The 2020 election includes a candidate who’s spent his life advocating for illegal wars and another who’s brought anti-Semites with him on the campaign trail amid a rise in anti-Jewish slaughters and other hate crimes. There’s one who’s lied about being a Native American for personal gain, and then there’s the late entrant who glorified the Chinese dictatorship best known for putting a million Muslims in concentration camps.
So naturally, the Left is very, very angry with the mild-mannered gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for working at a mainstream management consulting firm for three years a decade ago.
McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group (if you’ve been on a college campus during recruitment season, you’ve heard it as BCG) comprise the Big Three, or the top management consultancies. The Big Four include the major accounting firms that have forayed into consulting: PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and KPMG.
If you are a student at a top university who does not immediately intend to pursue a graduate degree, there’s a pretty decent chance you’re gunning for a consulting job at one of these seven firms. And it makes sense. These are the gears that keep our economy operating as efficiently as possible.
With starting salaries plus bonuses beginning in the high five-figures, consulting is hardly a thankless job. But it’s a very demanding one, with most weeks starting with a 6 a.m. flight to the site of a project, often requiring working until midnight or later every day, with few proper weekends off.
Project types vary. Pete Buttigieg, who was bound by nondisclosure agreements like literally every other consultant in the country, disclosed that he worked to reduce overhead expenses at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, analyzed the effect of price cuts at Canadian grocery chain Loblaws, strategized how to sell more energy-efficient products at Best Buy, researched energy efficiency for an environmental nonprofit group, and worked with a number of government agencies.
All in all, these are pretty standard projects for associate consultants fresh out of school and at the bottom of the totem pole. Then why is the Left so livid?
Well, the benefit McKinsey consultants provide can be summed up in the fact that companies are willing to pay so much for it. Consulting firms generally charge companies per day what they give associate consultants per paycheck, and McKinsey charges about 25% more than its competitors. Companies shell out millions for a team of 25-year-olds to run regressions and surveying and crunching data. They do that because they know they’ll get the best talent that McKinsey has to offer. It could well save them millions or save their company altogether.
If finance is responsible for growing and allocating capital, consulting is responsible for industries themselves using that capital as efficiently as possible. That makes your world cheaper, faster, and more prosperous. Apparently, that enrages the Left, or at least it provides them an excuse for outrage.
While it’d be lovely if more graduates from top universities went into entrepreneurship, 40% of Harvard grads already do go into top consulting or finance firms for a reason. It’s there that they’ll learn how to run a business, nonprofit group, or agency. The quality of McKinsey’s alumni proves it.
Former McKinsey associates (the job held by Mayor Pete) include Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith. Although many from McKinsey remain in the private sector, some go into the public sector. As luck would have it, many of those are favorites of the Left!
McKinsey alumni also include first daughter Chelsea Clinton, Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, Obama’s head of the Small Business Administration Karen Mills, and Obama’s HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell. Elizabeth Warren’s daughter Amelia is Buttigieg’s fellow McKinsey alum!
Mayor Pete should welcome the ignorant attacks from haters. His biggest problem remains his lack of experience, so maybe, with his exemplary and exceptional resume center stage in the news cycle, that perception will bend back in his favor.
