Once upon a time I was a new little anglophone in a medium sized North American francophone city. Being a ‘starving artist’ I had a few very easily marketable skills, however one of them was making decently pretentious 3rd Wave coffee. A deeply hipster existence for 2011. 

I answered an ad online for one of those said pretentious cafes posted in French (which I did not speak) and landed an interview. I met with one of the two owners of the café that was yet to be built. We met in a physically gross chain café beside a busy metro, looked like a surfer and spoke English enough for us to communicate well. He didn’t really seem to know much about coffee though, he said he was:

‘an RA for a Private Equity firm but he and his partner had been fired for whistleblowing (insider trading) among colleagues so they were going to open a café while they built their own boutique firm.’

None of that meant anything to me at all. Did they work for a bank? I essentially lied about my level of French and got the job despite my unfortunate Englishness. I knew coffee. I was brought on as one of the first employees and over my four years there we built a tiny little café and clientele. I slowly learned about their old lives in the ‘big firm’. I tried to understand what their former jobs were, what they did.  I’d pieced together that they got the idea about opening a café when ‘one of the partners brought in a coffee consultant while researching investment opportunities’. 

They would frequently cite a very famous barista handbook as their base methodology because as it turned out, the book’s author was the person their former firm met with-who they directly learned about the industry from. Who they paid handsomely to come in and drop knowledge. This was a confusing thing to hear at the time as they were paying me minimum wage with government subsidy. Over my tenure there I also learned that every employee of said former firm got their own Vespa and that they all wore 300$ shoes. I learned how to use credit and started to believe there was such a thing as ‘ethical capitalism’ as one of my bosses personally donated to green peace. It was all very gray. 

After 4 years I still didn’t understand what they actually did and started to assume it was somehow related to stocks. Stocks I was later told were just one piece of pie within your ‘diversified portfolio’ and that you can essentially put money anywhere. For over a decade now I have perpetually found myself asking the question…

What the fuck is a consultant?

We will occasionally hear about consultants in the media with comedians often making jokes about the confusion as to what it is they do. They just…work with numbers and stuff right? Just some boring corporate white collar work. Though after several personal experiences over the years with proclaimed ‘consultants’ and their offspring I started to notice a correlation between consultants and a general emotional depravity in favor of financial gain. More so than other industries I’d personally encountered. Having spent my early years around the entertainment industry I understand what people are willing to do for money and power but these dudes, are on a whole ‘nother level.

What struck me the most was the societal quietness of it all. To acquire such wealth, eat in the finest establishments and jet set around the world one would think there would be some social media influencers, some kind of pseudo celebrities within their field. Surely there would be tons of people in this industry flaunting their power, maybe say like a real estate agent. You can find thousands of shiny real estate agents pushing their personal luxury lifestyles while hocking houses, so why not consultants? What are these guys involved in that they would be so willing to live in the shadows? 

Can you tell me what a consultant does? How they make money? How much they make? Where the money comes from?

All anyone ‘on the streets’ seems to know about this industry is that it is hella lucrative. Before we start looking into who these guys are, let’s just start from the potential incentive for someone to want to be a consultant. When I started this project I assumed as this is such a large industry that data surrounding it would be easy to find as these are highly educated earners after all. Surely there should be some sort of federal census data, or user generated data floating around the web. For example if I wanted to look into another high earner class of citizen like say, doctors, there’s a plethora of data available to me as a public citizen researcher to analyze and play with if I look around a bit. For most billion dollar industries this tends to be the case as the pool is so large it would be almost impossible to control people declaring their salaries en masse and taxes must be filed. For the case of consultants though, it’s not as easy.

Having gleaned the more major firms over time I started my search with one of the largest consulting companies, ‘McKinsey & Co‘. You can find plenty of sites that have salary ranges and relative bonus rates per company, but there’s seldom mention as to how this data was derived. Most sites like ‘Glassdoor‘ and ‘levels.fyi‘ have user surveyed and usually proprietary data that they use to give a rounded estimate of the average range of salaries in a given industry or company.

‘Glassdoor‘ (who recently merged with the anonymous corporate sharing platform ‘Fishbowl‘) has become one of the largest spaces for people to get deep information on work culture and salary expectations online, as well as being a hub for active job seekers in today’s market. It may store one of the biggest caches online of corporate data across sectors. Having access to broad data sets like this could allow someone to research market trends, employee wellbeing, and forecast future trends-among other uses.

As a netizen in order to obtain an account you must first provide them with some sort of tangible filet of information about your previous/current working company. Only then will you have full access to their features as a user, but still not quantifiable data. Now of course in the world of coding there are countless ways to get around this and a Glassdoor API does exist, but only if you have a business or research firm that is deemed worthy of having access to the data.

Glassdoor’s API policy

This publicly provided data cannot be collected, analyzed or visualized for my own interests unless I wanted to go down a less legitimate route…which I will not. I would love the opportunity to run a time series analysis on multiple salaries however. So I persevered through the available data online in search of some solid numbers.

some examples of free available data sets I found online read into Jupyter Notebook

Turning to independent sites I landed on one of the most abundant sources of data around the subject ‘Management Consulted‘. How verified and accurate this data is is anyone’s guess but in general let’s just say that the average consultant from Jr.Associate to Head/Senior Partner can look to start from 70-120$k and exit anywhere from 300k-1.5m$ per year with bonuses.

A starting salary of 140$K is nothing to scoff at as for most people that would be the tippy top of their possibility of earning in their lifetime. For freshly graduated young consultants though, it’s a base entry level salary. Fascinating as well that there has been a nearly 20k increase since 2021, when the global economy was supposed to be at a standstill. The 50 page report is available via Management Consulted.

As the quest to understand consulting increased I started seeking out their private spaces online to get a real vibe of their overall ‘culture’. My old faithful Reddit proved to be a decent stomping ground for new and former consultants, over 200 thousand of them in-fact, looking to blow off some steam after long hours slaving over slide decks and trading emails to each other begging to “pls fix” their problems.

As I had enough personal contact with some of their antics I already knew they worked 60-80 hour work weeks. If you’ve ever hung around CXO type people you know that they’re always working-you’re never actually off the clock. Why would you be with that kind of salary and privilege? In the case of consultants their hierarchical structure is more similar to a law or accounting firm but again the exact organizational structures are not really publicly available. Everything is potentially a trade secret so inside operations of these firms are often closely guarded. 

There’s various sections of industry one could go into in this profession from business development to human resources procurement, but generally there’s 5 main types of consultants outside of ‘niche’ industries. With consultants regularly say things like “let’s not boil the ocean” or “client failed implementation of recommendations” it can be difficult to understand what the fuck they’re doing.

Strategy Consultants– Provide guidance on high-level decision making in companies or organizations. They’re contractually brought into working positions similar to CXO in order to analyze and suggest large scale changes within a particular company or organization.  They also participate with large scale policy decisions and actions. 

Management Consultants– Referred to also as Business consultants, these are the mid-level jack of all trades consultants. Upper management on Power BI steroids. This is where those prestigious MBA degrees come in handy.

IT Consultants– These guys are a little different, they’re a little newer on the scene. Many have engineering or computer science degrees. IT consultants are brought on by orgs often for implementation of large scale technological projects. Say a company suddenly starts offering a new payment processor online, they need to implement that product, they may call an IT consultant. 

Operational Consultants– This is the largest section of the industry as it encompasses many of the other types such as strategy or IT in order to carry out “operations”. These are the big boss consultants that come in and ‘fix’ the organization. Often they accomplish growth or success by cost cutting and downsizing. As they are the heavy hitters they can essentially call upon any type of consultant in order to execute whatever plan they have come up with to make the problems of their client go away. Supply Chain, Sales and Marketing, Sourcing and Procurement, R&D, Finance, Defense, Health, Acquisition…anything.

Financial Consultants– Pretty self explanatory. Financial consultants could come in on an accounting basis, for risk management purposes and /or financial advisory. In general these guys have Finance degrees and really do just think about numbers. They’re probably the most common stereotype of what you think a consultant might do. Many firms operate as ‘forensic accountants’ and are a driving force of the industry.

For most professions that make these sorts of figures we as a public have a general fucking idea of what it is they do. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, engineers, CEOs even-we have a vague idea as to what it is they do to make money. We may not know the nitty gritty but we could postulate as to their common educational requirements and overall job skills. For consultants, it’s a lot less clear cut.

For those ‘in alignment’ with consulting there are 3 top firms. McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. Internally they are referred to as the ‘Big 3’ or ‘MBB’. They represent both the birth and decay of the industry being the biggest players on the market landscape but also by setting industry standards which all subsequent firms follow.

Pretty much every firm has a section of their website dedicated to their ‘case studies’ exemplifying their abilities to grow and transform your organization. They are very fancy slideshows, or as they call them ‘slide decks‘. If you look into consulting at all you’ll predominantly find helpful articles and videos produced by young upstarts with claims such as ‘how to ace the MBB case study interview’. Each case study is a packaged little slice into how they go about their actions and are used in business schools to teach the methods of which will be used by these firms.

With consultants being so private Reddit seemed one of the only accessible places online that one could go to get any sort of open data on what was going on.  My initial thought to quantify their posts came from seeing so many individually depraved comments about society or their work life while going through the posts that I assumed some of that would come out in the data.

The data itself is of course-uncorroborated reddit comments, but there was a general vibe that I was catching reading through it all.

So I went ahead and created my favorite thing in the world, a word cloud. Though a relatively simple NLP practice, I favor word clouds as a way to pull unseen data and to quantify social usage of particular words. Predominantly I have used these methods with more right-wing and conservative group data where hate language is more present and therefore easier to interpret.  I was seeing scandalous conversations around ‘r/consulting’ posts, but once compiled were incredibly boring.

I collected all the ‘hot’ posts comments and broke down the language into single words (tokens). I chose not to apply sentiment analysis as I am a very sentimental anglophone human. Once the data was processed, numerically it would seem that they just talk about work and how many hours they’re giving. ‘Consulting’, being ‘consultants’, ‘project’, ‘pay’, ‘travel’. They said the word work over 600 times in a single post. Even online where you do see a sense of freedom in what they’re saying when you compile it all is still just about the grind of the job.

Pulled data using public API

I really felt with the amount of negative things they had to say that the data would reflect that. That’s what their tricky lexicon is actually for though, you can say some pretty awful shit in seemingly diplomatic innocuous ways if you went to the right post-graduate institution. 

Determined, I started to look into particular posts with large enough engagement to get a fair data sample but was also sleazy enough that people would be talking mad shit.  Which me led to the post: 

“Why do BCG and Bain never get shit on?”

Reddit “Shit On” Post

A few names/words stuck out to me; Deloitte, Goldman, Colm, Romney, McKinsey, Morgan, Superstonk, Accenture, Scandal.  As this industry is one big pool many firms are mentioned alongside one another, pulling Deloitte and Accenture together is not surprising but a few of the other words lead to some questions. Goldman is assumed to be referencing Goldman Sachs who according to them had a net profit of $47.4 billion in 2022. Another consultancy that honestly I thought was a bank for rich people. 

Accenture and Deloitte are two other top players in the market who despite their record increases of 19-22% respectively netted a combined amount of $120.9 BILLION DOLLARS in 2022. All of these firms have currently been mass firing thousands of employees in preparation for certain economic freezing but…if you netted all that money and are now downsizing where does all the saved money go? Who’s paying these guys billions of dollars a year?

Well it turns out, fucking everybody. Why was Romney was pulled from the Reddit data. Oh yeah because he is a Co-Founder of Bain. Silly I should have known.

For those who are lucky enough not to follow American politics Mitt Romney has been politically known by the general public since his first run for President in 2008 after holding the position of Governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007. Though he succeeded his campaign that year to endorse fellow Republican John McCain, he attempted to run for President once again in 2012 with more gusto and holy underwear. Though unfortunately the garments did not protect him from defeat.

Romney’s greatest appeal as a candidate to the Republican party lies in his deep religious ties being a high ranking member of the LDS church as well as a prolific business man. Though to memory at the time of his campaign the vagueness of how he acquired such wealth was never really addressed. Much like the GOP’s later endorsement of Trump’s ‘business acumen’ in 2016. No one really cares enough to know how you became so wealthy and powerful, the point is that you are so therefore you must be a good business person. 

Though the conflicts of interest did not go unnoticed by journalists at the time the majority of the general public didn’t care or understand enough to dive into the regulations and movements of the private equity market. Republican voters just knew this very rich conservative person was speaking in full sentences and wanted to bring the bible back to the schools, a practically messianic GOP candidate.  

We’ll get more into shady dealings in the following but as a teaser just last year Bain and Co. was banned from the entire country of South Africa due to ‘misconduct’ with former President Jacob Zuma.

Why and how would an American consulting agency be involved with a President yet alone be banned by an entire country? Why would an African government call a North American consulting agency to fix their internal problems?

Well as it turns out that’s part of the ‘operations’ and ‘strategy’ sectors of consulting we saw before. So is healthcare and policy. Essentially consultants are entrusted with every major sector of our lives globally. Though what they do seems an innocuous mind numbing concoction of jargon actually amounts to our entire societal functioning. Why do we trust them? Why do large organizations and governments call them into their halls to fix all their woes? 

Aside from Mitt Romney we also see the current and former CXOs of YouTube, Alphabet Inc.(Google), Meta, Boeing, Morgan Stanley, GE, and Nike make the list of MBB alum. As well as Benjamin Netanyahu and John Legend. What a party. It would make sense that organizations would trust consultancies when their alumni and founders have gone to hold some of the most powerful positions in the world. These leaders can effect the daily reality in which we are currently living. They must be great with business right?

Steve Jobs himself had a well known position on consulting as demonstrated by his speech at MIT in 1992. The now somewhat famous interaction produced one of the better summations of the industry and their practices in general:

“…owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations-where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust yourself off- one learns a fraction of what one can what you coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results. Not owning the implementation I think is is a fraction of the of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better “

Steve Jobs

In human speech what ol’ Stevie is basically saying is: ‘how can someone make recommendations or major changes in a business without a history of ownership or actually sticking around to see the results of those decisions?‘ Sure, consultants have their place, if you’re a start-up who needs help in a new or emerging sector it can be incredibly valuable to call upon someone with experience and expertise in the market. However for sectors like Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals, Politics or Public Policy, bad advice can have grave consequences on living breathing humans. 

Even here in my current residence of little ol’ Canada McKinsey has been steadily growing their contracts within the Canadian government.

Though $32.5m may not seem like a lot in the ocean of funds this industry swims in, as a Canadian living under the poverty line how much student debt could that cover? Could it pay for clean drinking water in the North? Could definitely help.

According to the CBC during the last 7 years of Trudeau’s run in office his government has spent $66 million CAD in consulting fees to McKinsey. CBC goes as far as to quote sources within the government saying:

“In the end, we don’t have any idea what they did.”

This is not to say Trudeau’s party is solely responsible for letting the fox into the hen house as CBC and the National Post have called this fact to attention many times within the conversation surrounding McKinsey issues. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Justin Trudeau’s antithesis) also used McKinsey to figure out how to run the government during his reign but not with the same oomph as our current PM.  Harper also had his own aspirations to join the industry after his Prime Minister gig.

As of February 2021 in regards to their consulting work with Purdue Pharma, McKinsey was slapped with a $573 million dollar settlement between themselves and 47 states, five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.

This is the same Purdue Pharma who pled guilty in 2020 to getting the nation hooked on opioids for profit. It now appears they may have got the idea from McKinsey. The firm did their job, they grew the business, but at what cost? Patients are seen as customers and the product is a death pill. They got that bag son! So strange to both employ and potentially be suing the same company at the same time. 

Here in Canada the biggest political consulting firm winning sketchy contracts goes to McKinsey and Co. but they’re one of many operating nationally. You could deep dive for literal years on the deplorable movements of McKinsey alone but I feel implored to warn you that we have entered a whack-a-mole situation.  

Where you think you’re safe from McKinsey you better watch out for BCG. Bain. Deloitte. Accenture. Where one company may be banned, the same players may just jump ship to the next vessel. Let’s deep dive into some of the types of predicaments these companies can find themselves in at a global scale.

Starting with ‘BCG’ another ‘big 3’ firm, according to Vox they’ve been implicated as recently as 2021 for working with the ‘WHO’ (the World Health Organization) regarding Covid policy and god knows what else. The scandal lies in that usually the WHO is usually barred from outside consulting contracts but for Covid I guess they decided to make an ‘unprecedented’ decision to use BCG’s services.  

The details of the WHO situation are beautifully documented and cataloged in the cited Vox article as well as the WHO external report documents if you have deeper interest follow the link. Though this would seem like enough to stop for we unfortunately have many more moles to whack. 

Another big national player here in Canada is Deloitte, who often provide scandalous press fodder though they haven’t had the same funds/contracts as some of the other firms. Even with these shortcomings they’ve made sure to create a top tier hostile working environment for their female employees.

As a woman I am saddened but not shocked by this, I’ve lived long enough in this body to assume female discomfort is the internal vibe of most ‘company culture’. What’s not necessarily assumed is them running companies into the ground repeatedly and then trying to hide it.

Currently Deloitte is involved in yet another audit scandal which is pretty much the only way to ever find or nail these guys for anything. Similar to how we handled gangsters back in the 1930s and also Wesley Snipes. Deloitte Canada has paid more than 200 million dollars in fraud charges nationally alone, though think about what they don’t get caught for?

To find the ‘creative accounting’ that occurs within these companies (*cough cough* offshoring) you need forensic accountants. Which…hilariously most of these dudes are. 

This is a good intermission from whack-a-molin’ should you need a break, but for those brave individuals who have made it this far and still want to do some swingin’-position your bats.

The first time in my memory the general public was glued to the markets was the great #Superstonk scandal, involving my resting space of Reddit and some very bizarre market manipulation by the Musky boy. I feel as this is the most well known example where consultancies suddenly became publicly relevant. They came out of the shadows because they felt robbed, their profits were affected. 

Hypothetically there is a continuous number of shady dealings happening in every single one of these companies every single day, and therefore it would be absolutely impossible to attempt to bring them all to the table. So as my grand finale I have attempted to compile a ‘greatest hits’ of the most egregious dealings that have made the light of day. Or at the very least, an SEC circle court. 

EY recently got pinched for lying on CPA exams, incurring the largest ever fine imposed on an accounting firm by the SEC.

“This action involves breaches of trust by gatekeepers within the gatekeeper entrusted to audit many of our Nation’s public companies. It’s simply outrageous that the very professionals responsible for catching cheating by clients cheated on ethics exams of all things,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. “And it’s equally shocking that Ernst & Young hindered our investigation of this misconduct. This action should serve as a clear message that the SEC will not tolerate integrity failures by independent auditors who choose the easier wrong over the harder right.”

Oliver Wyman recently had to put their operations to the test when Southwest Airlines’ firewall went down one day causing major disruption to the company. 

As their public image being Southwest Airlines has always been pretty touch and go, this disruption could have dealt the final blow to the airline. So what does any struggling corporation do when in crisis? Call in the consultants of course! 

However there’s an interesting detail I’d like to point out here. The CEO serving Southwest at the time of the breakdown happened to have spent 12 years as an aviation consultant at the very same firm his organization decided to hire! How crazy is that? You know, they probably could have used his expertise. 

You’ll find this often, a cyclical exchange of executives between every corporate or political sector. This pattern helps to explain how and why they’re involved in essentially every level of society and global economy, there’s nothing you can’t ‘consultify’.

We’ve wacked many a mole and have achieved a high score, but it’s time for the SPEED ROUND.

As promised, let’s end our salacious surfing with the story that I feel is the most concise way to show the true magnitude and operative style as well as being one of the most publicly covered. Having occurred off the North American continent, South Africa does not care about yo secret keeping so they are spilling the the tea.

It started when South African President Jacob Zuma called upon Bain during a time of civic change in his country. Zuma is known to be a shady dude having been tried for many things including corruption and rape as early as 2006, but was/is a populist President who made great fanfare of his influence and changes to South Africa. His party embarked on large scale transformation projects incurring millions of dollars in contracts for public works and other social initiatives during his tenure. Zuma being of a growth oriented mindset and wanting to globally expand, looked to the global markets.

Who better to call than the very people who created the system he so desperately wanted to be a part of? What happened next will be a deep smudge in the record of Bain and it’s cohorts, as shown by their post-mortem public apology:

As this is an ongoing and incredibly nuanced case given the parties involved the intricacies of what actually went down are still currently being debated. What is understood is that Bain and Co. essentially worked for Zuma as their ‘client’ and facilitated the transfer of very large sums of public funds and operative power into the hands of Bain and constituents of Zuma’s inner circle. 

Within the language used around within Bain’s apology would you read this as critical as it actually is? Bain didn’t have “full appreciation of the political environment” of South Africa?? One of the most publicly politically complicated nations in known history, oh…you didn’t know? Didn’t do due diligence on that one? Didn’t realize the instability of what you were playing with? That your client had been jailed politically more than once? Y’all ain’t heard about Nelson Mandela?

Bain did what they were hired to do, make money for their client and themselves. They accomplished their goal, the rest is just a PR problem.

You may ask why a high school dropout has spent all this time and effort to understand systems and people I’ll likely not encounter in my day to day? Why would it matter to someone like me?

I’ll never have money in a private equity fund, I’ll never really need to call a consultant, but I can feel with every fiber of my artistic being that the root of the cause of many our woes comes down to these fucking firms.

The general unrest I feel about these organizations is based on our collective potential future-what are we ultimately building here? Our health, social organization and decisions of when and how we go to war are almost entirely being decided by publicly unelected people who’s sole responsibility is to increase the wealth of the firm and their client. That is and will always be the bottom line. There is no remorse in this. Money is holy in the Church of Capital. 

Currently the big firms are scrambling to have the lion’s share of control of our future and maintaining Covid growth numbers, investing heavily in the latest technological tools available. Though at this time the firms are majorly cost cutting and delaying new hires this is not preventing them from garnering newer bigger contracts globally. They just want to keep the pile of money they’ve accrued, ‘Dragon’s Den’ has taken on a much more literal meaning.

The Middle East is the next golden egg for firms with Dubai being partially built and regulated by and for consultants. This is a sign that though many firms are declaring their intents to invest in carbon neutral energy solutions, they will always be found where the oil is. That’s part of a good diversified portfolio, clean energy AND oil holding, always hedge your bets. 

We are currently at a time of great social change and many systems we never gave much mind to are being shaped and transformed to better suit those who are at the end of the money train. The push for AI into every sector of commerce is a short-sighted attempt at profit grabbing, hoping to automate every possible job they can in order to save the labor costs. The goal is to apply this framework to everything. Bundle all your services and automate anything and everything you can. 

As someone who is interested in Data Science, obviously I am in no way against algorithmic advances in our society. When used for sensical means and ethical methodologies. Tools used to detect cancer and run prediction models are entirely free to access to members of the public. Sciences that are genuinely incredible advancements are not being hidden.

In fact the health sciences are so underfunded much of this data is made publicly available in the hopes that citizen scientists may give their hard earned free time towards building a better future. Much like the way Microsoft started using open-source principles to improve it’s overall network.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are said to be going towards defense, energy, healthcare, and technology but where is it going? Are we as a people seeing the fruits of this money? Where does this bottomless pit of money come from? If their entire ability to play with money came from commercial means perhaps it would be fair game but the truth is a lot of their funding comes from the public sector. 

In order to grow your country, you must grow your commerce (your GDP) and always strive to increase your rank on the global capital stage. So by that standard it’s actually quite sensical that entire nations would call upon business Jedis. Those who work with the force of money. Money is one of the only ways we can show our value in this system.

That’s the only reasonable explanation for how this beautiful photo was able to occur:

We cannot as a species continue to ignore the correlation between money, power and global affairs. It’s one in the same and while we feel we may have democratic control within the systems we as a people have built there are battles being fought on conference calls at this moment that will potentially affect us all as a people in the coming future. 

If the senior partners of these ‘MBB’ firms are some of the main decision makers of our time, how can we know that our interests of biological survival are safeguarded? We’ve seen these people take out entire public coffers, let millions die to an opioid crisis for profit, destroy ecosystems, small business, governments, consult on war matters. 

The mounting problems we as a species have incurred due to our collective actions are raining down on us at a faster and faster rate. Being in my early 30’s I have witnessed countless economic crashes and violent wars, I’ve witnessed climate change in real time and felt services dwindle while community suffering is at an all time high. 

I spent my early youth in Los Angeles, where money and depravity went hand in hand. We saw soaring opulence down the street from abject poverty, so in general LA has always been an extreme example of the current state of American Society. In a place like Los Angeles that generates billions of dollars per year from the entertainment and tech industries, one of the wealthiest states and counties in the country also has one of the world’s worst homeless situations.  Skid row has always existed in my memory and was a common anti-drug warning used to scare us as children “Keep that up you’ll wind up on skid row!” 

The number of people floating around Los Angeles has ballooned up around 69,000 people, which is more than the population of Bermuda. Imagine the entire country of Bermuda without housing in a single city.

How do we as a people plan to solve this crisis? 

Call in McKinsey of course, they have a plan! 

The fact that the same company who helped to create a social health crisis to the point of a Federal lawsuit believes that they can solve the crisis they created is the reason why I am scared.

Though we could hypothetically carefully select every aspect of the politicians we elect or businesses that we support we will not have control or knowledge of their use of consultants unless something goes very awry. It doesn’t seem that this industry will shrink any time soon, as they still hold the trust of the very people and institutions that we rely on. 

At this moment in history one would think that as a ‘global community’ we would pull together and allocate resources in a way that would further the human race but that isn’t the most profitable option. Every sector of our lives is potentially being directed behind the curtain by a handful of ambiguous ‘firms’. We are in the process of building an entirely encapsulated global economy that moves only through the boardrooms of these organizations. Independence will be impossible. There is no sector too small, no scandal they cannot wiggle their way out of.

So I hope the next time you run into someone in the consulting industry or overhear “that guy’s a consultant” at a dinner party, you’ll not only understand them better but know the right questions to ask. ‘Cause you bet your ass every one of those guys has a story that will shock you.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more obsessions.

References