Fair take, but you'd be hard pressed to find much resemblance to any advice McK gives to its own practices.

Pre-AI, I always said McK is good at analysis, if you need complicated analysis done, hire a consulting firm.

If you need strategy, custom software, org design, etc. I think you should figure out the analysis that needs to be done, shoot that off to a consulting firm, and then make your decision.

IME, F500 execs are delegation machines. When they wake up every morning with 30 things to delegate, and 25 execs to delegate to, they hire 5 consulting teams. Whether you hire Mck, or Deloitte, or Accenture will only come down to:

1. Your personal relationships

2. Your company's policies on procurement

3. Your budget

in that order.

McK's "secret sauce" is that if you, the exec, don't like the powerpoint pages Mck put in front of you, 3 try-hard, insecure, ivy-league educated analysts will work 80 hours to make pages you do like. A sr. partner will take you to dinner. You'll get invited to conferences and summits and roundtables, and then next time you look for a job, it will be easier.

Analysis of what? What does that mean? What's something you conceivably would need a consulting firm to "analyze?" I don't understand why management consulting firms would hire software people in the first place, and then punish them for not being on a client-facing project. That seems a bit contradictory to me, but this is all way out of my wheelhouse

Analysis:

1. How do I build a datacenter

2. How is the industrial ceramic market structured, how do they perform

3. How does a changing environment impact life insurance

Strategy:

1. Should I build a datacenter

2. Should I invest in an industrial ceramics company

3. Should I divest my life insurance subsidiary

Specifically in the software world this would be "automate some esoteric ERP migration" or "build this data pipeline" vs. "how can we be more digital native" or "how do we integrate more AI into our company"

These look like questions you would give to AI in 2026.

They are.

The problem is AI isn't CYA quality (yet) to your board.

For instance, what would we need to start offering siracha in our burger?

This can be simplified further: "Don't hire McKinsey." ;-)

The only people who hire McKinsey are execs who are even more clueless than the consultants.

The executives who hire McKinsey are often not clueless, but they often lack the political power in the company to push through their plans. So they hire some well-regarded business consultancy to get an "objective" analysis what needs to be done.

How can it be that what you just wrote is such a widely known fact? I've been reading this and hearing this from consultancy people as well for many years now. If the guy lacks the political power, why don't his internal political opponents say, "nice try hiring the consultants, but we know this trick very well, you still don't get it your way".

It has to be some kind of higher level protection racket or something. Like if you hire the consultants there is some kind of kickbacks to the higherups or something with more steps involved where those who previously opposed it will now accept it if it's rubberstamped by the consultants.

Or perhaps those other players who are politically opposing this person are just dummies and don't know about this trick and actually trust the consultants. Or maybe it's a bit of a check, that you can't get anything and everything rubberstamped by the consultants, so it is some kind of sanity filter that the guy isn't proposing something that only benefits himself and screws everyone else.

And if it's the latter, then it is genuine value, a somewhat impartial second opinion. Basically there is a fog-of-war for all the execs regarding all the internal politics going on, it's not like they see through everything all the time and simply refuse to take the obviously correct decision for no reason.

if you don't have sufficient political clout or influence, you seek sponsorship or backing from others with it to accrue more influence for your idea. You can pay consultants to agree with your idea and produce pretty charts and whitepapers for it.

The question is, why does anyone take the word of a company seriously which will agree with any idea if you pay them? After several iterations of this game (decades by now), someone would surely say "nah, we don't care about these charts and whitepapers, we know that the company who made them will agree with anything for money, so it's still a NO"

My hunch is that in fact they won't agree with just any idea. There is a limit to how extreme the idea can get, though probably the filter is indeed weak. Still, without this filter, people would propose even wilder ideas that maximize their own expected payoff at the expense of other players, so just the fact that it has to be signed off by an external party is still enough information for the powerful decision makers that they are willing to fund their services.

Nah. They're conflicted and goal seek backwards from your wacky vision.

Look at NEOM in Saudi.

McKinsey took 130M in a year to recommend a 500B investment in a 105 mile city in the desert. Sunk 50B and project was revised to take 50 years and 8 trillion.

It's impressive salesmanship how they were able to bilk such a large sum and support interim approvals for the regime to launder favors. I can see people wanting that "conflict."

There's a sort of prisoner's dilemma. If you make a fuss you'll get branded as anti-progress and sidelined. If you put your head down and just do what you're told you're a team player and will probably survive.

Aside, there's a lot of stuff online re McKinsey. I suggest searching HN plus also search "Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower" in your fave web search engine.

My favourite was the LRB article "When McKinsey comes to town" -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800

In my experience, McKinsey often gets brought in from the very top - who should be able to push through more or less what they want. They just want a scapegoat in case things go wrong.

The version I've heard is that you can pin the blame on the consultants if it goes wrong.

This is also true.