UK Analysts Shred Global Consultancy Industry

In recent years, McKinsey & Co. has become a household name – but for all the wrong reasons.

Photo Insert: McKinsey agreed to pay nearly $600 million for its role in the deadly opioid epidemic in the US, following allegations that it had advised Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin.

One of the “Big Three” consulting firms, its work for major corporations and governments has increasingly become a source of scandal and intrigue around the world, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington wrote for Project Syndicate.

In the United States, for example, McKinsey agreed to pay nearly $600 million for its role in the deadly opioid epidemic, following allegations that it had advised Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin.

In Australia, the firm’s work on the previous government’s national net-zero strategy was criticized as a flagrant attempt to protect the country’s fossil-fuel industry. In Puerto Rico, a New York Times investigation found that McKinsey’s investment subsidiary, MIO Partners, was positioned to profit from the very same debt that its consultants were helping to restructure.

This list could go on and on. But as we show in our new book, “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps our Economies,” such scandals are only the tip of the iceberg. While there are a few bad apples in every company, the real problem lies with the consulting industry’s underlying business model.

Mazzucato is a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health For All and a co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water.

Collington is a Ph.D. candidate at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and is a co-author of “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments and Warps Our Economies.”

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