One of the reasons that the Left, typically seen as opposed to big business, has trouble truly reckoning with the malevolence of McKinsey is that the consulting firm is deeply implicated in things it holds dear. That includes more than just the top-down, technocratic mindset that helps keep the revolving door between it and our bureaucratic state spinning. It also encompasses some of the ways that left-wing ideology has infiltrated business. As I wrote last year, in response to Garrison Lovely, a McKinsey “whistleblower” on the left whose welcome condemnations fell short of their full potential:
Lovely would have us believe that political leftism is incompatible with the status quo McKinsey serves. But it is not just compatible with the status quo; in much of society, and, increasingly, even in business, it is the status quo. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has run rampant in the workplace (encouraged by McKinsey); environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics have conquered the stock market (at McKinsey’s urging). These are not corporations succumbing to “the pressure to rationalize every decision based on its impact on shareholder value,” as Lovely described them. Rather, they have gone out of their way to establish political profiles that tend to one direction. See also the businesses (including McKinsey) that baselessly condemned Georgia’s recent election-integrity laws. It’s not hard to find more evidence that McKinsey has bought into other leftist shibboleths. Here you can read about the firm’s commitment to provide “development in the context of an identity-based experience.” Perhaps this is just window-dressing, a ploy to distract those who would otherwise apply scrutiny. If so, however, consider what it means that prevailing political incentives almost always point one way.
In City Journal, National Review alumnus John Hirschauer has more evidence of how McKinsey helps bring leftism into the office — and how it is likely doing so deceptively. In 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023, the consulting firm produced studies that allegedly proved companies prosper by having more diverse leadership. But a recent paper by academics Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand that analyzed the data on which McKinsey based its first three diversity studies (which it refused to hand over to the paper’s authors, forcing them to reverse-engineer it themselves) found the studies seriously lacking. As Hirschauer puts it, “Green and Hand not only were unable to replicate the studies’ findings; they also found that each of the three studies had analyzed the data backward.” I.e., already-successful companies decided to improve their internal diversity; they were not made successful by their diversity.
If they’re right, they have provided yet more evidence of how McKinsey helps the Left (and dishonestly at that), given the way the Left has hijacked diversity as a means to impose its political preferences. And they’ve provided yet more evidence of why, as I have written before, “a commitment to free markets in the abstract does not oblige conservatives to defend McKinsey in particular.”