There's no denying that McKinsey & Company has been a consulting powerhouse for decades, but, from opioids and cigarettes to healthcare cuts and family separation, much of the firm's work has focused on prioritizing profits over human life. While the firm was once recognized as an ethics-based company, it's since become notorious for its contributions to some of the deadliest issues impacting the United States.
"We will not let the fear of criticism, or the possibility that we'll make mistakes in the future, stop us from trying to help our clients take on tough challenges and make a positive difference through our work," McKinsey's managing partner, Bob Sternfels, said.
The company's prioritization of clients over morals is one of the driving forces behind its popularity. It has long told its employees that client interests should come first, always.
Despite the firm's long standing relationship with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the agency's Center for Tobacco Products, one of McKinsey's oldest and most frequent partners is the tobacco industry. McKinsey was instrumental in helping cigarette companies continue to push their products more than fifty years after cigarettes were linked with cancer.
In a 1992 lawsuit regarding McKinsey's work to support the tobacco industry, federal judge H. Lee Sarokin wrote in his official decision, "Who are these persons who knowingly and secretly decide to put the buying public at risk solely for the purpose of making profits and who believe that illness and death of consumers is an appropriate cost of their own prosperity!"
Even more recently, when vape company Juul needed someone to help them market their products to teens, McKinsey was at the top of the list.
McKinsey says its work with Juul focused on teen-vaping prevention, but much of McKinsey's work with Juul has not been revealed. The two joined forces at the peak of popularity for teen vaping, and Juul has since been accused of targeting young people with its marketing, including by hiring young models, using novelty flavors, and advertising on youth-dominated platforms.
A McKinsey partner named Alfonso Pulido said in a deposition last year that McKinsey actually advised Juul on its branding, teens' preference for flavors, youth vaping regulation, as well as teen vaping prevention.
"The stated objectives were to help inform youth prevention activity as well as responsibly introduce a flavor that was appealing to adult smokers," said Esfand Nafisi, an attorney representing plaintiffs suing Juul for its teen-targeted marketing. "Did anyone at McKinsey stop and say, 'Hey, maybe we shouldn't be helping tobacco companies study teenagers'?"
The McKinsey study found that mint was the preferred flavor for teens, and mint would go on to become a top seller for Juul amongst teen customers. At least some of the work that McKinsey did for Juul was actually conducted through Juul's law firm, allowing both parties to claim lawyer-client privilege in order to keep the work a secret.
According to Pulido, McKinsey quit its work with Juul in 2019 due to "increasing regulatory uncertainty and increased awareness of youth use."
Juul agreed to pay $438.5 million this month to settle government investigations into its marketing, though the vape company didn't acknowledge any wrongdoing. McKinsey has attempted to keep its involvement with Juul a secret and wasn't involved in the settlement.
"Like many other companies and industries, our approach to working on tobacco-related issues has changed significantly over the years," the firm said in a written statement. "We have imposed ever-stricter limitations on our work in this space until last year, when we ceased tobacco-related work entirely. We ceased all work with the vaping industry in 2020."
While it hasn't had to pay for its work with Juul, McKinsey did pay $641 million to settle other government investigations regarding its work on an even deadlier campaign: Purdue Pharma's push to increase OxyContin sales.
McKinsey advised the drug company to begin tracking data on which physicians were prescribing OxyContin the most so that their salespeople could target those prescribers specifically. McKinsey told Purdue that it could "turbocharge" opioid sales by using more aggressive marketing. In 2017, McKinsey suggested that Purdue should offer "rebates" to pharmacies for every customer of theirs who overdosed. That same year, nearly 50,000 Americans died of an opioid overdose.
Litigation against the firm for its role in the opioid epidemic is ongoing at both the local and federal levels.
Along with Purdue, McKinsey has also consulted for nearly every major pharmaceutical company- as well as the government agencies that are supposed to regulate those companies. One of McKinsey's biggest selling points for drug companies is its deep connection to the FDA. Under former President Donald Trump, McKinsey was paid $77 million for FDA consulting. For its part, the firm denies that it has a conflict of interest in this case.
However, McKinsey's negative impacts on the everyday lives of Americans aren't restricted to the pharmaceutical industry: in the 1990s, the firm encouraged companies to move their businesses and jobs overseas where wages and supplies are cheaper. McKinsey also recommended that companies like Walmart increase their proportion of part-time workers, cut salaries and health care benefits, and shrink retirement contributions.
These types of cuts are part of what McKinsey calls "right-sizing", reducing spending on workers, food, medical care, and other related expenditures. In fact, according to author Duff McDonald who wrote a book about the firm in 2013, McKinsey might be "the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs than anyone, anywhere, at any time in modern history."
The firm also has a history of helping governments market their policies, no matter how harmful those policies may have been. Along with its work advising hostile autocratic governments, McKinsey also advised the U.S. immigration authorities working to separate families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
According to a recent book about the firm by The New York Times reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, while McKinsey might attempt to maintain a positive image as a company, employees on the inside hold no illusions about their morals.
"There was never ever, ever an attempt to be anything other than what they were - 'We are the sharks and that's why we are the best and everyone wants to work here because we are the sharks,'" one college graduate told the writers about why graduates choose to work with the company. "And that's refreshing. No one was lying to themselves at night."
Those same employees have gone on to play a large role in McKinsey's more invisible influence: Senator Tom Cotton, former-Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Transportation Secretary and former-presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg are just a few of the powerful people who once worked at McKinsey.
"Because the firm won't identify clients or disclose the advice it gives," Bogdanich and Forsythe wrote. "Americans and, increasingly, people the world over are largely unaware of the profound influence McKinsey exerts over their lives, from the cost and quality of their medical care to the jobs that pay for their children's education."