Another famous McKinsey piece-de-art comes to mind - the work they did for the NYC Dept of Corrections to stem violence at Rikers. Their recommendations were to build a piece of software which they built and delivered but it never worked. The software did all sorts of analytics and tried to pick the prisoners who would benefit from their risk violence reduction program.

Apart from their sordid failures in building and delivering software, it turns out that their data analysis was outright fraud as they cherrypicked the trial inmates, who were low-violence, to show it worked.

This disaster ended up costing NYC 27.5 million. Their recommendations were a dud, the software never worked and violence soared. Ripping NYC for tens of millions and condemning the people with the lowest power - prison inmates - to worse outcomes - that is McKinsey's credo for you.

The thing that baffles me is not that the majority of McKinsey consultants would go along with it but there are almost zero whistleblowers. Shows the power of the firm's narrative and the prestige. My hope is enough of these exposes and the prestige of working at McKinsey will be akin to having worked at Enron or a WorldCom.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...