All Episodes
Previous Next
July 10, 2023 - Louder with Crowder
31:50
MCKINSEY UNCOVERED: INSIDE THE WORLD'S MOST SINISTER COMPANY
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
What exactly is McKinsey & Company?
It's the world's top consulting firm.
It serves 80 of the Fortune 100 companies.
The McKinsey & Company's client list is full of bad actors, domestic, authoritarian, foreign regimes, communist state-owned enterprises.
But given the firm you represent has played a not-so-insignificant role in things like the opioid crisis... They operate at the expense of someone you know.
What would your advice be to the 2,000 workers that are supposed to be terminated?
Some of the cost-cutting initiatives even quite literally led to death.
As it entered a tunnel, the train derailed.
And they must be exposed at every opportunity.
$10 billion in annual profit, control over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, and unparalleled influence over the world's most powerful governments.
If I ask you to name the most powerful companies in the world, some names would probably spring to mind.
Pfizer, BlackRock, Berkshire Hathaway, even the Umbrella Corporation.
Commitment, honesty, integrity.
But what if I were to tell you that you're missing one?
That there's another company just as powerful, just as big, and even more nefarious.
One with which my very own team was actually lucky enough to spend some personal time.
Why should we actually believe that two representatives from McKinsey care about the well-being of the American worker?
I think you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to take what we've shared today as helpful.
If that exchange seems a little confusing, you probably need a little backstory.
Enter McKinsey & Company.
Who are they?
What do they do?
The fact that most of us have to ask that question means that we are behind the eight ball in a big way in understanding the incredibly destructive impact that McKinsey & Company, remember that name McKinsey & Company, has inflicted upon the American people.
So, to grasp this, let's start with the front, okay?
The part that you probably have seen.
Think of a storefront, and stay with me here.
A lot of it has been presented under this guise of consulting.
That's a fun word.
Anyone who spends time on social media has likely seen one of these day-in-the-life videos from people in the consulting world.
And it's thrust into your feed mercilessly without your consent.
In life as a consultant in New York City, here we go.
Start my day off with a workout, getting ready.
Get a sandwich packed.
Pretty casual today for the office.
This is the office.
Again, not many people come in, but that's okay.
A quick coffee break, snack break.
Then went in this breakout room to kind of just get some work done.
Pray for my posture, please.
More snacks.
Now to a meeting room for a meeting to close the day out.
Now these videos are meant to romanticize the consulting, I'll keep doing this, consulting industry and attract applicants from the nation's top business schools.
They want you to think that their consulting world is a lot like this.
When in reality, the consulting world is more like this.
Crap, sorry, wrong clip.
I mean more like this.
Yeah, Bob is a consultant.
In a nutshell, consulting firms give advice and direction to companies focused entirely on maximizing shareholder
profits.
So, that's the boring part.
Really, at the end of the day, consulting firms are at best professionally useless, and at worst, and most likely, actively destroying America, or the country you live in.
According to a former management consultant who spoke exclusively with our team here, the way it works is upper management will have a pet project they're afraid to back, so they hire a consulting firm to push said pet project.
Consulting firms are then hired to give the client what they want at the end of the day.
90% of what consultants provide is information the business already knows.
Consultants spend 50% of their time justifying their existence to clients, which means they aren't really doing anything 50% of the time.
Just a lot of waste and bloat.
Now some of you would say that that's a mischaracterization.
Fair.
So I would ask you, do these professional broads strike you as useless?
So our workforce is only becoming more diverse.
Inclusion is only going to matter more.
And so we really need our people, leaders, to lean into this.
It feels like hard work sometimes, and moving cultures is hard work.
A lot of times though, moving sort of, what I think of as like micro-cultures, right?
The culture on your team, the culture on a project.
That can move a lot faster than people often think or than people sort of give it credit for.
So showing up with a different set of behaviors and encouraging it in others can pretty quickly move the needle for any individual's experience.
The answer is yes.
We'll go back to those two lovely ladies who happen to be partners for McKenzie in a little bit.
But first, what exactly is McKinsey and Company?
Why should you care?
How does it affect you?
All right.
It's the world's top consulting firm.
It was founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey.
It has 90 offices in 50 countries.
It serves There's 80 of the Fortune 100 companies as well as national governments.
That's important.
We'll come back to that.
$10 billion in annual profit.
That's more than $1 million per hour.
And key McKinsey & Company alumni include Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Alphabet CEO, that means Google and YouTube.
Sundar Pichai, gross, I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Former Meta COO, Sheryl Sandberg, that's formerly Facebook.
And everyone's favorite resident gay, Pete Buttigieg.
Butt gig.
So McKinsey and Company's client list is full of bad actors, domestic, foreign, private, and public.
You remember Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the company who actually did play a role in the legitimate opioid epidemic in the 2000s?
And I know that's a third rail, people have blown it out of proportion, but Purdue, OxyContin, right?
There was a problem.
McKinsey, Advise consulted Purdue on how to increase the sales of the OxyContin pill right in the middle of that epidemic.
It was McKinsey who advised the company how to sell high-dose pills even after Purdue.
Pleaded guilty to misleading regulators and doctors.
Now between 1999 and 2021, deaths involving opioid prescriptions, and this is important because I understand that the opioid epidemic, a lot of it, most of it has to do with street drugs.
But opioid prescription deaths, rose from less than $5,000 a year to more than $16,000 per year.
Which is why in 2021, McKinsey settled to pay nearly $600 million for their role in the epidemic.
That's a lot of nuts!
I don't want to focus on that so much as the fact that there's a huge conflict of interest.
McKinsey not only advises these kinds of companies, But at the same time, the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be overseeing them.
For example, they were advising Juul on how to sell vapes.
You're an adult, if you want to use a Juul, fine.
But they were also advising the FDA on how to regulate vaping and nicotine while collecting checks from both.
Greed, for lack of a better word.
And the part that really grinds my gears, or would, if I was an early 19th century version of what we imagined a robot to be, is that McKinsey advises authoritarian foreign regimes and communist state-owned enterprises.
An example, in 2016, McKinsey helped the Saudi government intimidate, arrest, and jail dissidents.
McKinsey had prepared a nine-page report measuring the public perception of certain Saudi economic policies and cited three individuals who were driving much of the largely negative coverage on Twitter.
A Saudi Arabia-based writer named Khalid al-Alqami, a dissident living in Canada, named Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous writer.
After the report was created, Al-Elkami, say that three times fast, was arrested and Abdulaziz's brothers living in Saudi Arabia were put in prison.
The anonymous Twitter channel was shut down.
Abdulaziz also says that his brothers, friends, associates in Saudi Arabia have been arrested and tortured, including electrocution, waterboarding, and his younger brother may have even had his teeth pulled out.
Now if that doesn't do it, McKinsey has also worked with Chinese state-owned companies.
Now when I say that, what I mean to say is the Communist Chinese Party.
They were working for a company called China Communications Construction Company.
And this is the company that did a lot of work building the islands in the South China Sea, these artificial islands that China is militarizing and is making the South China Sea into basically what could become a Chinese lake.
This is, you know, very much a problem for U.S.
foreign policy, for the U.S.
Navy.
Yet, at the same time, McKinsey's also been doing consulting work for the Pentagon and for the U.S.
Navy.
McKinsey's consulting contracts with the federal government give it an insider's view of U.S.
military planning, intelligence, and high-tech weapons programs.
But the firm also advises Chinese state-run enterprises that have supported Beijing's naval buildup in the Pacific and played a key role in China's efforts to extend its influence around the world, according to an NBC News investigation.
Some official Chinese representatives weighed in on the report.
Compelling.
By the way, if you enjoy this, you may consider tuning in Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.
Eastern, right here on YouTuber Rumble, where we do a daily show that covers the entire spectrum.
But it's a comedy show.
Today's a little more serious.
Now, here's the issue.
You can serve the American consumer and working man or woman or Z, or The Saudi Arabian government or the Communist Chinese Party.
You can't serve all of these masters.
Which master is more powerful?
Which one is dangling a bigger carrot?
And McKinsey and company, as consultants, have potentially irreparably wrecked the American middle class.
Look what you did, you little jerk!
Now, to be clear, I'm pro-business, okay?
There's nothing wrong with doing good business or making a profit.
The difference is that starting in the 1970s, McKinsey & Company focused exclusively on shareholder profits with conflicts of interest, advised companies to hyper-concentrate management functions among elite executives.
I'm the company now.
And production workers were also stripped of basic managerial functions.
Downsizing happens, but this wasn't the result of market forces, business conditions, or even necessity, but a new managerial worldview from the top down.
McKinsey partner John Newman wrote about the new business strategy in his memoir, saying, The process, though swift, is not painless.
Since overhead expenses are typically 70 to 85 percent people-related, and most savings come from workforce reductions, cutting overhead does demand some wrenching decisions.
Now, when IBM took their consulting into account and decided to remove lifetime employment, the officials there asked gun store owners near the headquarters to close their shops while, quote, employees absorbed the shock.
So a lot of jobs gone forever that never come back, right?
And that hurts upward mobility, class mobility, pay discrepancy.
But here's the thing.
It hurts class mobility.
Because of a company with a worldview beholden to foreign governments who do not believe in the value of class mobility.
According to the former consultant, who spoke with us exclusively, the mentality pushed by McKinsey et al.
is definitely a contributing factor to the demise of the middle class.
It pushed the idea that you have these uber-powerful CEOs commanding the entire firm from the top and hollowed out the middle management.
And this is a super important point, okay?
There's a big difference between business owners—small, medium, even large business owners—and CEOs.
CEOs may have had nothing to do with starting a company.
They may not own that company at all.
They are installed, glorified managers.
And in the 1960s, this was largely recognized, and CEOs made about 20 times more than basic lower-end production workers.
Today, it's about 300 times more.
And who played a large role in making this fundamental shift?
You guessed it.
Over nearly a century of work, McKinsey, they argue, has been instrumental in shaping parts of American society, from offshoring to securitized debt to CEO compensation.
One issue that is really troubling in this country, I think everyone would agree, is inequality.
And McKinsey has contributed mightily to that.
Going back, for instance, to 1950, when one of their consultants decided to look at how much executives were making versus how much the workers were making.
And he concluded that, well, the workers are catching up, so maybe the corporations ought to figure out ways to pay the leaders more.
Every year they built on that, more and more and more.
And executives, the gap between what the leaders were making of corporations and the workers kept growing and growing and growing over the years.
Some of the cost-cutting initiatives that have come from McKinsey & Company have even quite literally led to deaths.
In 1997, McKinsey advised Disneyland California to undertake a series of revisions in its maintenance department, including Cut the budget by a quarter.
Cut the number of supervisors by half.
Cut the number of managers by a quarter.
Move the majority of maintenance to the graveyard shift.
And here's the problem.
You can still be pro-free enterprise and understand needing to streamline a business while recognizing the devastating effect on the American middle class that has been inflicted by companies who are setting out nebulous arbitrary rules.
Cut it by a quarter.
Cut the number of supervisors by half.
Even though they don't understand the business model and may never have set foot on the grounds of said business, but are collecting money from all different directions, none of whom share the same values.
There's a big difference.
That is not free enterprise.
One former Disney mechanic noted the issues.
That the changes caused, saying, we could have three rides down at any one time while the park was open.
One time, Indiana Jones went down for a dead vehicle.
We responded to that.
It was a computer problem.
Then Peter Pan goes down.
The supervisor said, go to Peter Pan.
Leave Indiana Jones alone.
When we got there, people were hanging in the air on Peter Pan.
Now for reference, when hanging in the air onto a poorly maintained ride, happy thoughts do nothing.
And sometimes those riots go wrong.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
You can clap as much as you want and believe as strongly as you can.
A fairy's not going to show up.
Sprinkle some dust and save you.
Here's another example, September 2003.
Disneyland's big Thunder Mountain malfunctioned, injuring ten people and, unfortunately, killing one.
When a ride mechanic failed to tighten two bolts on the wheel of a popular ride at Disneyland, and a manager failed to check the work was done before signing it off, it would set off a chain of events that would lead to disaster, with multiple injuries and one rider even losing his life.
Now OSHA blamed poor safety protocols and poor training for the ride's malfunction.
The same protocols Which were a direct result of McKenzie's consultations, this company who probably has no business running a theme park.
There's a former mechanic at the park.
He described an interaction that he saw between one of their supervisors and a McKenzie representative.
That must have been a fun day.
When the consultant asked why the mechanics bothered checking the lap bars on Big Thunder Daily when records showed that they had never failed, the supervisor reacted with disbelief.
The reason they don't fail, he said, is because we check them every night.
Let's contrast the McKinsey & Company representative versus a business owner.
The business owner might ask his employee, if it is his own business, hey, why don't we do it this way?
Can we automate it?
If the employee says, actually, the reason we haven't had any failures is because this system ensures safety.
Oh, great.
I don't want anyone to die.
It's my business and I probably won't have any more customers.
There is no accountability connection.
Or incentive, long-term, for McKinsey & Company to look out for this company, that person, more than the next company.
Or communist government.
That's not free enterprise.
And the biggest issue with firms like McKinsey is the elites in their ranks, they're so far removed from the consequences of their consulting that they don't really have sympathy for real-world outcomes.
The late Steve Jobs understood this.
All too well, and he was a fruitarian.
So how many from consulting?
Oh, that's bad.
You should do something.
By the way, quick note, McKinsey & Company obviously has their claws, probably, right here if you're watching on YouTube, I'd recommend going to Rumble, but leave a comment or share this, hit like, it helps with the algorithm.
Okay, uphill battle no matter where you go.
Now that we're all caught up on what a piece of s*** company, I use that word loosely, McKinsey, is, let's rewind a little, a little bit.
So our workforce is only becoming more diverse.
Inclusion is only going to matter more.
And so we really need our people leaders to lean into this.
Now these two handsome individuals are Diana Ellsworth and Monet, spelled with two N's, Williams.
Both self-proclaimed members of the LGBTQ plus rated community.
Diana is a partner.
At McKinsey's Atlanta office, according to her company profile, Diana leads McKinsey's diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
DEI, familiar with it?
Directs initiatives focused on establishing inclusive, productive workplace cultures that support greater collaboration and innovation from a diverse workforce.
Remember earlier with that quote I said seemed benign?
Who determines what's considered a positive impact?
What change are we actually seeing?
Here are some titles for posts that Diana herself has authored on McKinsey's website.
They include, Racial and Ethnic Equity in U.S.
Higher Education.
Students and Faculty.
No word on what they do with Asians.
Racial and Ethnic Equity in U.S.
Higher Education.
Why Women of Color Are Leaving and How to Rethink Your D.E.N.I.
Strategy.
Again, if a giant, all-powerful corporation determines that focusing on equity is positive change, then you can't have equality.
Equality or equity?
You have to pick one.
Equality means equality of opportunity.
Equity means ensuring outcomes based on race, based on sex, based on gender, friction, whatever we're considering today.
But she does sound, granted, like a lot of fun at parties.
Now her colleague, Monet, spelled with two Ns, and I'm getting very near the end of this now, is no less progressive.
She is also at the Atlanta office, where she is, quote, helping clients drive mindset and behavior change and build capabilities at scale.
Among her highlights, Monet, spelled with two N's, hosted a webinar for the company called Equity, there's that word again, and a Path Forward for Black Employees.
Interesting point of topic, given the fact that the average McKinsey and company partner, like Monet, spelled with two N's, earns on average $560,000.
Also, a path forward for black employees, call me traditional or racist here, should be the same As for any employee, show up on time, do your job well, make the company better, and help your teammates slash fellow employees.
I don't know why melanin should be the determining factor, but McKinsey & Company does believe that's the case, and they want to ensure that every company follows lockstep because, hey, that's a positive change.
Isn't that Monet spelled with two N's?
So when it comes to advancing the rights of the world's Most downtrodden, which changes on any given day.
Righting the wrongs of white cis men.
That category stays the same for all time.
These ladies are aces.
They're tops.
But how would they handle, you know, actual questions?
Kind of like a consultant handling an actual ride at an amusement park.
Start with the McKinsey spokeswomen are both notably openly lesbian and that is an accomplishment for which they should be proud and no one can ever take it away from you.
Let's see how they do when asked about doing business with countries that kill lesbians!
How much overlap do you have with McKinsey's ethics or values, given that it partners with, like, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it's highly illegal to be a member of the LGBTQ community there, and if you chose to engage in supporting that community, would you face backlash with your company?
So I think it's a fair question, and I think a lot of us have to figure out the degree to which we feel like we fully align with the place that we work.
I think, you know, for me, I believe our firm is really committed to a lot of things that I am also really committed to.
I think on the, you know, you conveniently or coincidentally have two members of the LGBTQ plus community as your speakers today.
I'll say very candidly, when I actually joined our Atlanta office, There was nobody out in the office.
There were no out consultants in our office at the time.
There were actually no out consultants at the time in what we called our Southern Office.
So it was Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, and Miami.
And it almost was the reason I didn't join the firm.
Because it seemed kind of concerning to me.
Sure.
You mentioned passion for helping that community in your life outside of work.
What career impacts might you have If you chose to do that for people living in Saudi Arabia or Dubai.
I mean, so we as a firm are really committed.
So I actually co-lead with a partner colleague of mine from our China office.
I co-lead our global LGBTQ plus affinity group.
And it's a global group.
We have folks in all of our offices.
We have set up a system where we have different levels of membership and different sort of degrees of outness.
But it is a it's a global community that's sort of consistently growing.
We have a number of offices that I've been at the firm 14 years now.
We're in a dramatically different place today than they were when I joined, in terms of the number of out colleagues and how folks engage.
But the firm is supportive of the community, full stop, in all of our global locations and all of our offices, regardless of the broader political context in which those offices exist.
Bullshit!
She admitted that she has been with the company for 14 years.
Saudi Arabia imprisoned people on McKinsey and Company's advice only five years ago.
If 14 years ago, her and her friends laid foot in Saudi Arabia, it would be raining butch men for a week.
Now, let's see how these geniuses handle, but Lesbians for which they should be certainly proud and no one can take that away from them.
See how they handle addressing the sins that their company has committed in the name of turning around a quick profit.
I think a lot of the things you said today sound great, and I think we can all agree that eliminating burnout is probably good for most workers.
But not to be too hyper-critical, but given the firm you represent has played a not-so-insignificant role in things like the opioid crisis, addiction for teens with vaping and tobacco, as well as the hollowing out of America's middle class, and work with totalitarian regimes in China, Saudi Arabia, places like that.
Why should we actually believe that two representatives from McKinsey care about the well-being of the American worker?
I think you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to take what we've shared today as helpful or not.
I'm Diana, this is Monet.
McKinsey says things that are helpful, but their results are not helpful.
Not for jobs in Ohio.
I know there's been a lot of press recently.
I think we're not in a position to be sort of the experts to comment on everything that's there.
Our firm has created an incredible number of jobs through the work that we do.
We actually do more growth-oriented work than we do the opposite.
And so, on the whole, I firmly believe that we're in a better place because of the work that we do.
We called it a bulls**t. Well, it may be comforting to know that they care just as little about their own employees as they do about you.
Talking about burnout and maintaining a healthy life-work balance, what would your advice be to the 2,000 workers that are supposed to be terminated by your company as a part of Project Magnolia?
What would you give to them as advice?
Oh, we did that.
Oh, no, no.
I understand.
Like, I understand fundamentally.
company they came and they're doing it.
We didn't talk about their talk.
They talked about what the C-State has decided to do.
We're not the C-State.
Oh no, no, I understand.
I understand fundamentally.
But the thing is that...
They came here, they talked about shutting down.
If anybody else, if this is what you're talking about, this is not what the rest of us think.
No, we came here.
We came here to talk about the fact that we're burned out and tired, and some of us as managers have staff that's burned out and tired.
Like, staff that is burned out and tired, but also losing their jobs.
You know, I live in a tech circle.
I've been laid off for every year in a row for five years in a tech circle.
I have been laid off, too.
So it's a terrible thing.
That's not what the billionaires in the United States have decided to do with our country.
Well, it's not the billionaires, it is also the representatives and the people here as well.
Now, at first glance, the panelists, as well as the entire crowd, look as though they were floored with offense.
Here's the thing, as is often the case, even in their own camp, You right now watching, you're not alone.
Not everyone there was displeased with this team's approach.
Thank you for talking about it.
I just, it's hard to hear them preach these things and come and talk down to people when they don't care, like their company.
But those people aren't really hurt, are they?
Yeah, you asked the question in a respectful way. People need to hear.
I'm not trying to be a provocateur. I'm just trying to get a real answer.
Because they never give a real answer.
No, you're not. And I don't think people understand the scope of what McKinsey has
done to people over the past decades. So anyway, thanks for saying it.
But those people aren't really hurt, are they?
Those people aren't interesting to McKinsey and company.
As a matter of fact, the respondents, by the way, who are lesbian and should be proud, and that can never be taken away from them, their approach to handling even the most basic questions is kind of the perfect encapsulation of not only the consultant class, but specifically the elites at McKinsey & Company.
They're unbelievably well-versed at screaming platitudes, virtue signaling, but they have no interest in benefiting anyone, anything, but their checkbooks.
Or, They're shareholders.
And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with shareholders.
Equities have made probably more millionaires than any other device in the history of mankind.
The problem is when you create a company that isn't really a company, but exists solely to perform for shareholders at the expense of the consumer, as well as the company that is designed to serve the consumer.
That is not capitalism.
If a CEO who wasn't there for the founding of a company answers to McKinsey & Company to find themselves getting a big fat bonus while their employees are being laid off, that is not free enterprise.
If McKinsey & Company decides that it's more profitable for their shareholders, for them to play ball with communist China, than to serve the United States citizenry, that is not free enterprise.
This is not about being anti-business.
This is about saving business.
This is about saving American ingenuity, and not just the American worker.
The American business owner from the hawks, like McKinsey & Company, who very often create no products themselves, create no businesses themselves, they come in to destroy a body and pick at the carcass for a select few, while the rest of you, the American public largely, but obviously citizens of other countries, I'm sure that the Citizens under the rule of Communist China or the gays in Saudi Arabia aren't big fans of it either.
are left to pick at the scraps.
These giant corporation-government amalgamations, I'm not going to use the word businesses, deserve no respect.
McKinsey & Company deserves no quarter, and they must be exposed at every opportunity.
You've heard of BlackRock, you've heard of Vanguard, they're important.
Because they operate at the expense of someone you know.
And it could just as easily, and very likely, is you.
People were losing jobs all over America, and McKinsey was beating the drums on it.
They are everywhere in DC.
McKinsey's very influential in Western Europe.
They have been for half a century.
Behind President Vladimir Putin's war machine against Ukraine sits Rostec, a massive weapons maker.
It's controlled by the Kremlin, and until recently, a client of a leading American consulting firm, McKinsey & Company.
McKinsey advised Purdue how to avoid FDA and pharmacy restrictions because McKinsey knew that people were overdosing and dying.
Clearly McKinsey should not be setting strategy for both drug companies and the FDA.
They know exactly what the repercussions are going to be and then they say we're going to do it anyway.
▲
Export Selection