When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firms by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe
When McKinsey Comes to Town was the perfect book to read on the plane to Disney World. McKinsey specializes in extracting profit from every entity the company touches and generally sucking the soul from most enterprises. I spent multiple days overheating in what I would consider the first ring of hell (Disney World in July is a one-time stop for me) while contemplating how McKinsey helped create such an efficient and expensive experience that millions of people (what are we doing??) purchase to to stand in unbelievably long human cattle lines.
This book infuriated me, and it makes you question the way many businesses and public sector systems operate. Are the horrible problems and outcomes part of a broken system? Or are they features of a McKinsey designed process to enrich corporate entities at the expense of society?
The pervasive and invisible hand of the consulting firms touches every area of our society and likely all Fortune 500 companies. Big consulting plays a major role in all the worst areas of vice in society—big tobacco, gambling, opioid addiction. McKinsey consults (behind closed doors) for the healthcare industry, big banking, and insurance giants. They showcased their great work during the Enron scandal. The icing on the cake is that McKinsey also consults the government on how to regulate these industries.
This book is well-written and well-sourced. The sunlight shining into McKinsey from this book is a positive for society.
Quotes
“Klostreich, a twenty-year Disney employee, became incensed. “The reason they don’t fail is because we check them every night,” he said. Goodwin said Disney viewed not checking lap bars as an acceptable risk. “It’s like a pilot saying, ‘Hey, we haven’t crashed in a while, let’s skip the preflight.’
“McKinsey consulted for Juul on highly sensitive topics, such as surveying which flavor names appealed to thirteen-to seventeen-year-olds, though the firm said that work was in support of the company’s effort to prevent youth vaping. McKinsey even offered to study the “risk framework” of Juul’s developing a product for the marijuana market. McKinsey’s research raised no red flags within the firm, one partner who worked on the Juul account said.”
“Presenting itself as a voice for health-care reform, McKinsey has remained silent on some of the most important health issues of our time. It did not lead the fight against cigarettes, vaping, and opioid abuse. (It had clients in all three sectors.) McKinsey did not speak out forcefully against the high cost of drugs or the tsunami of direct-to-consumer drug company advertisements. (Five drug company clients were called before Congress to defend price hikes and executive compensation.) Nor has the firm publicly raised alarms about the consolidation of health-care services. (The firm had clients who presumably benefited from these anticompetitive business decisions.)”
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth of Other Suns breaks your heart. It tells the story of blacks moving north to leave the Jim Crow south from 1905 through the 1960s. Blacks made the decision to leave their communities because their situations could not be worse somewhere else. Many African Americans saw their family/friends/community lynched with no hope of justice. It is hard to believe the policies (lack of policies) in place less than a century ago that made this movement happen.
This book follows multiple individuals across their lifetimes as they made the Great Migration, and Wilkerson completed over 1,200 interviews with people who made the move to Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, New York, and California. In many cases, life did not get much better for the people starting over in the north and west. Many battled the unwritten and harder to identify “James Crow” policies, and living conditions in urban centers were awful.
This book feels like fiction with deep characters and Wilkerson knows their full life stories. She shows the subjects’ entire lives–good and bad. The full circle documentation of these people moving north as young people and reflecting as 80 year-olds is awesome, heart-warming, and heart-breaking.
Quotes
“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.“
“Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.” Sixty-six were killed after being accused of “insult to a white person.” One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents”
“In the spring of 1919, a colored soldier named Wilbur Little returned home to Blakely, Georgia, after a tour of duty in World War I. A band of white men saw him at the train station in his uniform. They ordered him to take it off and walk home in his underwear. He refused. Soon anonymous notes were warning him to leave town if he wanted to wear his uniform. Days later, a mob attacked him as he greeted friends congratulating him on his achievements. He was found beaten to death on the outskirts of town. He was wearing his uniform. He had survived the war only to be killed at home. Cases like that were cause enough for some men to go north.”
“The rents in the South Side Negro district were conspicuously the highest of all districts visited,” Abbott wrote. Dwellings that went for eight to twenty dollars a month to white families were bringing twelve to forty-five dollars a month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration. “
“It’s not the oasis that I thought it was,” he says, “but I’ve got over that, too.” He pauses and considers the options of a stifled life under the deadly combination of Jim Crow and “little-townism,” as he calls it, if he had stayed in Monroe or even Atlanta. “I don’t think I could have done any better,”
Cancel Me If You Can by Dave Portnoy
Dave Portnoy is polarizing, but he’s real. Compared to the McKinsey book–Cancel Me If You Can is refreshing (and much lighter). It tells the story of Barstool and its humble beginnings. I appreciated the 10 year journey to get it started. Portnoy did not live well while building Barstool. He lived in his parents’ basement during the company’s formative years. He did not develop significant wealth until much more recently.
Dave has an eye for obscure talent, and he’s created a culture where oddballs can thrive. Last year, I read Erika Ayers Badan’s book on her career and time as CEO of Barstool. Both books are solid. I also appreciated the section talking about his acquisition/merger transactions with private equity (Chernin Group), ESPN, and Penn Entertainment.
Throughout the book, Dave spends a lot of time discussing the problematic nature of cancel culture, and his main argument is that it lacks context. He has been insulated from being cancelled because his entire life has been documented on the internet for 20 years, so his main following knows who he is and his sense of humor (and his shortcomings).
Quotes
“Quite simply, the people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing and chasing short skirts.“
“To say the release of the first issue was an unmitigated disaster would be an absolute insult to the phrase “unmitigated disaster.” There is a famous expression that I’m sure you’ve heard of: you get what you pay for. My primary distribution method for the first issue of Barstool was the homeless drunks contracted by the staffing agency. I’d say 90 percent of these people didn’t show up to work that day. Oh, you mean the homeless drunk getting a couple bucks to hand out newspapers didn’t make it? Gee, you don’t say.”
“In twenty years of doing this shit, I’ve learned that it is far easier to work with nobodies or people who are on their way up than established stars.”
“The next day, we had Frank on Barstool Radio to discuss his viral moment, and he proceeded to tell us he had written a blog called The Sports Encyclopedia, every day, for thirteen years straight, to a grand audience of nobody. Like I’m not exaggerating. His YouTube videos had zero views. Now that is what I’m talking about when I say doing it for the love of the game.”
“On the brighter side though, I was able to save dozens and dozens of pizzerias from going out of business with my frozen pizza reviews. A good review could land a place thirty to forty thousand orders overnight. You read that correctly. Thirty to forty thousand orders overnight. That’s how popular my reviews were. It was insanity. Small businesses that were on the verge of going out of business were suddenly given a lifeline and had to hire more people to fulfill the orders.”
Who is Michael Ovitz by Michel Ovitz
Michael Ovitz started Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and Who is Michael Ovitz gets granular (probably too granular) to tell the story. Ovitz re-invented the traditional agent/client model and built a team to maximize the entire relationship. CAA represented big-time actors, helped them find successful scripts, then sent the scripts to their director and producer clients to make the movies happen.
I appreciated the deep focus on client privacy and a shift from agents being seen as party influencers into straight-laced business advisors who commanded the highest fees for their clients because they had the best research and detailed information.
Ovitz was a prolific gift giver and acknowledged great work whenever he saw it. I enjoy reading the way Ovitz approached the longterm pursuit of big name clients and developing the agency’s business. ,Ovitz also expected his staff to be well-read and well-rounded, so they could connect with a diverse set of clients.
This book is full of personal war stories on clients from the 80s. There is also an odd dynamic where Ovitz talks about his 24/7 devotion to clients and the business while trying to make it seem like he was also a present father/family member (uphill battle).
Quotes
“Our sell was simple: if you were with us, as an agent or a client, CAA would protect you 24-7, take care of your every need. At a time when other agencies were full of solo acts, we had teams of four or five agents on each client.”
“In those days, the focus of representation was the social life: ICM’s Sue Mengers would sign you, then invite you to the cocaine parties at her house in Beverly Hills. She’d also gossip about you—she called her stars “sparklies”—to her other clients. We built our business as her opposite: we’d take tables in the back of restaurants, where we couldn’t be overheard, lean in, and present ourselves as very square. “You won’t have a big social life with us,”
“Yet our MO was to be attentive, polite, and well informed. I wanted worldliness to be one of a CAA agent’s defining qualities—Be able to talk knowledgeably about what your clients love. This will encompass pretty much everything. I insisted that our agents have a reading list: one national newspaper, one international newsmagazine, and one special-interest magazine, such as Golf Digest.”
“I often sent out more than a thousand letters a year, commemorating every opening of a film (I’d send along a lucky horseshoe from our gift office), award nomination, or award—and those were just the rote letters. The ones that really had an effect were the personal ones, the ardent ones, wooing and praising and letting people know: I saw what you did and it was terrific.”
The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
The Trading Game was a bit depressing but gave a clear window into Wall Street/London finance. Gary Stevenson writes his own biography as a trader who comes from an impoverished background in London and becomes a successful day trader. He finds himself on the trading floor thanks to winning a sponsored math probability challenge while in college. He goes from a survival mode to earning over $1 million in his first full year. The newly earned insane money brings an entire identity reckoning with a steep lifestyle cost. Compelling and interesting..but also made me sad for Gary.
Quotes
“This is another general rule of trading: you don’t necessarily make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.”
“Having the right trade is not all that matters. It’s also important that you survive. Every trader has a pain threshold. Every trader has an amount they can lose. You could have the best trade in the world, but if you hit your pain threshold, it doesn’t matter, you’ll lose all your cash. The lesson, then, is never hit your pain threshold.”
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