When McKinsey Comes to Town

Bogdanich and Forsythe, New York Times investigative reporters, examine McKinsey's work for specific clients and the consequences, based on internal documents, court filings and interviews with current and former partners.

The cases are the substance. The firm advised Purdue Pharma on increasing OxyContin sales, including proposals to target high-volume prescribers and to pay distributors rebates for overdoses, work for which McKinsey later paid nearly six hundred million dollars in settlements. It advised the Food and Drug Administration's drug division while also advising the pharmaceutical companies that division regulated. It advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement on detention cost reductions including cuts to food and medical care that the agency's own staff considered unsafe. It advised insurers including Allstate on claims handling in ways designed to reduce payouts to policyholders. It advised authoritarian governments including Saudi Arabia and China, in one case producing a report that identified critics of the Saudi government by name. It advised tobacco companies, coal producers and polluting industries while marketing its climate practice.

The institutional argument is that the firm's professed values and its actual conduct diverge, that the partnership's economics reward revenue generation, and that the confidentiality it maintains prevents any accountability for outcomes.

The book is adversarial and McKinsey has disputed characterisations of specific engagements. The documentary basis is strong and much of the Purdue material comes from litigation records. Read alongside Duff McDonald's more sympathetic institutional history.