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The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business
Author:
McDonald, Duff
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Class:
338.761
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: HD69
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ISBN-13: 9781439190975
LCCN: 2013002023
Imprint: Simon & Schuster
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Pub Date: 09/10/2013
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $30.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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387 pages ; 24 cm
H 9",
W 6",
D 1.3",
1.36 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Library Journal Best Books
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Starred Reviews:
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TIPS Subjects:
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Business
Finance
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BISAC Subjects: |
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Corporate & Business History
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Consulting
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LC Subjects:
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Business consultants
McKinsey and Company
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SEARS Subjects: |
Business consultants
McKinsey and Company
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Publisher Annotations | 06/07/2013 |
| A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of McKinsey & Co., America's most influential and controversial business consulting firm, told by one of the nation's leading financial journalists. Founded in 1926, McKinsey & Company has become one of the world's leading management consulting firms, helping to invent American business and shaping its course for decades. Ushering in the age of American industrial dominance, McKinsey remapped the power structure in the White House, helped create the bar code, revolutionized business schools, and introduced the idea of budgeting as a management tool. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| Booklist | 07/01/2013 |
| McDonald is a contributing editor at Fortune magazine and the New York Observer; he has also written for Vanity Fair, New York, Esquire, Business Week, GQ, WIRED, and other publications. His first book, Last Man Standing (2009), delved into the 2008 financial crisis through a profile of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase. In his new one, he examines one of the world's most influential companies that you probably never heard of, the consulting firm of McKinsey & Company. Ranked among the top-rated consulting organizations for decades, McKinsey & Company has been a top-brass advisor to most of the Fortune 500 corporations at one time or another, though its client list has always been a well-guarded secret. This is a company that has prided itself as having the highest standards in the industry yet has contributed behind the scenes to severe cost cutting and downsizing, acted as enablers to the Enron and General Motors bankruptcies, and seen a former CEO hauled off to jail for insider trading. McDonald's reporting reveals how and why this Teflon firm has continued to thrive through the years. Siegfried, David. 416p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 07/01/2013 |
| A history of the McKinsey consulting business and an evaluation of whether it is a "net increaser of 'value' or merely the most capable mercenary force in the corporate world." In a timely book, Fortune and New York Observer contributor McDonald (Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase, 2010) probes the leading business consulting company in the country, considering McKinsey's role in the functioning of America's corporations and their leadership. The author leaves no doubt about his own critical views as he discusses such questions as whether the firm's advice is worth what its customer pay. He discusses the extent to which it has been "preying on the insecurity of 'keeping up with the Joneses' " by feeding on the tendency of one organization to imitate another or simply providing corporate leadership with cover stories from the outside "disinterested expert" who recommends what corporations want to do anyway. McDonald asserts that McKinsey "made the bulk of its money helping its clients slash costs" and suggests the company may have been the impetus for more job losses than any entity in U.S. corporate history. Originally, business consulting provided a way for corporations to maneuver around antitrust laws and a vehicle for swapping intelligence and business practices. Marvin Bower, successor of the founder, made McKinsey into the force it became as top companies like General Motors were recruited as clients in the 1930s. Contracts to reorganize national security and defense during the Eisenhower administration gave the company new leverage and clients. McDonald discusses whether the advice the company gave during the 1990s to clients like Enron and Citibank may have contributed to subsequent economic crises. He also emphasizes the firm's defense that they only provide advice; others choose whether to implement it. A fast-paced account of a key business institution, its deeds and misdeeds. 416pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 03/04/2013 |
| Founded in 1926, the powerfully influential management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. helped create the bar code and reconfigure budgeting as a management tool but also contributed to the debacles that were General Motors and Enron. Financial journalist Duff, now associated with Fortune and the New York Observer, here considers how McKinsey consultants have facilitated the restructuring of major American firms-and what the consequences are. A wake-up call? With a 60,000-copy first printing. 416p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 05/27/2013 |
| The celebrated management consulting company exerts an influence that varies from benign to malign, according to this revealing, if conflicted, history. Financial journalist McDonald (Last Man Standing) traces McKinsey's rise to the pinnacle of corporate advice peddling and its unique pretensions and privileges: its elitism, decades-long engagements and lucrative open-ended contracts; its symbiosis with the Harvard Business School, whose newly minted grads dole out wisdom to experienced executives under its auspices; its aura of intellectualism, which sometimes amounts to vague buzz phrases and invocations of "change"; its reliance on alumni who helm other companies and steer business its way. McDonald, a contributing editor at Fortune, can't quite decide whether this is all good or bad, or whether he's indifferent. He credits McKinsey with rationalizing business practices and forestalling corporate mistakes, but charges it with standing behind blunders and bankruptcies from Enron to GM; he wonders if the firm is less about helping companies make better products more efficiently than giving doctrinal cover to CEOs' impulses to slash payrolls. McDonald combines a lucid chronicle of McKinsey's growth and boardroom melodramas with a serviceable, if sometimes cursory analysis of evolving--or at least retreaded--management theories. But the larger import remains, like that of the corporate world it symbolizes, a contradictory muddle. Agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects. (Sept. 10). 416p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9781439190975,dl.it[0].title
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