McKinsey and Company Refuses to Serve Mexican Drug Cartels
Photo by Matthew T Rader from Pexels
In a Bold Move, international consulting giant McKinsey and Company announced that it would not provide consulting services to Mexican cartels.
In a telephone interview with Consulting Magazine, global managing partner Kevin Sneader discussed new business development guidelines that the firm will be implementing to better protect its blue blood brand. “While errors were made at Purdue Pharma, they are not as bad as they appear. The advice that we provided Purdue might have made us look like a firm trying to profit from the opioid crisis. In truth, we were helping an industry leader develop game changing customer relationship strategies that leveraged up-sell and cross-sell of a very “sticky” product. It was an excellent opportunity to increase net promoter scores for heavy users. Even though the opioid crisis has killed over 400,000 people in the U.S., one must realize that this has hurt us as well. People at my club were miffed to see me wedged into their foursome after they had heard about our involvement with Purdue.”
This is not McKinsey’s only brush with controversy. In fact, working with despots has become a firm strategy. “As a firm, we believe that we can drive more change from within by contracting with problematic actors. When we work with a Russian oligarch, the results show that they become better from the experience. For example, based on our influence our oligarch clients now question the efficacy of poison to address competitive situations. And window incidents happen 22% less often with our oligarchs and with those that choose not to work with us,” shared Sneader. A window incident is when someone dies from falling out of a window, his hands bound behind their back with zip ties, and the bottom of his feet and genitals burned as if scalded with a blowtorch. “We have also worked for leaders that routinely kill people who underperform or accidentally stray in front of their motorcades,” he continued. “In truth, these are the people that need our help to get better.”
During the interview, Mr. Sneader shared the rationale for not working with Mexican drug cartels. "People initially thought this decision was driven by racism, but that is far from the truth," he said. “We had an initial meeting with El Mayo, the head of the Sinaloa cartel to discuss how we could help them develop a go-to-market strategy for North America. He seemed quite interested in our initial PowerPoint presentation and everything seemed like it was going well until we hit slide 15 and he noticed a bar chart with labels in Times Roman font instead of our standard Helvetica. It really set him off, and all of a sudden he pulled out an MP-5 and suggested that he would be happy to “cap the little pendejo in the back of the head” who had ruined a perfectly good presentation with what he called a ‘sub-standard and dated font’. He even pointed a damn MP-5 at the McKinsey partner, which could have resulted in a real tragedy. Unfortunately, our data analytics people in India have a tendency to get creative with font use. I’ve even seen them use Comic Sans on occasion. At McKinsey we do have our standards, and we choose to draw the line at putting partners’ lives in danger over potential font inconsistencies.
Fact Checker: Don’t worry, no partners were fired over the Purdue Pharma engagement.