John Oliver is literally the only person on Earth who could get me to enthusiastically drop everything to click on a 26 minute video about a business management firm.

This reminds me of an old joke: A shepherd is tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a shiny red BMW appears. The driver is a young man in an Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes and Polarized sunglasses. He sticks his head out the window and asks the shepherd, “Hey! If I can tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looks at him, and agrees. The driver plugs his cell phone into a laptop and connects it to a GPS and starts a remote body-heat scan of the area. During the process he sends some e-mails. After receiving the answers, he prints a 100 page report on the portable printer in his glove compartment, and proudly announces to the shepherd: “You have exactly 1,478 sheep.” To which the shepherd answers: “Impressive. You can choose one sheep out of my flock”. He observes the man pick up an animal and load it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?” “You’re on.” the young man answers. “You are a Mckinsey consultant,” says the shepherd promptly. “You are right! How could you possibly guess?” says the man, visibly surprised. “It wasn’t a guess,” the shepherd replies. “You drive into my field uninvited. You want me to pay you for a piece of information I already know, you answer questions I haven’t asked, and you know nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

My mom was a well liked middle leader in the government in Denmark. She was laid off due to a mass layoff orchestrated by McKinsey. They never even met her. Her responsibilities were passed on to her leader, who broke down with stress after a month.

The Henry Kissenger gag aged hillariously within less than a month

Whenever he covers a big company, I like to imagine the crisis meeting on Monday morning that starts with everyone watching the show in awkward silence.

Having worked with McKinsey, I can tell you, that Oliver is being kind to them.

I had a McKinsey experience in the 2000s. They came in, cut close to 50% of the workforce in our warehouse and offices, and increased top management 25%. The result was that the "lucky ones"who stayed started to work 10+ hours per day, with peaks of 14 to 16 hours at month end in the finance dept (I was a middle manager in accounting) because the workload was the same but we were 50% less. Actually the workload was a slightly bigger as the new managers were asking for their own reports (they needed to justify they were there). My team started to fall sick after 1 year, I managed to stay 2 years more before falling sick myself and heard that the company was first sold and dissolved one year later. I don't trust McKinsey, if they come in the company I work for now, I will leave immediately.

Apparently McKinsey are into coding as well - when I joined Credit Suisse as a contractor last year I had to rewrite some code their consultants had written in R to Python. It turned out the R code had a bug and didn’t read the data files correctly and the liquidity reports that were being sent to the top management of the bank had been incorrect for years.

As long as John Oliver is on HBO. HBO's legal team has steady employment.

As a rule of thumb:The more a company announces that they aren't evil the more evil they are!

I've had the pleasure of working with them. You spend 75% of your time with them training them on the things that they don't know about your business. Their staff tend to be green new MBAs with next to zero experience. Whatever the problem is, they have a standard formula they will force your problem into - whether it fits or not. And then when the whole experience is done, they will give you basically the same answer you had from the very start. And a multimillion dollar bill.

Hearing the contempt for McKinsey in the audience as Jon talks is rather refreshing

I don't think I've ever heard a more visceral crowd reaction when John talked about McKinsey's involvement in pushing pediatric OxyCotin.

One of my personal favourite McKinsey ideas: when it was hired by the French government to find ways to spend less, they advised reducing students' aid by 5€ a month. The amount the government saved? Precisely what McKinsey billed them for the advice...

As a professor at an Ivy League school, I've been repeatedly heartbroken to lose some of our most gifted students to this crowd. As a society, we're really setting the wrong incentives for where talent goes (and that's not to say that everyone there is incredibly gifted -- there's more than enough privileged duds there, too).

I once interviewed for a McKinsey internship (not in the US). I had great grades from one of the top business schools in my country but was not at all the boastful type. The partner actually accused me of being a liar, because “my grades did not match my attitude”. A friend of mine, who is the smartest, hardest-working and overall best person I have ever met - including really humble - also interviewed and was accused of being an actress. On the contrary, I heard from several people with not necessarily stellar but decent grades but more capable of projecting ambition and self-assurance that they faced no such mind-boggling feedback. These recruiting practices sound like a big red flag to me. Also, later I worked at Deloitte doing audit. It was still crazy hard work, but I found a much greater respect for honesty and truth, and earned enough respect that when I sent out my farewell email a partner actually came to the staff open space to personally say goodbye. Highly doubt I would be shown the same kindness at McKinsey.

This passion and research is what we need.

As someone who currently works at a large consulting management firm, I can attest that John ABSOLUTELY hit the nail on the head with this episode.

Had one of them come to my job. He promised a new future for company and workers, no layoffs. Made it his point to greet every worker, was really sweet. Drove a ferrari. Month later, 50% of the workforce was fired effectively next day with no prior warning. Which, considering that most of them (including me) were migrant workers whose accomodation was paid by the employer, was a total disaster. Gave us a week to leave premises. For me it was either finding a job within that week or going back 1000 km back home with savings only. I found a job, but many didnt.

I’m a finance exec and I still don’t understand how a large successful company can think hiring a bunch of MBA students is going to get them some deeper insights or more expertise.

John Oliver is once again trying his absolute best to get sued. Never change.

Last year, I worked at a company that hired McKinsey to work on a tech project here in Brazil. After 6 months and millions of dollars spent, they delivered a project so fundamentally shitty that some analysts from my company (me included) had to be brought in to fix the absolute mess they had created. When confronted, they refused to acknowledge their bad job, and according to one of their partners "were very disappointed at us". The truth is, upper level management loves McKinsey because they are very good at making nice-looking Power Points and easily convince people who don't really know much about anything (such as upper level management). The analysts who are forced to work with them absolutely hate them (and I know a lot of cases that were similar to mine). And, of course, all of this is just peanuts compared to the actual harm McKinsey does working for governments and morally dubious companies around the world.

A young consultant spent a graveyard shift with me at a paper mill. We were told to answer any questions they had, so I did, using my office computer to look up the data. The report came back that engineers spent too much time in the office, and not on the floor! Hell, we did what we were told…

Katie Porter is a national treasure. I wish we had a politician like her.

In 2010, my company paid McKinney in Sweden $100,000 for 2 consultants for 4 hours to work with the management team on business growth strategy! The consultants just gathered all our own work, organized them in a PowerPoint document of some 20 pages, and gave it back to us. Pure bullshit.

I owe a major debt of gratitude to John Oliver and team for putting these segments on UKposts for free. There are few things that give me as much joy as when I see a new episode is available to watch. Doing your part to educate the masses on relatively obscure or complicated topics while being factual, funny, and empathetic. John and team are all saints.

The fact that McKinsey's wall of alums had a picture of Jeffrey Skilling hanging was comedy gold! If anyone is interested in learning about the monster named Jeffrey Skilling I'd recommend watching the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room".

My ex-roommate used to work at McKinsey. I've never seen someone work so freaking hard in my life. It was utterly unsustainable, in my eyes. I barely saw her. She was worked to the bone and the pressure, gosh, as an outsider, I couldn't even wrap my head around it.

My first job after college was for a large engineering company in Germany. The company had 4 divisons serving different industries. From nuclear power to technical consulting. Every division had it’s own purchasing group. The leadership brought McKinsey in and the 4 purchaing groups where centralized to one. You know the synergy, efficiency bs. The result was that we had large projects halted to a stop because of purchasing. You just don‘t by a domestice heaters the same way as a nuclear power plant component. The leadership brought a consultant back. The first statement: put back smaller purchasing groups, you will be more agile and closer to your market. That company was McKinsey. All of the turmoil nearly killed the company. I left a month later. What is my definition of a consultant? A consultant is a man who knows 50 sex positions but no woman.

I was an engineer in a company which (sadly) hired McKinsey for advice how to increase profits. Employees knew that meant major layoffs, though our Management took pains to deny the obvious. In the end major layoffs occurred, Management seats increased and the company never recovered. Basically, McKinsey's philosophy was: don't trust experienced employees, control everything to the n-th degree, increase profits by decreasing headcount (but never Management). Screw McKinsey and similar "Management Consultants". They're part of the evil which gives our capitalist market system a bag name.

What I find extremely confusing about management consulting firms is that they are invariably staffed by people who have never actually run a business in their lives, so how can they possibly be "consultants" to other businesses on how to run their business? They hire right out of university, people who have no real world experience of anything, at all. When I started my technology consulting firm, by that point in my career, I had a full decade of technology management experience, and two decades of experience actually using computers. I'd founded the first 100% broadband end-user ISP in America in the 1990s, and designed and built wide-area, metropolitan-area, and local-area networks for clients ranging from Fortune 500 firms to high security government installations, and enterprises of over 10,000 users in both the private and public sector, with project budgets in the multiple millions of dollars, working with partners like IBM, HP, and Lucent, among others. A "consultant" is, or at least is *supposed* to be, a subject matter expert, and no one, absolutely no one, who graduates from college and business school is an expert in anything, at all.

Having been a consultant myself, I can attest to the accuracy of this observation: a significant number of F500 executive teams are consulting alumni, and many pivotal corporate decisions are influenced by consulting firms. The essence of our role was rooted in facilitating transformation-we advocated for change, asserting its positive impact, all while recognizing that our firms' livelihoods depended on it. We possessed the ability to propose a strategic direction one day, streamline a workforce based on that direction, only to return two years later with a different strategy, justified by the ever-shifting and intricate landscape of the market. We were trained to communicate and work in certain ways so clients perceive us as experts.

McKinsey is the answer to "how can I do capitalism in the most despicable way possible?"

I used to be friends with a guy who then started at McKinsey germany. That cult of money and grandiosity turned him into an absolute ghoul. You could see him get more shallow and vapid by the month. He would later pretend that it wasn't his old friends who dumped him for that but instead him leaving his old circle of friends behind because they were too small fish and couldn't even afford to be part of his new lifestyle, so what was the point in keeping us anyway. Some jobs absolutely eat your soul if you are prone to greed and think living your best life means buying and emulating everything from the latest GQ magazine while doing absolutely horrendous and inhumane shit hidden behind cold spreadsheets. Pitiful.

John Oliver you are an international treasure - keep doing what you do!

Our national broadcasting station in Australia, the ABC, recently did a deep dive on the major consulting companies operating here. One of the stories centered around Governmental reliance on consulting companies, to the point where one company was simultaneously advising the government on Tax Reform whilst advising a private company on how to reduce corporate income tax!

as a business graduate, "bullshitting your way into a plausible sounding answer" is what our teachers do everyday

I'm 64 years old and having spent my entire adult life in corporate America and having watched some great companies die (Sun Microsystems, Wang Labs) because of arrogance of the leadership who listened to McKinsey and people like them and having spent the early part of my career at investment banks on Wall Street with people just like they portray here .. this is a very important piece of journalism!

every week i fear that john oliver will tell me "oops sweaty that thing you like actually sucks" but this week he was like "i am about to validate the hell out of you"

I worked for a large telecommunications company. Every 18 months or so we'd go through a restructure. McKinsey was involved every time taking their cut. I did once ask the CEO during a kitchen chat why. "If they're so good at their job, why do we keep having to pay them to undo their previous mistakes every 18 months." The silence was golden. The CEO finally stumbled of some BS no one including himself believed.

As a former corporate brainwashed, I am loving to see the downfall of corporate culture as something cool and the exposure of what it really is.

You nailed it. They are not there for their expertise. They are there to isolate the company management from consequences. That's what they are paid for.

One place I worked they brought in McKinsey (at great expense) for several "workstreams". I was in charge of one of these from our pov. We were supposed to be having a week of "workshops" with them. The first meeting a partner and a bunch of bag-carrying flunkies came in and said they wanted to "listen to me", so I told them a bunch of stuff and they spent the entire meeting repeating back what I had said and stroking my ego. At the end of the meeting I said "OK now tomorrow you guys better bring something to the meeting and not just have what I told you put on a bunch of slides". They cancelled the rest of the workshops and said they wanted to "focus on areas where they could add more value". Super clear they knew I had their number and they would instead zero in on people they could bilk more easily. Also: later in that exercise we were on a late night zoom meeting with like 10 of the top partners in finance in McKinsey and one of the associates on the meeting didn't realise his camera was on. While we were presenting he got up, went to have a shower and came out of the shower naked. In front of his client and all of his bosses bossess bossess.

Brilliant piece. Katie Porter’s clip was the most damning. She’s a national treasure. Even ad agencies implement conflict of interest protocols!

Former consultant (not McKinsey) and I can verify this content. The "secret" to McKinsey's longevity and success is serving as resume builder for unqualified/unremarkable offspring of the ruling class for telling top level executives whatever they want to hear. There are literally thousands of US consulting firms that achieve better results at a fraction of the cost, but they all lack the real secret of success, giving super-rich a-holes a facade of competence.

I worked for Verizon for nearly 6 years and had to work with McKinsey teams on a multitude of projects. They were the bane of my and my team’s existence any time they inserted themselves into our work. This whole segment was spot on and pure gold.

I’m soo glad that Rep Katie Porter made this video!! Her integrity is something to aspire to!!! She wrote an amazing book, politics is messier than my minivan!! Recommend read!! We need more people like her in our government!! I will be voting for her for CA senate set!!

They've become very famous in France over the last few years, because of how involved they were with Macron and how much he outsourced to them. The word "corruption" has been thrown a lot concerning their relationship...

McKinsey is where all of the German defense budget went for many years, because the daughter of the defense minister worked at McKinsey. So McKinsey was hired for hundreds of millions of Euros per year to do "consulting", which has led to the complete destruction of the German Bundeswehr. The current minister of defense has a lot of shards to pick up to get the Bundeswehr into an even half-way viable state... It's ridiculous.

I bet all the people working at McKinsey are gonna unironically share that last skit with each other 😂

I worked for a global energy company and when they told us they were bringing in McKinsey...we all knew it meant lay offs

I was a consultant with WSP and Mouchel. We sometimes brushed up against McKinsey consultants - and most of the time they were wrong. Sadly, their reputation is pretty bulletproof - and we found out why. When the clients weren't happy, McKinsey didn't charge them and then made them sign NDAs.

I graduated from an Ivy League college in 2020. At graduation, the student speaker said something along the lines of "We're going out to change the world. We are the doctors, engineers, and consultants..." The crowd audibly laughed at consultants.

McKinsey is brought in often to simply confirm a management decision. It helps company management to 'defend' their ideas and get approval from the board.

Watching this entire thing as an employee at McKinsey was an experience 😂

"Send an email, not a F#&!Ing helicopter!!" is a hilariously accurate summary of just how inept and unnecessary typical business procedures are..

Thank you John for going after these parasites. The fact that Katie Porter is on to their BS should come as no surprise.

As an ex-conultancy worker, I'm somewhat embarassed to say that the thing which suprised me the most about their involvment with Saudis wasn't their pact-with-the-devil work ethic, but the fact that that slide at 19:28 is ABSOLUTE SHEIT. Come on, dividing titles into syllabes? And the boxes on the bottom are not even alingned

I LOVE this piece. I worked for about three years for one of McKinsey's biggest rivals (guess two names and Im prety sure you got it). The doublespeak is intentional and carefully cultivated. And naturally, this sort of self-deception becomes a narcotic. The reason they are successful is that they can write long dissertations on why the employees need to be squeezed. They help companies justify decisions that no soul-possessing human being would want to make. Thanks John. This was a long overdue discussion of an industry that is actively harming the average working person.

John Oliver’s writing team should be making the big bucks. The research for this episode was incredibly well done

"You're working in one of the Rootin'st Tootin'st Journalist Shootin'st regimes in the Middle East..." - 😂😂😂 20:26

I strongly recommend reading When McKinsey Comes to Town. It’s an incredible book.

And tonight I learned horrifying information about the inner-workings of a company I knew nothing about - I’ve missed this show so much. ❤

On top of all these things one needs to mention that Jeff Skilling, the guy who created Enron (possibly the biggest corporate scam in the history of mankind, for those too young to remember), was a McKinsey consultant of 21 years.

I’ve never seen a crowd go from utterly confused to literally gasping and groaning in outrage SO FAST

“We impact people lives” - true especially all those made redundant based on your reco 👍🏻

What I've learned: Consulting firms are needed to communicate management decisions to the workforce without management having to take any responsibility.

McKinsey has helped kneecap the company I retired from, 3M. Their continuous reengineering has lead to a 70% decrease in the stock price over the last 5 years and a complete destruction of the innovation culture at a once great company.

As a long time management consultant it is encouraging you have finally exposed the BS delivered by these large 'consulting' firms. Well done.

This episode is sooo satisfying to watch

Fun fact: German Railway was once known for its punctuality & reliability. Enter McKinsey: Its lack of punctuality & reliability turned into a runnibg joke for the last quarter century.

McKinsey did not invent the bar code. The NAFC with the help of McKinsey developed the standard for it. The bar code was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver.

Australia has a huge problem with consultancy firms and government. Especially during the Coalition government term they essentially supercharged getting rid of the public service department and using massively overpaid consultants instead. And of course there were conflict of interest scandals that came out of it. Not least a merry-go-round of ex-government getting jobs in the consultant firms and consultants getting jobs in government. Couple that with our famously opaque lobbying laws and it’s been a disaster.

I am watching this during my office break, and oh boy not regretting a bit.

A company that truly lives by the philosophy that the impression of competence is more important than actual competence.

I hope they give LastWeekTonight's writers a raise. They deserve it.

That was amazing. Thank you John and Last Week Tonight team. I was laughing and horrified at the same time.

Just brilliant… I look forward to new episodes every week.

Pediatric oxycontin is a group of words I never imagined being spoken in the same sentence, and yet McKinsey apparently advocated for them. Wildly irresponsible and deeply heinous.

I'm a retired emergency management specialist. I was stunned to learn that British Petroleum and other firms had allowed consultants to write their emergency plans that, expectedly, turned out to be virtually useless when the Deepwater Horizon Spill occurred. A good emergency plan requires input from the people who will actually respond to the emergency, who are the employees and managers themselves, with guidance from an expert in preparing emergency plans. However, the consultant-prepared plans looked like boiler-plate that did not take into account differences between companies in structure, staffing, environment, jurisdiction, and other variables. The same would expectedly be true for advising companies on day-to-day management, which should be closely aligned with disaster roles.

Business consultants: if you can’t be part of the solution, there’s a heckuva lotta money to be made prolonging the problem!

LWT research team is the BEST!!! I always learn something new from this show.❤❤❤

I did a case study on them for my dissertation. They have an outsized influence on economic development in Africa and they cause massive harm.

There was (and still should be) a scandal in France when it was discovered how much president Macron and his staff paid McKinsey (without declerating it) for useless advices, but it has always been about the money. I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about McKinsey other works, which seems way more relevant and incriminating.

Thank you for all the great work you and your staff put in.

This video was the most savage read I have ever heard, lol. He tore that company to pieces.

I was a visual analyst at McKinsey and company and was part of McKinsey Global services in India. We were the guys who made these powerpoints and i can say now how shitty they used to pay us eventhough they were this multi-billion dollars company, i can say the slide John showed is a legit one as McKinsey has their own powerpoint identity and i have worked on slides like those for years.

Round of applause for the "It's me at the top" guy, that is acting worth all the money signs.

I agree, John is just brilliant.

Essential Service. For mood, enlightenment, citizen engagement. This show is essential.

I used to work for McKinsey. Everything that John says about McKinsey is true. I'll leave it at that, nothing to add here.

Thank you for calling out this company. They were instrumental in the privatization of public schools in the US, charter schools.

what a joy to watch John Oliver

This is so apt. Thank you J.O.

Worked there. Worst decision I ever made. But yet when I was leaving, so many companies were bending over backwards to have me. Which I actually found disappointing and sad.

I work in a governmental institute (not in the US) they contracted McK once and implemented it’s proposed strategies. It was a shitshow. After that this institute trained their own consultants and they now help the departments improve which proved to be cheaper and better. I guess McK really helped us better ourselves.

I worked at Deloitte and it's basically the same

this is golden and extremely well put!

This is the most vocal I’ve heard the audience in a good long while. Actively booing McKinsey at points. I love it!

I love that they put Jeff Skilling on the wall of fame. For those who don’t know he was a McKinsey consultant who took over Enron. McKinsey did a lot to shape his outlook on business and he imported the McKinsey culture to Enron which turned the company into an arrogant and wasteful mess. He also was a key player in the Enron scandal and only recently got out of prison.