When Machiavelli Comes to Town: The Dangers of Opportunistic Consulting
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.” ~Niccolò Machiavelli. The Prince (1532).
“Unencumbered by government oversight, McKinsey is accountable only to its clients, who expect that their vulnerabilities, mistakes, and business strategies—in order words, their secrets—will remain just that, a secret”~ Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, excerpt from the book, When McKinsey Comes to Town(2022).
McKinsey & Company is widely regarded as one of the top consulting firms in the world. Based out of Chicago Illinois, McKinsey heads the triumvirate of major US consulting giants alongside Bain and Boston Consulting Group. For nearly 100 years, McKinsey has provided high-powered consulting services to many movers and shakers across corporate America, including General Electric, US Steel, Disney, and General Motors. They specialize in providing management consulting and services to C-Suite companies, helping clients to leverage management strategies and frameworks that achieve higher workforce productivity.
Additionally, McKinsey endeavors to aid companies become more efficient in their management practices. McKinsey clients often apply their advice by doing more with less, advancing components of scientific management into real-world practice. Scientific management is component of public management coined by Frederick Winslow Taylor, a prominent mechanical engineer, in the early 20th century. As outlined in this documentary, scientific management teaches managers to run their businesses like well-oiled machines. Taylor taught managers to treat their workers like cogs in a machine, focusing entirely on productive labor output. Laborers are no more than gears grinding forward to power a well-oiled machine. Workers should enhance a firm’s productivity regardless of how burdened or overworked they will be.
Over time, McKinsey has even broadened its consulting advice to aid several presidential administrations with political management strategies. The dynamics of this is explored in greater detail in the 2022 book, When McKinsey Comes to Town. In it, authors Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe explore how McKinsey was hired by President Trump’s Health and Human Services to develop administrative methods for stopping the spread of covid-19. Much of McKinsey’s advice fell not directly on the president’s desk but was managed by callous bureaucrats in the Administration such as Athony Fauci and Robert Redfield. Channeling Taylor’s scientific management, these men cared about little more than controlling crises and constraining individual freedoms through broad-based mandates so as to enhance their bureaucratic authority.
Prior to this, President Obama used a team of McKinsey consultants to advise him on his bitter political debate with Republicans in Congress over the botched Obamacare rollout. Across both the Obama and Trump administrations, McKinsey proved to be resoundingly successful in obtaining multi-million-dollar government contracts, with one estimate exceeding $1 billion according to Bogdanich and Forsythe. Much of this was garnered through an aggressive pursuit for advisory partnerships, often without much competition from other major consulting firms.
This article explores the dangers of management consulting advice gone awry. This piece provides an eye-opening case study on McKinsey’s embrace of Machiavellianism. McKinsey has been notorious for undercutting ethics to gain expedient outcomes, locking-in lucrative contracts that bear conflicts of interest, and promoting risky and at times experimental management models. McKinsey’s advice has been likened to blind greed, facilitated by a set of opportunistic instincts that lead high-powered clients astray.
Relying on Bogdanich and Forsythe’s 2022 book and Niccolo Machiavelli’s classic treatise on political power, The Prince [1532], this piece will demonstrate the dangers of consultation devoid of sound ethics and morality. In acknowledging that McKinsey’s services have been highly useful and beneficial for many American companies, I do not seek to paint a broad brush by branding all of their advice and strategic corporate game planning as immoral. Rather, I will highlight certain elements of their consulting services that have raised eyebrows, crossed ethical boundaries, and likely contributed to detrimental market outcomes.
What the Bible Reflects on McKinsey, Machiavelli, and Misinformed Advice
McKinsey’s consulting advice has often drifted away from ethical principles or a biblical sense of right and wrong. Serving as a core motif in Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book, McKinsey consultants have been caught promoting sneaky, risky, and underhanded managerial methods to clients. This manifests itself with reckless suggestions that are akin to high stakes gambles. If the advice works, the client’s pay off will be massive. But if it doesn’t (which is most likely the case), the ensuing damage to the client will be severe. While such advice can help a firm obtain a momentary market advantage over its rivals, it often backfires from perilous consequences that are only realized in the future. This Machiavellian form of high-risk consulting is not new and can be seen across several Old Testament accounts in the Bible.
A notable example is in 2 Samuel 10:2, where King David of Israel sought to provide comfort to Hanun, the son of the late King Nahash of the Ammonites. At this time, King Hanun was mourning the death of his father. Nahash had provided critical support to David and his forces while they were on the run from his son Absalom (amid Absalom’s rebellion). According to scripture, “David said, ‘I will show kindness to Hanun the son of Nahash, as his father showed kindness to me’” (2 Samuel 10:2). David sent two comforters to the land of Ammon to support Hanun during his time of mourning.
As they arrived, some of Hanun’s royal advisors, who would be the equivalent of modern-day consultants, spoke in his ear deceitful words about the intentions of David. They suggested that the comforters were actually spies sent out to collect information on the land and report its vulnerabilities back to Israel. They ask, “‘do you think that David really honors your father because he has sent comforters to you? Has David not rather sent his servants to you to search the city, to spy it out, and to overthrow it?’” (2 Samuel 10:3).
Foolishly, Hanun took their advice and restrained the comforters, ordering his men to tear their clothes in an embarrassing way and shave their beards. In doing so, once the men reported back to David, the Ammonites made themselves abhorrent and adversarial in the eyes of the Israelites. Naturally, this stoked unnecessary tensions and Hanun went out to battle with David and his army upon hiring an army of Syrians. David’s forces utterly defeated the Ammonites and the Syrians in an epic two-front war. The end result forced the Ammonites into hard labor and set the stage for their kingdom to be fully conquered by Joab, commander of Israel’s army, a few chapters later.
The moral of this story is that there were Machiavellian consultants advising key biblical figures in the thousands of years before Niccolo Machiavelli walked the earth. As King Solomon once said, “there is nothing new under the son.” Hanun’s advisors channeled Machiavelli’s teachings regarding how “it is better to be feared rather than loved.” Much to his demise, Hanun misunderstood the intentions of his father’s friend and turned a valuable ally into a fierce enemy.
Similarly, Ahithophel of Giloh, counselor to King David who defected David’s son Absalom, provided infamously crafty advice. Revered for his angelic wisdom, Ahithophel advised Absalom on how to sway the people’s loyalties away from his father: “Go into your father’s concubines whom he has left to keep the house; and all Israel will hear that you are abhorred by your father. Then the hands of all who are with you will be strong” (2 Samuel 16:21).
These salacious actions succeeded in antagonizing David and drawing support among rebellious Israelites who remained in Jerusalem during the takeover. This severed any remaining ties of goodwill between father and son, while symbolizing open rebellion between Absalom’s faction and the servants of David. They also fulfilled God’s curse on David as prophesied by Nathan the Prophet regarding his murder of Uriah the Hittite and adulterous relationship with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba.
Lastly, we see signs of Machiavellian counseling and unscrupulous advice two generations later with David’s grandson Rehoboam. Rehoboam ascended to the throne after the 40-year reign of his father, King Solomon. Despite Solomon being revered as the wisest king in Israel’s history and arguably the second wisest man to walk the earth behind Jesus, his son would commit some very unwise decisions. Namey, King Rehoboam consented to the Machiavellian advice of his reckless friends over the advice of his father’s elder advisors. It was Rehoboam’s friends who inspired his imperious response to Jeroboam, the son of Nebat and former head of the House of Joseph’s labor force, after requesting for relief from Solomon’s strict work edict.
As the scripture reads: “Your father made our yoke heavy; now therefore, lighten the burdensome service of your father and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you” (1 King 12:4). When Jeroboam requested that the king lighten the workload burden on the people’s weary shoulders, Rehoboam contemplated their request and consulted his father’s advisors. “Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who stood before his father Solomon while he still lived, and he said, ‘how do you advise me to answer these people?’ And the spoke to him, saying, ‘if you will be a servant to these people today, and serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:6-7).
However, Rehoboam ultimately took his friends’ brash advice by responding with harsher burdens. This was by the Lord’s hand with the intent to tear the kingdom away from Rehoboam as foretold by the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite in 1 King 11. This was to punish Solomon’s unfaithfulness to the Lord during his later years after he was seduced into a life of idolatry by his hundreds of pagan wives.
King Rehoboam on the throne flanked by his childhood friends while facing Jeroboam’s followers. To the left are the elder advisors whose good advice was rejected by the king.
In continuing the above passage, the Bible states: “But he [Rehoboam] rejected the advice which the elders had given him, and consulted the young men who had grown up with him, who stood before him. And he said to them, ‘what advice do you give? How should we answer this people who have spoken to me, saying, ‘lighten the yoke which your father put on us?’ Then the young me who had grown up with him spoke to him, saying, ‘thus you should speak to this people who have spoken to you, saying, ‘your father made our yoke heavy, bur you make it lighter on us’—thus you shall say to them: ‘my little finger shall be thicker than my father’s waste!’ ‘And now, whereas my father put a heavy yoke on you, I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges (scorpions)!” (1 Kings 12: 8-11).
When King Rehoboam conveyed this imperious, callous, and dictatorial response to Jeroboam, the people of Israel were appalled. As prophesied, Jeroboam led 10 out of the 12 tribes of Israel away from Jerusalem, dividing the kingdom against Judah. Because Rehoboam embraced the Machiavellian dictum of swift cruelty and scarce benefits, the Israelites forsook their loyalties to him in active rebellion. As written in The Prince, “therefore any cruelty has to be executed at once, so that the less it is tasted, the less it offends; while benefits must be dispensed little by little, so that they will be savored all the more.”
However, Rehoboam stretched Machiavelli’s advice to its extremities by hallowing out any meaningful public benefits for Israel, due to his overly strict labor regime. This drove most of the people to align with Jeroboam to break-apart from Judah and establish a separate kingdom under his rule. While Machiavelli encourages statesmen to enact ruthless judgements on the people as a means of solidifying their respect, he also cautions about its unintended consequences if taken too far. A key passage from The Prince reads:
“Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Besides the reasons mentioned, the nature of the people is variable, and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion. And thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.”
We now shift to how Machiavelli’s mischievous and cunning advice has been channeled McKinsey consulting services. Whether unwittingly or intentional, McKinsey has trained many of its consultants to advance a deceitful agenda. Such professionals have expunged their morals or forsook certain ethical principles in exchange for expedient results by any means necessary. Machiavelli’s famous work on mastering statecraft has much to say about the eye-opening McKinsey horror stories revealed in Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book (2022). The following captures a snapshot of these.
The Original Advisor: Machiavelli’s Influence on McKinsey
Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book, “When McKinsey Comes to Town,” features an eye-opening exposé of the largest and most powerful management consulting firm in America. If you consider what a consultant does in providing advice to leaders regarding their managerial responsibilities and oversight capacities, this is not so different from the role of political advisors in The Prince. While political advisors orient their advice toward proper governance, managing power cunningly, and statecraft, McKinsey’s advice has heavily influenced political decision-making. McKinsey even features teams that distinguish between their domestic policy portfolio and foreign policy focus. This can be seen chapters 5 and 7 which illustrate various scandals surrounding management consulting over engagement with the Chinese government and FDA regulations of opioids.
In chapter 5, the central controversy was over how McKinsey offered its consulting services to high-ranking Chinese officials and top federal agency officials simultaneously. Despite being an American company, McKinsey was caught double-dealing against the US, pursuing projects that benefitted Communist China’s geopolitical ambitions, while also supporting America’s military defense priorities. Particularly, McKinsey was caught advising the Department of Defense (DoD) on critical foreign policy strategies and defense technology while also advising China’s military intelligence on strategic counter-defense protocols. This was seen in McKinsey’s facilitation of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, ignoring the national security concerns raised by DoD and various European nations like France.
According to Bogdanich and Forsythe (2022) book, “The plan quickly raised alarms in Washington and other Western capitals. Leaders feared China’s government would use the initiative as a stealth plan to expand its own military influence, to entrap poor nations by lending them money that they couldn’t repay, and to bind those nations in a Beijing-dominated sphere of influence” (pg. 101). McKinsey disregarded the ethical concerns over China’s military expansionism and debt abuse of poor nations, in addition to covering up its double-dealing conflict of interest. Additionally, nine of the top fifteen Chinese contractors for the Belt & Road Initiative were also clients of McKinsey.
In this vein, Machiavelli spoke about the power of opportunism. He states that successful leaders should be willing to change their tune to fit the occasion, arguing, “whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” This squares with McKinsey’s self-dealing approach to doing business with China regarding their Belt & Road. Even though it was controversial and not one of the organization’s typical client projects, McKinsey pursued this Belt & Road in order to capitalize its own financial gains.
When faced with public backlash, McKinsey repeatedly denied doing business with China’s central government. This, despite the company’s portfolio consisting of multiple Chinese owned firms and lower-level officials in China’s government. Following negative press in The New York Times about McKinsey’s dealings in countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and other adversarial, McKinsey passed an internal policy that it would avoid political consultancy for parties or advocacy groups altogether and avoid doing business with “authoritarian countries.”
With chapter 7, McKinsey embarked on a controversial agreement with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) while it was contracted with Purdue Pharma to boost the sales of a deadly drug: OxyContin. OxyContin is a highly powerful, synthetic opioid used for alleviating severe pain problems. It has been tied to a string of overdose-related deaths from patients who succumbed to their addictions. This didn’t stop McKinsey from signing a $2.6 million contract with the FDA. The FDA, despite being the primary agency tasked with ensuring the safety and health of Americans using commercial drugs, overlooked the grave threat posed by OxyContin.
McKinsey was hired to “turbo-charge” Purdue’s drug sales apparatus while serving as its PR firm to. The company later broke away from drug manufacturer clients altogether, buckling other outside pressure against. Despite its best efforts to the fan the flames around the perceived safety of OxyContin, McKinsey was unsuccessful in its attempted coverup of the opioid epidemic that claimed the lives of thousands. Following a set of criminal and civil investigations into its arrangement with Purdue Pharma, McKinsey settled with the Department of Justice for $650 million in 2024. McKinsey essentially ran a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to preserve the reputations of Purdue Pharma and the FDA during a national drug crisis. Winning the media and the public over through deception was the consulting firm’s goal. As Machiavelli instructed, “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” And McKinsey had largely succeeded in throwing a veil of deception over the public’s eyes regarding the false trust put into OxyContin.
Epilogue to Harvard Professor of Government, Dr. Harvey Mansfield on his writings about Machiavelli
The legendary conservative Professor of Government at Harvard University for over 60 years, Dr. Harvey Mansfield (retired 2023) was an expert and a noted scholar on Machiavelli. A Google AI summary had this to say about his work based on Professor Mansfield masterclass scholarship on Machiavelli—
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield views Niccolò Machiavelli not merely as a clever political commentator, but as the true, deliberate founder of modernity. Through books like Machiavelli’s Virtue and Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth, Mansfield details how the Florentine silently overthrew classical philosophy and biblical religion. [1, 2, 3] {AI Overview}
This understanding of Machiavelli is more substantive, comprehensive, and consequential placing the man and his iconic writings on Statecraft squarely in the fulcrum of the Renaissance’s immoral dilemma. Such a dilemma consciously sought to separate Legality from Morality (and the Catholic Church). That in 2026 we are still living with the remnants of those Sacred/Secular battles makes reading and understanding the writings of Machiavelli all the more critical in modern times.
Conclusion: Beware Dangerous Advice
In closing, there are many parallels between the cunning lessons of deception and manipulation conveyed by Machiavelli’s The Prince and the deceptive advisory tactics of McKinsey & Co. Machiavellian deception has even been foreshadowed in prominent biblical accounts long before Niccolo Machiavelli walked the earth. The roots of deceitful advice run deep within ancient accounts and echo across time. Every account of nefarious consulting described in Bogdanich and Forsythe’s 2022 book should be considered within reason. Most of the examples in this book showcase McKinsey’s consultancy being devoid of moral principles. Ethical judgement was thrown out of the window in exchange for an expedient pursuit of power-broking. McKinsey became the ultimate powerbroker in the realm of consulting, establishing the success of many clients across political, corporate, and entertainment circles.
However, while McKinsey provided deceitful advice to expand its profit-margins, not every account in the book confers direct or full responsibility for the fallout. For instance, McKinsey had a direct hand in the 2007-2008 financial crisis by knowingly selling bad advice on how US banks should adopt subprime mortgage schemes. McKinsey incentivized banks to decentralize their decision-making, empowering lower-level bankers to issue larger loans to clients, and reorganizing banks around different sectors like retail banking. These were referred to as McKinsey’s “matrix management” structures in Chapter 8: Toxic Debt. These faulty financial arrangements convinced many banks to discard their lending risk assessments, exposing borrowers to greater financial risk in the process. Much of this decentralization was pushed by Chase and Citibank at the helm. According to the authors:
“In Chicago, McKinsey’s matrix helped set off a chain of events that contributed to what was then the biggest bank failure in American history and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of this crisis were three big McKinsey clients, Continental Illinois, Chase, and Seattle-First, or Seafirst, all of which had eagerly imbibed the McKinsey Kool-Aid” (Bogdanich and Forsythe, 2022, pp. 176-177).
This is a clear example of McKinsey’s Machiavellian manipulation playing an active role in fomenting a domestic financial crisis. However, there are also examples in the book where the authors exaggerated McKinsey’s role in a scandal. The most notable is Chapter 11 on the consulting firm’s dealings with the Houston Astros baseball team. The authors seem to imply that McKinsey is behind every bad decision rendered by its client, the Astros, without proper evidence.
Where McKinsey only provided its client team with data analysis on other baseball team injuries. Houston Astros expanded far beyond the initial advice by cheating against other teams through a variety of sneaky methods that it (not McKinsey) came up with. This includes sending coaches to go undercover into the other team’s dugout and relay information on the enemy’s strategy and steal the opposing team’s pitching signals. While McKinsey hadn’t advised the Astros to engage in this cheating, the authors improperly implied that the cheating took place because of McKinsey’s data analytics on baseball injuries.
With the above in mind, and having read the book, it seems that most (not all) of the criticism raised against McKinsey in Bogdanich and Forsythe’s (2022) book is warranted. There are constant examples of McKinsey consultants integrating Machiavellian tactics into their advisory services. The consistent theme in the book is that McKinsey acts as a snake oil salesman of dangerous advice to gullible clients. The advice is construed as appealing and profitable at first for the client. However, McKinsey hides the unintended consequences that inevitably erupt when the program collapses or the initiative backfires in some way. This ties in well with Machiavelli’s famous saying in The Prince, “the ends justify the means.”
In closing, my father’s 2014 essay on Machiavelli succinctly captures the man’s sinister philosophy. According to the piece:
“Here is the summation of Machiavelli’s ideas: when he says, ‘I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.” What ‘status quo’ exactly does he wish to overthrow and by what means – reason, democracy, debate, and replace them fascism, war and ‘perpetual revolution’ (Trotsky)? By status quo Machiavelli clearly means replacing morality, civilization and its Judeo-Christian traditions with his ends/means paradigm politics or what Darwin would define centuries later as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest.’”
The “ends justify the means” captures the form of opportunistic consulting provided by consulting giants like McKinsey. It’s unfortunate that many of its clients, both corporate and government, were led astray by the Machiavellian tactics that McKinsey peddled to expand its own wealth. McKinsey lit a powder keg of dangerous ideas that contributed to a nation-wide financial crisis, geopolitical tensions with China, an opioid epidemic, the overlooking of health concerns tied to vaping, and more. An alternate title for Bogdanich and Forsythe’s (2022) book may well have been, “When Machiavelli Comes to Town.
Category: Socrates Corner, Uncategorized
