McKinsey’s partners suffer from collective self-delusion

ONE OF THE best explanations for the triumph of a “solution shop” like McKinsey was co-written by the late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in 2013. When hiring a management-consulting firm, he said, clients do not know what they are getting in advance, because they are looking for knowledge that they themselves lack. They cannot measure the results, either, because outside factors, such as the quality of execution, influence the outcome of the consultant’s recommendations.So they rely on reputation and other squishy factors—the consultants’ “educational pedigrees, eloquence, and demeanour”—as substitutes for tangible results. On that basis, no one would hire Schumpeter to help fix McKinsey’s problems. His diagnosis is as lacking in eloquence as he is in demeanour. In his unschooled view, those of the firm’s 650 senior partners who voted to oust their global managing partner, Kevin Sneader, on February 24th, are in a clueless mess. Worse, they don’t get that they don’t get it.