When Puerto Rico started bankruptcy proceedings in 2016, the US island territory became McKinsey’s newest client. The company was hired to advise a federally appointed oversight board and, according to a report in New York magazine, set about creating an “aspirational vision” for Puerto Rico, appointing a 31-year-old Harvard graduate as the project’s senior full-time consultant. A 2016 Columbia graduate assisted with financial calculations and job cuts (euphemistically termed “rightsizing measures”), and a recent Yale graduate handled hurricane damage assessment. Ultimately, McKinsey advised on a “schema” for the island’s ailing economy that included privatising public enterprises and removing labour protections.
The firm’s work in Puerto Rico is one of many stories in Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s new book, a brisk and approachable guide to the consulting industry and its discontents. Management consultants are frequently used by corporate executives or governments to provide a veneer of authority – and a convenient scapegoat – for controversial “reforms”. Their role in public life has increased: as one Conservative minister put it in 2020, Whitehall has been “infantilised” by its reliance on management consultants. Mazzucato and Collington’s argument is an elaboration of this point. They claim that consultancies have weakened businesses and hollowed out state capacity. “The more governments and businesses outsource,” they write, “the less they know how to do.”
