2025-08-12
12 分钟Hello, Alice Fullwood here, co-host of Money Talks,
our weekly podcast on markets, the economy and business.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Thanks for listening.
Business has been forced to adjust itself to staggering acceleration in the rate of change,
observed McKinsey, a consultancy, in a promotional pamphlet it published in 1940.
What period in history has ever presented more difficult problems for the executive?
Naturally, demand for McKinsey's advice was soaring, it wrote.
These too are times of upheaval.
Geopolitics is forcing companies to rethink where and how they operate.
Artificial intelligence, or AI,
is filling bosses with excitement at the opportunity to replace costly humans with bots,
and fear that their business models may be disrupted.
And yet McKinsey, the most illustrious of consultancies, finds itself in the doldrums.
McKinsey has long regarded itself as operating in a league of its own.
Ron Daniel, its boss from 1976 to 1988,
talked of an organisation of genuine greatness, filled with superior people.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey's current leader, prefers to describe it as distinctive.
This sense of superiority, though nauseating, is not entirely without justification.