Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

At McKinsey, he realized, he was expected to operate very differently. “Some months later,” he said, “I’m sitting next to the chief executive of a very significant business in Australia, and I’m expected to have a point of view and an opinion—a Day One hypothesis about this problem that we’re talking about.” Instead of listening, absorbing, trying to decipher slowly and respectfully the dynamics of the space one had entered, the high-flying, high-priced consultant was expected to jump in and know things. And even a consultant like Hinton, trained in music and expert in western Mongolian love songs, could be expected to do this, because of the protocols that McKinsey taught its consultants. They offered a powerful way of stepping into a world you didn’t know and reconstituting its reality so that the solution became more obvious to you than it was to the client’s native executives. The protocols allowed for a strange kind of earned presumptuousness. Equipped with a special way of chopping up problems, parsing data, and arriving at answers, the consultant constructed authority. His job was, as Hinton put it, “the bringing to bear and the championing of the religion of facts—incontrovertible, scientific, unemotional, unencumbered-by-people facts.”