Mirror, Mirror on the Boardroom Wall...

Firms like McKinsey offer CEOs a tempting relief. But it can also be dangerous.

I’ll let someone more qualified than me speak to McKinsey’s legal issues—putting it mildly—that were spelled out in this article from The Guardian.

But I can comment on author Peter O’Toole’s larger point. He contends that McKinsey’s continuing success in the face of lawsuits and scandals is that it provides an invaluable service to CEOs: letting them pass the buck when leadership gets difficult.

McKinsey also shields weak leaders from accountability. After a preventable shop floor accident or before big layoffs . . . a McKinsey report can shield a company from an angry plaintiff or its soon-to-be former workers. Its presence offers the plausible deniability that layoffs were just a business decision, one recommended by a respected, external party. . . . The durability of firms like McKinsey points to festering weakness in business’s upper reaches: today’s leaders either don’t have the skills to meet the accelerating world around them, can’t effect change within their own organizations, or are too afraid to make a mistake and fail.

Bullseye. As CEO, it is YOU who holds ultimate responsibility for what goes on in your organization. This aspect of the job makes it uniquely difficult. You have total responsibility (and the public spotlight) but limited control.

Feeling this pressure, it’s tempting for the CEO to outsource the confounding and heavy decisions to a 9+ figure consulting company. What a relief to throw up your hands and point to the highly paid folks in suits. But in doing so you have given up the single most important aspect of your job, the differentiating factor of the CEO: responsibility for leading the company.

If you do find yourself relying on external consultants (or maybe wishing you could), it’s probably a moment to take a look in the mirror. Either you and your leadership team haven’t built a system for tackling tough issues internally, or you’re prioritizing short-term optics over meaningful, long-term solutions.

Yes, CEOs today face unprecedented complexity—AI is a freight train, post-pandemic employee expectations have shifted, political tides are unpredictable, recession looms as an ever-present possibility. But hiring an external consulting firm is rarely the answer to addressing any of this. The rules of what a great CEO does haven’t changed.