BOOK REVIEW: When McKinsey Comes to TownBy Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. Doubleday, New York, hard cover, 354 pp, with bibliography and index. US$32.50.
McKinsey & Company, the consulting company that got its start in 1926 at the hands of a University of Chicago economics professor to provide professional services to companies, governments, and occasionally even baseball teams, operates famously on a strict code of conduct as strict as the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. It requires dealing with clients with the highest professional standards, the firm says, creating a working environment that inspires and motivates its people to fulfill McKinsey’s responsibility to society, to managing risk to the firm and seeking advice and raising concerns. Those standards have carried its besuited, prim consultants to professional provide advice to save institutions across the earth, or so the legend goes, making it the oldest and biggest – and “the most well-known, most secretive, most high-priced, most prestigious, most consistently successful, most envied, most trusted, most disliked management consulting firm on earth. It is the biggest of the world’s strategy consulting firms by revenue, handing out advice that has saved flailing governments and corporations across the world. But in the hands of Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, who spent years covering the firm for the New York Times, and whose Times stories form the backbone of this book, it is as if Milo Minderbinder, the mad mess hall supply clerk of Joseph Heller’s dystopian novel Catch-22 who ended up building an omnivorous syndicate that contracted to fight World War II for both the Germans and the allies, bombing his own unit for profit, came home and founded a consulting company… The text above is just an excerpt from this subscriber-only story.To read the whole thing and get full access to Asia Sentinel's reporting and archives, subscribe now for US$10/month or US$100/year.This article is among the stories we choose to make widely available.If you wish to get the full Asia Sentinel experience and access more exclusive content, please do subscribe to us for US$10/month or US$100/year.
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BOOK REVIEW: When McKinsey Comes to Town
March 31, 2023
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