MCKINSEY’S BITTER TONIC
By some estimates, the consulting firm could lose more than half its revenue in this country. Its SA head admits it faces a ‘steep decline’ . . .
The world’s largest consulting company, Mckinsey, now has an unenviable distinction to its name: a starring role in a Harvard Business School study which looks at what happens when multinationals in Africa take a rather flexible approach to “facilitation payments”.
Last week, it emerged that Harvard professor Caroline Elkins taught a fourday course in January centred on SA’S state capture scandal, called “Africa Rising: Understanding Business, Entrepreneurship and the Complexities of a Continent”. In Elkins’ course, 30 African graduates from Harvard discussed the 2015 deal in which Mckinsey clinched a R1.6bn contract to “turn around” Eskom — R600m of which then ended up in the pockets of Trillian, a shadowy company part-owned by allies of the Guptas.
Jim Aisner, spokesman for the Harvard Business School, said the Mckinsey vignette was “meant to be used as the basis for student discussion and role-playing and was never meant for public consumption”.
“This was supposed to be a private teaching moment about a situation in SA that aspiring managers or leaders could learn from,” said Aisner.
But the fact that such an august institution chose to highlight this corruption scandal has put Mckinsey's nose badly out of joint. So much so that last weekend, one of its partners met Elkins, presumably to lean on her not to do anything so silly again. (It has clout, since 6% of Harvard’s MBA students come from Mckinsey.)
Safroadu Yeboah-amankwah, Mckinsey’s MD for SA, told the Financial Mail that the short Harvard document was “pretty inaccurate”.
But it’s no real surprise that its faux pas became an
It beggars belief that a mess-up involving a huge R1.6bn deal can be laid at the feet of one man — Sagar