This was excellent but somewhere I imagine a room of lawyers and McKinsey execs were somewhat relieved to read it. It lacked a real knockout blow, and some of the content was almost discrediting to the authors.

There’s a fair amount of late-capitalism, bad corporation stuff. Companies hire McKinsey to help them deliver more value to shareholders, and often the workers are the victims. This isn’t at all revelatory, even if it’s frustrating. This is covered quickly and effectively early in the book.

There are several chapters in the middle that reveal ways that McKinsey’s actions contradict their values – working against the Affordable Care act, working with ICE during the Trump border detainment debacles, etc. This caused a lot of internal strife among the McKinsey rank and file, which is interesting to read about.

There are several examples of governments enlisting McKinsey to deliver terrible policy advice for exorbitant fees, while also working for the companies which benefit from these policies. Governments are not businesses and should not be run by the same principles, but we’re still learning that the hard way.

The meat of the book, in my opinion, documents McKinsey’s involvement with objectively unethical, and sometimes illegal mandates for big tobacco, Purdue Pharma, Allstate and Enron, among others. The stories here are shocking but not surprising, and all end on some variation of “McKinsey apologised/paid a fine/fired a couple people and promised never to do it again”.

There are several pages devoted to the Houston Astros cheating, which I liked reading but found irrelevant and somewhat damaging to the thesis of the book.

Overall the book is a good read — if you don’t know McKinsey or the world in which they operate, much of this will be eye-opening and enraging. At this point in America’s history though, it all feels depressingly unsurprising, part-and-parcel of How America Does Business. There is some hope in the form of moral, idealistic younger employees who abhor the ‘growth at all costs’ mantra and are vocal about it. Maybe this will incite more revealing and damning exposes, in the way that Dopesick and Pain Killer opened the door for books like Empire of Pain.