cruz asked him about President Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone pipeline:

“So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?” Cruz asked.

“The answer is we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones,” Buttigieg said.

This gets to the value-neutrality, and indeed, the soullessness, of what consulting can be at its worst: excellent at solving the problems before it, but lacking a substantive moral framework from which to do so. In his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, William Deresiewicz gets at a possible source of this amorality. As part of his broader diagnosis of why America’s meritocratic system has produced a coterie of ladder-climbers and résumé-builders who are trained to accumulate accomplishments and achievements for their own sake without quite understanding the purpose, save to succeed, Deresiewicz naturally focuses on the Ivy League, where many of these résumé robots (such as Buttigieg) end up. In his telling, when such individuals, forced finally to think of their lives as more than merely a series of rungs on a ladder to . . . something, confront the reality of postgraduate existence for the first time, they don’t know what to do. Fortunately for them, consulting firms are there to help them find their way, providing them with the kind of work and life they are by then familiar with:

Their recruiters descend upon elite campuses in force. They make it easy to apply — but they also make it hard to get selected, which is even better. The job looks great on your resume, and you aren’t foreclosing any options, since you can still do anything you want to after you leave. As for the work itself, it’s pretty much like college: rigorous analysis, integration of disparate forms of information, clear and effective communication. You don’t even have to have studied economics; firms are often happy to hire humanities majors. They’re looking only for exactly what the colleges were: intelligence, diligence, energy — aptitude. And of course, they offer you a lot of money.

Some of these hires leave for other things. But others stay a while, and many, regardless of their ultimate careers, imbibe the McKinsey mindset. Here’s the problem with that: “The meritocracy is also a technocracy,” says Deresiewicz. “It can solve the problems that you put in front of it, but it cannot tell you whether they’re the right ones to be working on.”

This might explain the embarrassing litany of truly egregious business decisions McKinsey has made in recent years. Most egregiously of all, the company inarguably exacerbated two of the most distressing trends of the 21st century. Inside the U.S., McKinsey was hired to help Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” sales of opioids, resulting in the opioid epidemic that has ended thousands of lives and destroyed or unsettled countless more. In February, the company agreed to a $600 million settlement with 47 states for its role in the epidemic. But don’t cry for McKinsey: Its stake in opioid-treatment businesses means it may profit off this as well.

Meanwhile, outside of the U.S., McKinsey has helped to facilitate the economic rise of China, in a manner beyond even the mere investment and engagement of other American companies with Chinese business. According to the New York Times, “In China, it has advised at least 22 of the 100 biggest state-owned companies — the ones carrying out some of the government’s most strategic and divisive initiatives.” One of McKinsey’s Chinese clients helped construct that nation’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, an obvious military venture. And perhaps most shocking, a few years ago some McKinsey employees attended a corporate retreat in Xinjiang Province, riding camels and relaxing in high-class resorts just a few miles away from Uyghur concentration camps.

Attacking the blindly technocratic mindset at the root of such moral lapses, Deresiewicz references the 1988 presidential election, which Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis claimed was not about ideology but about “competence.” George H. W. Bush, certainly an elite himself, responded aptly: “Competence makes the trains run on time but doesn’t know where they’re going.” One wonders if the McKinsey executives who attended this corporate retreat in Xinjiang saw the drone footage that emerged last summer of trains packed full of Uyghurs almost certainly headed to those concentration camps so near to where the execs once vacationed. One wonders if they cared.

Evidence for that is thin, aside from pro forma apologetic statements to that effect, and promises that the company “will be more thoughtful about such choices in the future.” For the Chinese regime is not the only shady government with which McKinsey has worked. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ukraine, and South Africa have also numbered among its clients; in many such instances, the company plunged its hand so deeply into the government’s filth that it became hard to tell them apart, as in South Africa, where the company became embroiled in a government-corruption scandal so bad that, in what was at least an implicit admission of wrongdoing, it had to restructure operations there.

The ubiquitous presence of McKinsey in the exigencies and vicissitudes of modern global capitalism has given critics of markets plenty of ammunition. Their criticism is hard to dispute concerning the behavior of the company itself. But it is at least worth noting that McKinsey’s technocratic conceit — its presumption of omniscience, entitling it to rule — may both predispose it to arrangements with governments, so often of similar mindsets, and encourage its employees to go into government themselves, where, in the modern bureaucratic state, the work is not all that dissimilar from that of a consulting firm. One might observe a meeting between McKinsey partners and government officials, looking “from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again,” and find that “already it was impossible to say which was which.”

For a company so successful, so omnipresent, it might be too much to expect a comeuppance. But one can at least take consolation from its bad press, which has indeed been bad enough that company head Kevin Sneader was ousted in February. Getting rid of one man on top, however, won’t do much to cancel out the company’s mistakes in recent years. Nor will it lessen the almost comical attempt to shore up its reputation by throwing in its lot with the Left: Working with authoritarian governments is fine, but reform of democratic voting procedures is a no-go. This is hardly the company’s only woke window-dressing; its newsletter and website are littered with the latest trendy left-wing bromides. It’s hard to believe that Sneader’s replacement will be significantly different, and those interested in seeing McKinsey further humbled shouldn’t expect much.

A commitment to free markets in the abstract does not oblige conservatives to defend McKinsey in particular, given what it has done. And much of what it has done proceeds from a technocratic mindset that can be hard to distinguish from government itself. So as the Right attempts to figure out what to do about woke capital, it should remember that the trouble with capitalism remains capitalists — especially the kind from McKinsey.