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December 26 - December 29, 2022
In 2019, the year after Khashoggi’s killing, McKinsey’s revenue in Saudi Arabia appears to have increased from the previous year, according to one internal measure. The list of clients, and the hours billed, are dominated by government agencies.
The Saudi and China-related work is part of a larger pattern at McKinsey that’s taken hold in recent years. The firm is increasingly working with authoritarian governments the world over or for the state-owned companies that undergird their power. And, like in Saudi Arabia, the elites of those nations can be found working inside McKinsey’s offices.
In Russia, the state-owned VTB Bank, which has operated under U.S. and EU sanctions since 2014, ranked among McKinsey’s top clients by revenue in recent years, as did Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, McKinsey records show. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, is a McKinsey alum.
In the words of Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the Welsh coal miner turned Labour Party politician who envisioned what would become the National Health Service: “No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”
In reality, competition didn’t work well in a hospital setting. That wasn’t a secret: one of the most praised economists of the twentieth century, Kenneth Arrow, had concluded decades earlier that the magic of markets didn’t function for health care in the way it would for selling bread, cars, or plane tickets. Patients just didn’t have the information to intelligently price health-care services, and more often than not their priority was getting the best care as soon as possible, not finding the cheapest oncologist.
Dean said in so many words that he’d be interested in a deep, granular look at a major corporation as a way to help readers understand how power is wielded in our society. We took Dean’s advice and chose to examine McKinsey, the secretive counselor to not one but thousands of companies worldwide.
