The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

The celebrated management consulting company exerts an influence that varies from benign to malign, according to this revealing, if conflicted, history. Financial journalist McDonald (Last Man Standing) traces McKinsey’s rise to the pinnacle of corporate advice peddling and its unique pretensions and privileges: its elitism, decades-long engagements and lucrative open-ended contracts; its symbiosis with the Harvard Business School, whose newly minted grads dole out wisdom to experienced executives under its auspices; its aura of intellectualism, which sometimes amounts to vague buzz phrases and invocations of “change”; its reliance on alumni who helm other companies and steer business its way. McDonald, a contributing editor at Fortune, can’t quite decide whether this is all good or bad, or whether he’s indifferent. He credits McKinsey with rationalizing business practices and forestalling corporate mistakes, but charges it with standing behind blunders and bankruptcies from Enron to GM; he wonders if the firm is less about helping companies make better products more efficiently than giving doctrinal cover to CEOs’ impulses to slash payrolls. McDonald combines a lucid chronicle of McKinsey’s growth and boardroom melodramas with a serviceable, if sometimes cursory analysis of evolving—or at least retreaded—management theories. But the larger import remains, like that of the corporate world it symbolizes, a contradictory muddle. Agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects. (Sept. 10)