Sometimes, though if you go through my other posts this comes up quite often for me, the news cycle (here the involvement of McKinsey in the destruction of the french public service and Macron’s ties with it) and the release of this book.

This book is extremely thorough in its investigation of McKinsey involvement in destroying lives all around the world while trying to maintain good figure by always saying their values protect them from doing harm (think Google’s Don’t Be Evil, with the same efficiency) AND saying that they are only doin execution and not policy. While acting as a think tank and pushing cookie cutter neoliberal policies as their main production.

It is good. In an infuriating kind of way. Don’t expect to fly through the book. It can be heavy. And chapter after chapter, examples after examples, industries after industries, layoffs after layoffs, the rage piles on.

That was extremely eye opening to me. Having done an MBA and pondered for some time joining them or BCG, I am happy that my red flags detectors worked out 6-7 years ago.

On the negative sides, even though the chapters kinds of build upon each other, they are still pretty much independent. And they follow a similar structure which might be due to the fact that both authors are primarily journalists/reporters. They would work great as independent long-form articles (some of them seem to have emerged from such articles) but they don’t roll as much as would/should feel natural in a book.

On a personal note, the chapter on Enron/Baseball almost made me drop the book. It’s a perfect mix of the topics I don’t give a single f*ck about.

Final word

Recommanded. But pick and read or use it as a manual. Choose your chapters and rage.