Wise Fool Digest Week of March 14

Not the Smuggest Guys in the Room

Welcome back to the Wise Fool Digest. Transparency and practicality seem to be the theme this week, including my ask to you below.

Missionary and Mercenary

It’s not much of a secret that I have deep ambivanence about public sector consulting — both as a line of work and as what seems to me an outdated problem-solving approach, at least as it’s often practiced. The Economist doesn’t play in the same sandbox, but a recent column on the turmoil facing business consulting juggernaut McKinsey sticks a new blade in that roast:

Its partners see themselves as missionaries. Yet they are also mercenaries—“guns for hire”, as Duff McDonald, a biographer of the firm, calls them. They have a mantra that puts their clients’ interests above their own, and a belief, drawn from the firm’s pristine heritage, that no one knows better how to distinguish between right and wrong. Yet in some cases, as in working with Purdue Pharma, maker of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, their moral compasses go haywire…