I was a management consultant with a Boston Consulting Group spin out (was SPA at the time) a very high brow consulting firm similar to McKenzie. I’ve also worked with McKenzie on the customer side.There’s no doubt the McKenzie folks are very smart, very experienced, and can draw from a lot of industry specific knowledge within the company. They can deliver a lot of value.

However they destroy more than they create.The managers at the company who hire them usually do so for their own selfish political reasons and McKinsey is more than willing to oblige. And the reason they oblige so readily is because they’re so arrogant having coming mostly from Ivy League schools, they actually believe they’re smarter than everybody else and everybody else is basically mediocre at best and doesn’t deserve to be associated with them.They cut other people out, they have secret meetings, they control meetings at the company. All while having no clue whatsoever about how to actually run a business and get something done, not to mention the inability to get the cooperation and operational knowledge from other people at the company.People at the company don’t trust them, they don’t like them and they’re incredibly arrogant.Think of them like a virus their — objective is to infect the cell, hijack the nucleus (sr management) and replicate themselves and suck resources from the cell.

I have managed McKenzie several times before from the client side. My strategy is simple. Use them for their knowledge, but put them in a box, define exactly the scope of what they can and cannot do and if they stray over the box and try to take over fire them. (Which I have done)

Many other consulting firms are similar, but McKenzie is the quintessential highbrow consulting firm that you need to be very careful about.

When you’re young and eager for example out of MBA school, which I was when I worked for SPA, you think you’re part of a great exclusive club, but keep in mind there’s a lot of scum around you. If you have any humanity in you, you’ll eventually realize it. But you learn a lot and work with very smart people, albeit mostly assholes who would eat their own children. But it was worth it to me, and after about three years I couldn’t stand the stench and went to work for one of our clients.