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How McKinsey lost its edge
As it nears 100, is the world’s most illustrious consultancy past its prime?
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The scandals of the past decade, like profiting from ill-gotten contracts with state-owned companies in South Africa, tarnished McKinsey’s public image.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
“Business has been forced to adjust itself to staggering acceleration in the rate of change,” observed McKinsey, a consultancy, in a promotional pamphlet it published in 1940. “What period in history has ever presented more difficult problems for the executive?” Naturally, demand for McKinsey’s advice was soaring, it wrote.
These, too, are times of upheaval. Geopolitics is forcing companies to rethink where and how they operate. Artificial intelligence (AI) is filling bosses with excitement at the opportunity to replace costly humans with bots, and fear that their business models may be disrupted. And yet McKinsey, the most illustrious of consultancies, finds itself in the doldrums.
