This. They also hire very smart people and they may well have the smartest people in the room at client meetings, so they have credibility.

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...'

This may not be the best forum for my question, but do people actually hire flashy but awful (or inconsistent) hairdressers?

Yes.

That is the standard little speech that I hear often repeated by McK employees. Like, "LOL, we don't do much, but we honestly try, but bureaucracy gets in the way." It's cute and funny on the surface, but I think it stops being funny when someone dives in deep and sees incentives that make a lot more sense than some nebulous concept of "political cover."

> 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.