A recent condemnation of McKinsey gets some things right but shows why left-wing criticisms of the odious consultancy tend to fall short.
A recent condemnation of McKinsey gets some things right but shows why left-wing criticisms of the odious consultancy tend to fall short.
I t’s not often that National Review and left-wing journal the Nation come close to agreeing. But on the subject of McKinsey, the globe-bestriding consulting firm, the Nation comes intriguingly close to having a point. In “Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower,” published earlier this month, ex-McKinseyite Garrison Lovely laments his time at the firm and condemns its influence:
McKinsey’s recruiting materials offer you the chance to “Change the world. Improve lives.” Naïve as it seems in hindsight, I came to McKinsey believing those words. But after a year and a half there, I eventually understood that not only does McKinsey fail to make the world better — it often colludes with those who make the world worse.
There isn’t anything here that contradicts my own negative assessments of McKinsey. Indeed, Lovely gets much about the firm right. Unfortunately, his case, in the Nation and earlier in Current Affairs, suffers from certain defects when it comes to the firm’s employees, its place in the status quo, and its relationship with governments, including our own. Taken together, these defects show why the Left will never truly be able to see McKinsey for what it is or confront it properly.
Start with Lovely’s analysis of the typical McKinsey employee. He is right that the firm depends on recruits from elite universities for the legion of advisers it dispatches to its various clients. They are often “‘insecure overachievers,’ a type of striving neurotic endemic to the Ivy League campuses that feed McKinsey’s halls,” who have “jumped through every hoop to sit at the commanding heights of society.” Obsessed with prestige and success but also vaguely persuaded that they should be engaged in some kind of “service” to the world, they are easy prey for McKinsey’s gauzy combination of altruistic marketing with ruthless execution.
But Lovely fails to reckon with how our elite institutions are producing such amoral individuals. If the ideals supposedly animating our higher-education system either do not survive contact with reality, or are never actually transmitted in the first place, then there must be something seriously wrong with that system. The collapse, at most colleges, of a true liberal-arts education into empty navel-gazing or relentlessly of-the-moment political activism has deprived it of true transcendent meaning. Add in the rise of “safe” majors, useful for résumé robots afraid of boxing themselves in, and you’ve got the makings of a radical circumscription of post-collegiate possibility. “Elite students are told they can be whatever they want,” William Deresiewicz writes in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, “but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things.” By acknowledging that McKinsey draws its best recruits from these environs, Lovely seems to understand, on at least some level, that the schools are at fault here. But implicit in his call to ban consulting firms from campuses, or at least to better inform students about them, is the idea that students and their schools are merely victims. To admit that schools are complicit in McKinsey’s prosperity would be to condemn those schools as well, something Lovely can’t quite bring himself to do.
If anything, Lovely — by his own admission, a product of the Ivy-to-McKinsey pipeline — would emphasize that his education was at odds with the world he entered. Fancying himself a “leftist firebrand,” he co-founded a prison-reform group as an undergraduate. In supposed stark contrast with this is McKinsey, which is “capitalism distilled.” It is “global, mobile, flexible,” “unabashedly pro-market and pro-management,” “an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over.” It holds “an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are.”
There are a couple of assumptions implicit in this argument. All are flawed. The first is that McKinsey represents the essence of capitalism. Yes, some of the firm’s worst sins, such as its supercharging of the opioid epidemic, can reflect a market logic shorn of all moral concern. And its best and brightest often merely ratify the more brutal corporate bloodletting a given client was planning anyway. But typically, McKinsey offers, in Lovely’s own description, a kind of “technocratic incrementalism” that does not capture the innovation of which markets are capable. Minor productivity gains cannot compare with the paradigm shifts of new technologies or novel ways of doing things. Lovely is right, in a sense, that McKinsey is a force in favor of the status quo. But the true power of markets is to change and improve the status quo, not to preserve it.
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.
Thus, the third assumption: that McKinsey is some kind of anti-government force. Not so. It is not only responding to government incentives in the aforementioned areas. It is also coming to resemble the state, which helps explain the pipeline that fills our politics with Pete Buttigiegs. By viewing a caricature of capitalism as the aggressor and McKinsey as its agent, Lovely gets this half-right. But he can’t see that McKinsey is so readily compatible with the modern bureaucratic state because the modern bureaucratic state, as captured by the Left, has influenced it.
Still, Lovely has a point that the intermingling of governments and McKinsey has been disastrous. In his view, the result of its centrality to the market is to have “made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires.” That the state has continued to expand in the U.S. undercuts the first half of this argument. That McKinseyized businesses often prefer rent-seeking and minor efficiency gains over genuine innovation affirms the second half. Here again, however, Lovely’s precepts prevent him from true castigation. He condemns McKinsey’s complicity in things every functioning state must do and overlooks its complicity in things only tyrannies attempt.
One of Lovely’s consulting gigs involved reducing violence at New York’s Rikers Island prison. He claims to have realized now that it was a doomed effort because there were more people in prison than there should have been. “Trying to solve that problem without looking at cash bail, prosecutorial discretion, mandatory minimums, and the war on drugs, is like trying to solve a 1,000 piece puzzle with 500 pieces and the wrong box: You may think you understand the problem, but you’re missing way too many pieces.” Doubtless there are improvements that can be made to our prison system; Lovely’s account that McKinsey is not the one to provide them is persuasive. But if your response to our prison-system problems, amid rising crime rates that disproportionately harm minority communities, is to toy with prison-abolition-lite, you are the one missing some puzzle pieces.
Lovely similarly describes another of his consulting gigs: working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration. At first, he was compliant. Eventually, however, he protested the agency and came to believe it should be abolished. In his view, it “provides no social value and mostly serves to terrorize immigrants.” And to him, Trump’s administration, of course, is “white nationalist,” presumably for daring to have an immigration policy at all. Doubtless there were abuses; we covered them at the time. But the notion that nations have borders and should control them is a recognition, contra pure capitalism, that they are not merely collections of consumers, something Bernie Sanders once recognized. Something like ICE will have to exist unless our nation is to have no borders at all.
At the same time that Lovely attacks essential functions of government in the U.S., he lets other governments and McKinsey’s interactions with them off easy. Yes, he does usefully catalogue business arrangements the firm has entered with corrupt regimes in South Africa and Saudi Arabia. And he does point out that typical McKinsey consultants and government officials have become so similar that, as George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, one could, witnessing a meeting between them, look “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.” But his harshest ire is reserved for our own government. During his Rikers job, he recalls having asked a superior that if McKinsey only implements directives, then “what would have stopped us from helping Nazis more efficiently procure barbed wire for their concentration camps?” He similarly observes in Current Affairs that McKinsey’s internal ethics (such as they are) would “not have prohibited it from helping Bayer optimize its production of Zyklon B [the preferred chemical agent for execution in Nazi concentration camps].”
Lovely need not consider the hypothetical. McKinsey is assisting a totalitarian, genocidal regime right now. 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 clients helped construct China’s obviously military-use artificial islands in the South China Sea. More recent reporting has revealed that McKinsey worked with even more Chinese-government clients than was previously known, including a drone-maker that the Treasury Department has since deprived of access to the American market. McKinsey employees even attended a corporate retreat in Xinjiang Province, riding camels and relaxing in fancy resorts mere miles from Uyghur concentration camps. All of this is abhorrent; Lovely, to his discredit, mentions none of it.
These defects render his overall analysis flawed and point to why a proper condemnation of McKinsey will not come from the left. Uncomfortable overlaps in personnel, worldview, and priorities mean that the Left and McKinsey are simply too bound up in one another for this to be possible.
Despite the flaws of his criticism, however, Lovely still gets many things right. His call for government investigation of McKinsey is welcome, though there is reason to doubt the ability of the state to do much about this problem beyond revealing more information. Keeping McKinsey off school campuses, or at least informing students better about its liabilities, is also a reasonable step, even though it still reflects his view of academia as a passive rather than active agent here. He might consider that disentangling McKinsey from the state and restoring the state to its proper functions and limitations are, in fact, connected imperatives.
Lingering quibbles aside, Lovely’s ultimate goal — “a full de-McKinsey-fication of society” — remains a worthy one. Conservatives should welcome his call for an end to what Edmund Burke would have recognized as an age of hypertrophied “sophisters, economists, and calculators” that McKinsey undergirds. Lovely and I may disagree on how best to make time at McKinsey “a source of shame” for the résumé robots. But we at least agree that it is eminently necessary. When National Review and the Nation can almost agree on something, you know it’s time to get to work.