Big Business and Bureaucracies Outsource Their Work to McKinsey
The U.S. consulting firm provides an arbitrarily wide range of services to nearly every large corporation and government in the world. Its ubiquity is a consequence and sign of institutional decay.
McKinsey & Company is the world’s largest and most important management consulting firm, with 45,000 employees and $16 billion in annual revenue.1 Headquartered in New York City’s Financial District, the U.S. firm consults for many if not most of the world’s largest and most important companies in practically every field of business, from banking to aircraft manufacturing to healthcare. To a lesser extent, McKinsey also provides similar consulting services to governments, at various times including arms of the U.S., Chinese, and various national European governments.2 Generally, McKinsey keeps its clients and the projects it undertakes for them confidential. At the same time, the company is so prolific that most large multinational corporations and government agencies have likely been McKinsey clients at one point or another. In government, known examples include everyone from the U.S. Department of Defense to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In business, everyone from Saudi Aramco to IBM.