Holmes, I agree. I know consultants (Monitor, McK, Merce and BCG). The only thing they share in common is that they are the best at BS. And the only way to move up is to backstab and manipulate (the up or out agenda combined with comparative evaluations makes sure of that). Its an organizational structure where you can bet your bottom dollar that the worst will rise up and the ones with an ounce of decency will leave or be pushed out.
Spot on Babak. One place where I worked (I didn't stay there very long - couldn't stand the stench), the division manager was ex-consulting. It just so happened that the managers he then hired used to work with him at - lets just call them - ABC Consulting. Funny about that. These managers would sell their own grandparents to get ahead. Backstabbing like you would not believe. I was particularly unimpressed with these jokers bailing out of projects that were going nowhere (after of course having shot their big mouths off - as to how they would be implementing this by when, etc, etc - grandiose plans). Some other poor sucker would be "promoted" into the role to take the fall. NICE! They would then move into a project that was going well, displacing the successful manager, as he or she would be given supposedly "more important/critical" (read going nowhere) work. Highly illogical of course - but the only reason it happened was because of massive cronyism by the head asshole...err... I mean manager. Needless to say all their better people left in droves. Funniest incident was when a group of guys had produced a very detailed design for a project. Went over this manager's head. She then asked these guys to put together a 2 page summary for the design review meeting - Why I do not know, since it was a DESIGN REVIEW and the people present were meant to read the bloody thing! So these guys produced for her a 2 page word document summary. Idiot-features' response was a classic: [Ex-Cons-Idiot_Mgr]: What is this? [Competent Guy]: Its the summary you asked for. [Ex-Cons-Idiot_Mgr]: No its not! [Competent Guy]: What do you mean? [Ex-Cons-Idiot_Mgr]: This is unprofessional! [Competent Guy]: OK, please explain how so? It is a point-form summary, with a high-level diagram, of a 70 page detailed design document. [Ex-Cons-Idiot_Mgr]: It is NOT IN MS-POWER-POINT Format!!! [Competent Guy]: Why, are we going to be using overheads? [Ex-Cons-Idiot_Mgr]: No. At this point, the designers with stunned-mullet expressions on their faces decided to keep their mouths shut. That night they began updating their Resumes. There we go, another Random Rant!
The consulting business is quite simple. Hire the smart kids from college, hire the smart mid-career people. Pay up to do so. You then re-hire them out to companies. Essentially McKinsey is a time-sharing scheme for quality people.
McKinsey lead Enron into collapse. The CEO Jeff Jeffrey Schilling was from McKinsey and they brought an entire barrage of consultants over to Enron before taking it into the ground. The corrupt and misguided "Asset Light" strategy all started at McKinsey and was praised as genius in the consultant community, before Enron sunk of course. Now, McKinseyites are not your average guys, resumes with 4.0 1550 SAT's attached for the most are getting thrown in the trash, 165 LSAT or 650 GMAT, , don't think about it. Also, if your applying, make sure your from the right school as I know of a college graduate with perfect grades 4.0 and and 1590 on the SAT who did not make the first round of interviews because he was from the "wrong school". You would have to come from one of their feeder schools. I would have to say to my knowledge, there is no entity in America that is more elitist than McKinsey, save Skull & Bones. These people who make it into McKinsey don't only have top 1% of their class grades and test scores and are from the "right schools" they have outrageous resumes like building the biggest snowman on record, working for the Gore campaign, Rhodes scholarship, fighting in Desort Storm, working for the UN, doing charity work in Sudan, stuff like that. McKinsey has "in the box brains" meaning your not going to find billionaire ideas there, these billion dollar ideas are for the college dropouts to develop. But within the conventional box of intelligence, it would be hard to find better brains than McKinsey. It is a great place to "be from" as it is the "Bentley" of Corporate America but not a great place to be at. But why would a trader think about working at McKinsey where top partners only bring in a couple million annually while top traders and fund managers bring in hundreds of millions? (Soros, Simon, Kovner, Lampert, etc.) If you want bank and you have brains, boldness/balls, are emotionally detached, and have creativity, the markets are the best place for this person, not sitting in an office for 80 hrs a week trying to convince some hack CEO what is the best plan for him and his company to make a killing.