You have an urgent problem, your stakeholders want change now, but you can get people off your back if you hire McKinsey.

Or, you know what you want to do already, but it’s a big change so you get McKinsey to sign off on it.

If it doesn’t go well you have cover ie we made the best possible decision we could - we hired McKinsey!

It's a good business model, kind of like hiring a flashy hairdresser that gives very expensive but often terrible haircuts - but when people are told that this famous stylist did it, they all just go 'ooooh...'

> His top deputy, Anthony Shorris, and other aides decided to hire a consulting firm. They solicited proposals from firms on a pre-approved list from the previous administration. Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract.

> The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.

Now that's a reason a deal like this actually makes sense! I give you $27m in taxpayer money, and when I leave, you give me $x in return. That's a deal that makes a lot more sense than paying 24 year old NYU grads to solve big problems with powerpoint and linear regressions.

Thanks. That would explain my perception that McKinsey has been trading on its reputation for the last 15 years at least.

At this point I'd only consider Bain, of the big three - and that's because I don't know much about them.

It's one of those system traps they liked to talk about: the industry is in decline, so the good people leave.

The Amazon apocalypse in retail made Global F2000 clients realize they needed to change how they treated tech. They wanted to buy, we found a way to sell it.

Do you have any examples?

A lot of basic statistical analysis, including regression of sales data, is no longer solely the domain of consultants. Similarly, cost level analysis (unit costs, profitability levers, margin analysis) is often done in-house via Financial Planning & Analysis teams.

The easiest sign of this is that many ex-consultants work in F500 companies so they bring their prior knowledge in-house.