At the same time, however, the company can also be saddled with a list of striking failures, missteps that would have doomed lesser firms. McKinsey consultants were on the scene when General Motors drove itself into the ground. They were Kmart's advisers when the retailer tumbled into disarray. They pushed Swissair in a direction that led to its collapse. They played a critical role in building the bomb known as Enron and collected massive fees right up until the moment of its spectacular explosion. And these are just the clients unlucky enough to have had their woes splashed across headlines. Many more have paid handsomely for guidance that shortchanged shareholders, led to unnecessary layoffs, and even prompted bankruptcies. And yet the consultants are rarely blamed for their bad advice—at least not publicly so.  Remarkably, that pervasive influence has come even though McKinsey contains more contradictions than the Bible. The firm is well known, but there is almost nothing known about it. Precious few McKinsey employees have ever become acclaimed in the outside world. The employees are trusted and distrusted—and loved and despised—in equal measure. They are a collection of huge egos that are yet content to stay behind the scenes. They are confident but also paranoid. And they are helpful yet manipulative with their clientele—and even their own people. What do they actually do? They are managerial experts, cost cutters, scapegoats, and catalysts for corporate change. They are the businessman's businessmen. They are the corporate Mandarin elite, a private corps, far from prying eyes, doing behind-the-scenes work for the most powerful people in the world. How do they do it? Well, their methods have been compared (by others and by themselves) to the Jesuits, the U.S. Marines, and the Catholic Church. They feel so strongly about themselves that they have insisted on a proper noun where one need not exist. To an outsider, they are a consulting firm.To themselves, simply, The Firm.  But the McKinsey story is even more than all of that. It's also about the rise and reach of American business in the twentieth century—and its remarkable adaptability to changing times. American capitalism may be under stress now, but modern American management technique—which McKinsey has played a part in both creating and disseminating—has distinguished itself as much by its innovative ability as by its sheer might. Today McKinsey is a global success story. But first it was a distinctly American one.  —Duff McDonald is a contributing editor at Fortune and the New York Observer.
In his new book, financial journalist Duff McDonald provides an intimate and incisive behind-the-scenes history and analysis of this enigmatic firm.