But why do we respect that name as a sign off?

What if a CEO said, “We're mortified to discover that we allegedly did a bad thing, but in our defense we did specifically check with the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ kid and he said it was A-OK and so you can't actually blame us".

I don’t find McKinsey any more credible than a child sticking his fingers in the mouth of a baby who is surprised when he gets bit.

It makes me ill writing this, but I believe it is due to the big consulting firms recruiting from elite academic institutions. Our primitive brains ascribe incredible value to institutions of any sort. Not that the universities are bad themselves of course, but that there is a belief in the general public that those graduates are smarter or better.

I think the issue there is that these new grads parachute into companies to advise top level executives, while have no real world experience on how business or people actually are in the real world. A lot of things sound great on paper when learning in the classroom, but don’t play out well in real life.

A consultant position should be one a person earns after spending 20 years in the industry, it is not something anyone should start out as.

Most of the big consultancies are also big accounting firms, where there is a fair amount of incentive for sign-offs to mean something, or at least have some serious risk if that sign-off isn't impartial or well researched.

I believe they try to project some of that earned trust to customers for the consulting side of the house. Though there is little, er, "accountability" for sign offs there.

Sounds like “Poor McKinzey, they have been scammed by their customers!”. No, they have not.

I feel like it's more joint enterprise in scamming everyone else. McKinsey says in writing what the client wants to hear ("poisioning people is just business"), the client gets to claim they were reliably told that poisoning a few million people was very legal and very cool.

No one ever got fired for hiring a consulting firm to check if a potentially risky strategy will make them money.

If it pays off, the fee doesn't matter because we made more money. If it lost money, well we did our due diligence so we were just unfortunate.

> Are they actually trusted to give independently good advice, or are they trusted to launder and expand on advice that leadership wants to hear but can't say themselves so that it can be plausibly deniable when it goes South?

It's both. There's some expectation that they aren't actively self-dealing... Besides the obvious expectation that they'd love to sell you further services. That's normal and expected, whereas them shilling for their other clients is not.

"Scapegoat as a service" is my favorite turn of phrase for that.