Onboarding

ON AN EARLY MONDAY MORNING IN FEBRUARY 2023 I entered the cavernous lobby of Three World Trade Center, a thousand-foot glass spreadsheet erected in downtown Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11.

It was filled with a cleansing woodsy citrus scent. Every surface was clad in marble, glass, or stainless steel and lit from above by a luminous ceiling. A James Rosenquist painting, 17 feet high and 48 feet across, filled the wall in front of me. I stared at it as I waited in the security line. In the center of the painting was what looked to me like a giant diamond, surrounded by shiny abstractions, in a sea of pinks and reds.

I picked up a temporary badge and put my bag, which contained the new Macbook Pro and iPhone I was sent the week before, through an X-ray machine artfully hidden in the marble of the giant security desk. The turnstile let me through with an approving bleep.

I took the elevator up to the 62nd floor. To my left was another reception desk, made of undulating wood slats, where two receptionists sat in front of a matte screen that filled the wall behind them. It cycled through animations of the McKinsey logo.

Opposite the desk, to my right, was a central floating stair. Smiling young people dressed in expensive neutrals and blues, occasionally set off by bright white Nike Air Max sneakers, moved up and down. Straight ahead was a spectacular view of the Hudson river.

The receptionist directed me to the largest meeting room, a 30 foot square glassed in on two sides, one facing north towards the Empire State Building and the other overlooking the edge of New Jersey. It contained about forty new employees in uncomfortable new shoes. Together we looked like a stock photo for a corporate brochure.

Our three “faculty,” all consultants at the firm, cautioned us against burnout and blind devotion to profit. They inducted us into the church of the pyramid principle — a way of structuring your thoughts so that you say what you want to say first, and then go into the details. They lowered their voices as they talked about “holistic impact,” the notion that we should think beyond money to the long-term health of a company and everything it touches. They explained how any problem could be solved through known, neatly diagrammed methods. I felt like everything in my life made sense again.

I am the child of immigrant parents who never quite found a path into American society and deferred their hopes to me instead. I disappointed them by becoming first a graphic designer and then, like my father, a professor.

Academia offered me health insurance, a retirement account, goals, and smart colleagues. But by the time I got tenure in 2019, teaching and learning had ground to a halt, replaced by buzzwords like “access” and “wellness.” Nothing worked and nothing was written down except for long lists of demands centered around trauma and anxiety. People cried in Zoom meetings. Conversations didn't make sense. I felt like I was tip-toeing around people I no longer recognized.

Eventually it was easier to stop complaining and start interviewing. An old friend invited me to a dinner celebrating a recent paper McKinsey had published on “The Value of Design.” The company had booked the top floor of a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, extravagant without being flashy.

One of the design partners gave a speech, which was followed by excited responses from the crowd. Fired up by the eloquent defense of design and a couple of glasses of wine, I spoke up, too, saying, “Data is a graveyard. You can learn a lot there, but you won’t find the future. You need designers for that.” They invited me to apply for a consultant role at McKinsey.

On my first day there, it seemed like an island of order and sanity. This was a place without uncertainty and disappointment, where together we would leave the world better than we found it. I believed. My onboarding had begun.

For a hundred years, McKinsey & Company has melded ideas from accounting, law, and engineering and applied them to business. It was founded in 1926 by an accounting professor, James O. McKinsey, who was passionate about applying his teachings to business management.

His successors added first the secrecy, mythology and jargon that would come to define both the firm and the profession now called "management consulting,” and then computers to track and centralize all of the projects (by then called “studies”) to be published as academic articles.

By the 1990s, it was serving almost every possible client of scale and consequence, so in order to grow, it needed to do more than offer abstract strategic advice. Over the next thirty years, strategy was overtaken by implementation. McKinsey would not only tell you what to do, it would help you do it.

By the time I joined, the firm made $20 billion a year. Forty thousand employees conducted tens of thousands of studies that served 450 of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as the governments of the UK, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Australia, Turkey, Brazil, India, China, and the United States.

Critiques of McKinsey center around its scandals. The firm touted its “in-depth experience in narcotics” to help pharmaceutical companies aggressively market pain killers, and has advised both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Saudi government. A former managing director landed in jail for insider trading. But in a way these scandals just serve as advertising, social proof of McKinsey’s image as an all-powerful and unstoppable mercenary force.

And it easily shrugs off any consequences anyway. Its three thousand or so partners are given unusual autonomy. If anything bad happens under one partner’s umbrella the others have plausible deniability. They can cite the firm’s famous confidentiality, assure any critic that they are taking the matter “very seriously,” and say the bad apple was leading only one study.

The firm’s true impact is the other tens of thousands of studies that efficiently design and redesign the world we live in now, optimizing each company for shareholders and executives by a few percentage points each year and moving the people who make the decisions further from any accountability.

The world is harder to live and work in than it used to be. There is no one reason or one entity to blame. But there is only one firm with its tendrils in everything. Before joining McKinsey, I thought I would find some sinister motives there, or sinister people, or at the very least willful neglect or cynicism lurking in its darker corners. Instead what I saw was the best and the brightest doing everything right, but always subservient to an inhuman logic.

Later in the week, we were initiated into the many roles in the firm’s rigid hierarchy from Business Analyst to Senior Partner, and the “caring meritocracy”—a hundred-year-old system, now augmented by software—that would measure and rate us all Everything was referenced in the “McKinsey Dictionary,” McKinsey’s extensive online glossary, a kind of decoder ring for the secret language we all now shared.

Our journeys through the firm were illustrated in an allegorical tableau in our pre-printed notebooks: a landscape with factories and buildings at the edges where people with compasses in consultant outfits were pushing and pulling each other and clients across fissures and other hazards.

We were asked to stare at it for thirty minutes and respond in writing to imagine our path to Partner, an exercise which felt like a holdover from the 1930s. This was to be an entrepreneurial quest: to be successful meant that you had cornered the market on some kind of expertise to sell to clients, a kind of business within the firm. I studied the allegory in the workbook again.

Our second week, “Business Essentials,” was virtual. We were broken up into teams of five to calculate ROIC (Return on Invested Capital) and EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) in Excel templates for a fictional faraway company. One person on my team was just a name on the screen. They never spoke. Another was visible, but always on mute. The third was amenable and practical, with an accent. The fourth was a fanatic from Costa Rica. I pushed for a more creative solution to what was clearly a hypothetical situation, while he kept repeating “the client is not going to care about anything else except for the money.” He was right, of course, even hypothetically.

By the end of that week, McKinsey’s plans to lay off 1400 staff in support positions in order to maintain the bonus pool for the firm’s partners had leaked. It was known as Project Magnolia. McKinsey is synonymous with layoffs at its client companies, but in its self-mythology, it had never had layoffs of its own. Bob Sternfels, the Managing Partner, issued a video to apologize for the indiscretion and remind us not to talk to the press. The New York office was noticeably quieter.

At a happy hour on Friday, an elegant young woman took me through her glittering credentials and then said that she had worried since the day she started that she would be “CTLed.” The McKinsey dictionary told me that this meant “counseled to leave,” McKinsey’s polite way of saying “fired.” I assured her that this couldn’t possibly happen, that it was all just a back office recalibration. Surely our knowledge of the rules, or cleverness, or some combination of the two would provide security.

Most of my new colleagues had done everything right up to this point. They had cracked the code, amassed the right combination of awards and activities and scores and poise to get them in the Ivy League, and then into McKinsey (“more selective than the Ivy League”). I had followed a different path, but like them, I wanted to believe.

Our faith fell short only when we tried to explain the constant feeling of being stalked like prey, alert for the moment someone would appear on a screen to tell us it was game over. Despite her credentials, the elegant young woman was cut by the end of the year.

The following week was my first official week of work. I sat in a booth on the 60th floor by the cafeteria so that I could check people out as they floated past me to get their salads and ice cream. The news of the layoffs had faded. The space had the air of a modern seraglio.

Many of these people would soon be sent on planes to distant headquarters in faraway states, hired out for millions of dollars a week to perform studies. As each study started to close, the client would eagerly agree to new work, glowing with the feeling of power and privilege in being able to burn a substantial ritual offering of cash in exchange for so much youthful momentum and energy. It helped that, in many of the companies, the executive ranks were already packed with ex-McKinsey consultants, and the room reserved for the McKinsey team became an oasis from the boredom of middle American corporate life.

My first study was for a large warehousing and logistics company. The company wanted to use a new software for tracking and logistics (called “Manhattan”) in all of its warehouses, but the first implementation had not gone well. McKinsey’s remit was to speed up the rollout so it would happen in five years instead of fifty. My task was to visit four warehouses in four different states, each using technology from different eras, and report back.

I began by interviewing two floor managers at a warehouse in the Inland Empire region of California. They started their days at 3:30 a.m., and their desks were tucked around what looked like a 1980s mainframe computer, a floor-to-ceiling monolith of blinking green lights and nests of cords churning out lists on a loud dot matrix printer.

The two floor managers finished each others’ sentences, even though they were responsible for two completely different systems. Everything was on paper, visible and fixed. The pickers fanned out with sheets of labels rather than handheld scanners, and at the end of the shift, who had done what and how much could be seen simply by looking at the stacks of labels on a tracking sheet. It was ranked second of all warehouses in the country for total distribution. Once I had interviewed the dozen or so people on my list, I briefly fantasized about quitting and joining them, because they worked so well together.

My last trip was to a warehouse in Kentucky, the only warehouse that had actually implemented the new software. The day I arrived, weary-looking workers were smoking at round plastic picnic tables that were missing their umbrellas.

The two floor managers flashed identical grins when I asked them to tell me about the new software. They said the trainers had arrived too early, and so by the time the software was implemented, many of those who were trained had left. Because the initial inventory had been incorrect, there were frequent errors that ground the warehouse to a halt. The new transportation software hadn’t yet changed over, so there was nothing to integrate into the new system. Because the WiFi only worked in some places, the new digital hand-held scanners were unreliable. And so on.

As we waited for the software’s login screen to load on their PCs, I asked if the chart on the wall was generated by the new system. They laughed. They had made their own Excel chart to track the workers’ average time and number of boxes picked, since the productivity targets in the new software were unreachable.

The pickers and forklift drivers showed me how they could click their handheld scanners into a black-on-green “classic mode,” which they said worked a lot better. It took me a minute to realize that the warehouse's tech guy had built his own interface for the system off the books, trying his best to emulate the 1980s green-screen software.

I came to realise that the promise of software and the technologies that enable it is better long-distance oversight, not more efficient work. And, of course, it also means work for McKinsey, or a rival, who can consolidate information into vast and shimmering “data lakes.” These lakes will flow into dashboards full of numbers to point to when executives find themselves unable to understand what their company really does and how to fix it. If their anxious boards and stockholders want them to show that they are doing something, the executives will hire consultants to propose and execute new initiatives with snappy names.

And that’s exactly what we did when we got back to headquarters. Instead of showing how technology implemented from a distance ultimately made it impossible for people to work together, we made slides full of “pods,” “lighthouses,” and “centers of excellence” to paint the picture of a new unified, data-driven supply chain company. The senior partners then flew in to conduct a kind of pageant with the executives to get their buy-in.

I was later assigned to do user research at a giant pharmaceutical company. As I was nearing the end of my first week, I hadn’t talked to anyone at the company, and I had no calls scheduled.

“These are not priority personas,” my manager told me on a video call. “The programmer is not priority. The VP is top priority.” She was in some kind of large suburban attic space. In the background was an upset child trailed by an older woman in a sari trying to coax the child down the stairs. She pretended they didn’t exist.

I focused hard on my image on the video call, tried to look agreeable and waited for the time to pass. This meeting would end and I would close the laptop and she would cease to exist. On my most difficult days, I convinced myself that none of these people were real, that it was all an elaborate but boring virtual live theater project.

It was going to be hard to solve the problem we were supposed to solve without talking to any of the people actually doing the work. But there was no way to translate this to someone who has always lived and worked in abstraction. I tried to ask questions rather than offer explanations, hoping that this would keep me from sinking my next performance review. I was also hoping to stay on the project long enough to make prototypes of dashboards to add to my “McKinsey experience.”

The next week, she scheduled three virtual user interviews with higher-ups at the Pharma company and added herself to the invitations. During the first interview, she angrily messaged me on Teams, asking why I was asking the questions I was asking. When we discussed it later that evening, she emphasized again how important these people were, telling me slowly in a low tone that they were the “C-suite” of one of the business units.

The C-suite comment stuck with me. I had something less than reverence for anyone at the top of the Christmas tree, because I’d always been on the ground, or somewhere near it, with their bad decisions raining down on me. In fact, I had come to the firm with some naive hope that I could funnel up a conversation from those on the ground at some other company and avert one tiny bad decision, or maybe make a process or a product less miserable.

But my manager wasn’t there to make anything better, or to make anything at all. She was a lifer and, like everyone around her, was hoping for one of two possible outcomes: she would win at the firm’s game and make it to the next level, or win one of those C-suite seats in “industry.” That’s why it mattered to her who we talked to and how. The only way to get to either of these goals is by keeping the client happy, not by solving their problems. I was expendable in that effort.

In the early 2000s, Microsoft famously descended into 12 years of mediocrity after implementing “stack ranking.” They ranked their employees quarterly and fired the bottom 10 percent. It never occurred to them that it would encourage people to backstab their co-workers, sabotage projects, and withhold information. McKinsey has had its own version since 1951, artfully named “up or out,” where a failure to make it to the next level within a certain period of time means you are “counseled to leave.”

Even before the layoffs spread beyond the back office, consultants of all stripes obsessed over the November and June reviews. They weighed out loud whether each daily comment, event, or decision would make their number rise or fall on the imaginary leaderboard. A “distinctive” or “very good” ranking meant a substantially larger bonus at the end of the year and the possibility of making it to the next level, closer to the fever dream of permanent financial security.

When there was enough work to go around, a negative comment on a consultant’s rap sheet might be outweighed by many positive ones, and there would be enough material to draw from for witty anecdotes that could serve as evidence for making it to the next level of the game.

But in this time of drought, both seasoned and the new consultants fought for whatever work they could get and did whatever was necessary to stay on it. Distracted by the constant squeaking of the guillotine above, they turned whatever emotional energy they had left towards the project of keeping the blade up for a little while longer. If that required a little sabotage, or withholding of information or contact, it was all just part of the game.

On an early Thursday morning in November, my second week deployed at the headquarters of a grocery chain, two young consultants were looking at a spreadsheet on a giant computer screen mounted to the wall.

They were calculating “work minutes” for various roles in the grocery store: the meat cutter, the bakery assistant, the deli manager. They were more animated than usual, having concluded that with their new procedures, they could reduce all of the times by twenty percent.

The consultants had already spent two years breaking down and rewriting each procedure and then urging the staff in the stores to “utilize” various tools and processes. They were frustrated that the workers were “stuck in their ways” and not taking up their new methods.

Someone had floated the idea that if the program had a compelling “brand,” the workers would finally embrace the consultants’ ideas for how they should cut chicken or wrap meat in a way that would raise the company’s stock price. I was the “visual brand expert” sent to the grocery stores to find out what the workers would find compelling.

In one store, a worker told me that it was their third “lean ops” program. Posters from the previous programs hung on the break room walls. Most of the people I talked to were older, straightforward and low-key, cautious and reserved to the point of being introverted. It seemed to me that they had found exactly the right kind of environment for this personality: the stores were orderly and mostly empty. Customers interrupted the flow of packing and stocking maybe once every thirty minutes. There was no pressure to make a sale or move a line. The same things were done the same way at the same times. I had worked in both fast food and construction, so I could see why many of them have stayed in these positions for years despite the low pay.

What wasn’t clear to me was when and how someone wearing wet vinyl gloves was supposed to pick up and read our divine consulting guidance, or who was supposed to make them do it, since they mostly worked without supervision.

This wasn’t my first engagement, though, so I knew that the task at hand wasn’t teaching grocery store staff new ways to shred chicken, or consultants about the world outside.

Between these studies there were two ever-presents.

The first was AI. The firm began rolling out its own in-house version in 2023, churning out papers on the topic along the way, and introducing a widely parroted notion that AI will replace “20 percent of jobs”—a figure McKinsey has now upgraded to 40 percent. AI is also a blame sink for McKinsey and its clients, allowing them to attribute layoffs to the technology without ever having to admit a business is in decline.

AI was in every study, proposal, and internal tool, sometimes central and sometimes not. When I talked to the other McKinsey team members about the potential after-effects, they were always upbeat. They were like the fried chicken ads where the chicken is doing the sales. When I asked them what they thought the goals were, they repeated the house mantra about how people will be freed of tedious drudgery and go on to do “more important” or “more human” things. I knew the mantra because I had put it in countless proposals.

So then I would ask: is the idea to have fewer employees? No, they would say, no way, we will just do more work. But then I would see it dawn on them that there isn’t more of this expensive work out there, and even what there was of it has been drying up fast.

The other ever-present was travel. It was always solitary. It was always the same. And it gave me long stretches of time to survey the world created by my slides and spreadsheets, and those of countless other management consultants.

There is a thought experiment where an artificial general intelligence maximizing the number of paperclips becomes so motivated and efficient that it uses the iron in our blood to make more of them. There is no sense in fearing this AI as some future spectacle; it’s already here, thousands of people with the best intentions relentlessly optimizing returns on invested capital. Out there is the real-life EBITDA metaverse that millions of us putting money away in retirement accounts have been unwittingly building for the last thirty years.

On every trip, the day before I traveled, my phone nagged me to check in to my flight, a process filled with promotions for upgrades and credit cards.

On the way to the airport, my Uber ride was non-negotiably priced according to the weather, the traffic, and the current mood of the algorithm. The driver got a variable commission that he would only see when it was paid out at the end of the day.

At the airport, I waded through stressed travelers doing all of the work that used to be done by airline employees. The security checkpoint was a labyrinth of lanes labeled with the logos of companies selling access to a shorter line, the travelers in the Clear lane mentally calculating their progress against those in the TSA PreCheck and vice versa.

At the gate, people boarded by castes built around loyalty programs and credit card memberships. Those who declined to participate in these add-on payment schemes were punished with uncertainty, inconvenience, and unexpected fees.

On the plane, every surface, screen, and announcement on the plane was laced with micro-incentives for products and services with an ever-increasing list of “partners.”

At every juncture, I saw staff and travelers set against each other by people in meetings at faraway headquarters. We were all kept at the very edge of our tolerance, carefully calibrated by the data from micro-surveys that popped up constantly on walls and on phones. When those tolerances were breached, the word “policy” was used like a shield, every response scripted. None of it benefitted either the exhausted employees or customers. But it was never meant to.

When I landed, I took another Uber for about an hour along a regional highway flanked by corporate franchises: Del Taco in front of the Staybridge Suites, Outback Steakhouse next to the AutoZone. The road and the buildings were almost always new, the same materials and the same surfaces reflecting the sun of Texas, Kentucky, or Idaho. Once I was past the Walmart, the scenery turned to Family Dollars, Dollar Generals, and Dollar Trees spaced out among trailer parks owned by private equity firms.

I checked into the same Marriott Courthouse Suites, comforted by the prospect of being surrounded by the same furniture, the same shower handle, and the same smell of Ecolab cleaning products to mask any suggestion of humanity.

I ate the same Chobani yogurt in the morning with the same granola on top, and drank the same Starbucks coffee. Every franchise had the same framed piece of word art, with fragmented words in black, gray, and red. It read “fantastic” and “expressive” in the foreground.

If you looked closely at the word art it felt more like a ransom note. The words “neglecting” and “excessive” were there in the background. Overlaid in red was a bolder statement that said “life is to be lived.” ⸭

JULIETTE CEZZAR is a designer, educator, and writer based in New York City.