HOW do they DO it?

In his review of When McKinsey Comes to Town, Toby Rogers reveals the formula for snagging top graduates as your new employees.

McKinsey is looking for Brahmins— those for whom solving complex problems and excelling in athletics comes easily. To secure their top picks, McKinsey interviews early in the fall semester of a student’s final year, makes the largest monetary offers, and is skilled at closing the recruits they have selected.

Smart people alone are not enough to generate huge profits though. McKinsey’s secret sauce is that they have figured out how to strip these smart, young, idealistic people of ethics over the course of a few years and turn them into stone cold killers on behalf of capital.

McKinsey’s pitch to recruits is filled with high-minded rhetoric about changing the world for the better. But performance is measured by revenue generated… and the worst clients (tobacco, opioids, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, etc.) pay the highest fees.

Read the book review, and the book! But remember, money is not the same as ‘capital’ as Rogers implies. Capital is necessary for wealth creation to benefit a multitude of people and programs, and capitalism is a good system when not abused by monopolists or reliance on government programs to provide healthy investment returns to shareholders. Those returns should go to taxpayers, not just shareholders. Just a thought.