The Firm

Duff McDonald is a journalist and the author of Last Man Standing, a biography of JPMorgan Chase CEO and chairman, Jamie Dimon. A contributing editor at Fortune magazine and the New York Observer, he has written for Vanity Fair, New York magazine, Esquire, GQ, Wired, and Time, and has been awarded two Canadian National Magazine Awards. He lives in New York.

They helped invent the bar code. They revolutionized business schools and created the corporate practices that now rule our world. McKinsey employees are trusted and distrusted, loved and despised. They are doing behind-the-scenes work for the most powerful people in the world, and their ranks of alumni include the chairman of HSBC and William Hague. Renowned financial journalist Duff McDonald uncovers how these high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts but also become mired in controversy across the years.

Discover how the firm celebrated Enron's disastrous corporate structure and how they've been instrumental in the government's controversial NHS reforms. Are they worth their astronomical fees? And what do firms and governments actually get for their money?

Based on exclusive interviews with key McKinsey players and written in gripping prose, this is a revealing window onto one of the most secretive and powerful companies in the world.