QUICK READ:

• An ideal of shareholder primacy, powerfully championed by Milton Friedman in a 1970 New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” gave the newly ambitious management consultants a guiding purpose.
• Today, top executives boast immense powers of command—and, as a result, capture virtually all of management’s economic returns.
• The Massachusetts attorney general said McKinsey had helped the maker of OxyContin fan the flames of the opioid epidemic.
• McKinsey provided the intellectual underpinning for pharma companies to rethink radically in the mid-2000s when drug pipelines seemed to have dried up and research productivity fell.