Why Is McKinsey Publishing Articles for... Kids?
Why Is McKinsey Publishing Articles for... Kids?
’McKinsey for Kids’ shows how corporations use ’thought leadership’ to preserve and perpetuate their influence.
“You’re a kid. You’ve heard of McKinsey—maybe your parent even works here—yet you don’t quite get what we do all day. You’re not alone—many adults don’t either. Basically, we help solve problems.”
So begins “McKinsey for Kids,” a series of semi-interactive pages on the elite management consulting firm’s website. In my latest article, ‘McKinsey for Kids’: An Insidious Tool Kit for Spreading Corporate Influence, which was published in The American Prospect on Tuesday, I explore what McKinsey for Kids reveals about corporate “thought leadership”—the articles, videos, podcasts, surveys, studies, research reports, and other types of content that companies publish and promote.1
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In The Management Myth, the author and former management consultant Matthew Stewart describes much of the “discipline” of business strategy as “bundles of nonfalsifiable truisms”—arguments and predictions that are, if not pure speculation, either so obviously true or so generic as to be almost meaningless.2 It’s an apt description for a lot of corporate thought leadership. Yet the fact that many of these publications are devoid of insights doesn’t mean they’re devoid of impact.
McKinsey for Kids shows how published content serves companies in a number of ways. Stewart notes that a “crucial factor affecting the ability of consultants to perform their communication and discipline functions” for clients “is the widely shared conjecture that they are ‘experts’ in something or other.” I argue in the piece that McKinsey for Kids
combines glossy presentation with curated anecdotes that paint the firm in its ideal light—namely, as a company full of “smart, curious people” who “like helping people solve big problems.” And it makes pronouncements on a range of issues, from global trade to the circular economy to artificial intelligence, which convey competence, expertise, and foresight.
These self-serving narratives target not only current and prospective customers and clients, but also current and prospective employees.
In a 2011 essay that was later published posthumously in her book The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan discussed a peculiar story that many of her classmates had internalized from consulting and financial services firms. As Keegan wrote, “The narrative goes something like this: eventually, I want to save the world in some way. Right now, the best way for me to do that is to gain essential skills by working in this industry for a few years.”3 This narrative has proven to be an extraordinarily effective recruiting tool.
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Why should we care how a management consulting firm recruits employees or makes money? As the article argues, “Because McKinsey’s influence is everywhere, and what the firm does affects more aspects of our lives than we might like to admit.”
The average person might not be familiar with McKinsey, but the politicians who that person votes for? They know McKinsey. (The politicians who don’t subject themselves to elections? They know McKinsey, too.) The CEO of the company that person works for, the regulators and government officials they rely on, the university professor they learn from, the hospital system they visit, the financial institution they bank with, the big companies they buy cars and food and clothes from? They all know McKinsey.
One consequence of McKinsey’s power and reach has been an infusion of McKinsey-like thinking into different aspects of politics, culture, and society, from government agencies and corporate boardrooms that pay for its advice to media outlets that cite its research to business schools that regularly send a quarter of their graduates into consulting.
“The foundational message of McKinsey for Kids,” the author and writer Cory Doctorow noted Tuesday in a Twitter thread about the article, “is identical to the message of McKinsey itself: to save capitalism, we must capitalism harder.”4
It’s not just McKinsey. While the firm presents itself with more polish and prestige than perhaps any other company, its research and publication techniques are imitated across management consulting, law, finance, and public relations—to name just a few of the industries that look to McKinsey for inspiration. They all share
a similar goal: to keep things the way they are by portraying themselves as experts who care. Plenty of individual employees are experts and do care, of course, but their wants and wishes are ultimately subservient to the wants and wishes of the organizations and structures in which they work. And those organizations and structures will never allow care to impede profits.
That doesn’t mean care isn’t useful to them, though. The perception of care, like the perception of expertise, turns out to be a great way to preserve a highly lucrative business model. It taps into something fundamental. Don’t most of us crave some certainty and control in an uncertain and uncontrollable world? Don’t most of us wish for meaning and purpose in our work? Don’t most of us want to believe that we’re good people who are on the right side, doing the right thing?
People keep hiring McKinsey “because we’re scared,” Duff McDonald, author of The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, told me.5 “And McKinsey knows how to scare you talking out of one side of its mouth while promising to take care of you with the other. McKinsey sells advice, but they give away the fear for free.”
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You can read the full article in The American Prospect. Huge thanks to David Dayen and the team at the Prospect for publishing the piece (and for distilling a meaningful argument from the 5,700-word first draft I sent their way). And thanks as well to E.G., B.L., N.M., C.B., C.L., and M.J. for providing ideas and feedback.
Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy (2010).
Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories (2014).
Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business (2013). The Firm is essential reading for understanding McKinsey’s role in shaping present-day capitalism.