Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?

Don't all these consulting firms have a really bad record when it comes to large-scale infrastructure projects? Some of the worst examples are Ciudad Real International Airport (Spain/McKinsey), Karuma Hydroelectric Project (Uganda/Deloitte), Chongwe River Water Supply Project (Zambia/Boston Consulting Group), Isimba Dam Project (Uganda/McKinsey), Haramain High-Speed Rail Project (Saudi Arabia/Deloitte), and Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York (McKinsey).

In constrast, China's infrastructure projects are highly successful - high-speed rail now covers 42,000 km across 100 corridors, and the first one was only completed in 2008. Based on their example, the most efficient way to build modern infrastructure is to cut the consultancy firms out of the loop entirely.

But how is the shareholder value doing?

Not a joke. Our metrics are different from their metrics. They might have succeeded.

Nya Kalolinska Hospital in Stocholm was pretty much the work of BGC… most expensive hospital in the world. (In Swedish but GPTs exist nowadays so…) https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/nks

The AKH (Vienna General Hospital) was orders of magnitude more expensive than the Nya Karolinska. It cost 43 billion Schilling to build in the 70s, amounting to roughly 5.8 billion euros today.

An even better example is the city of Chongqing. Looking at pictures of Chongqing from when I was in high school, I would say what stands today is simply not possible. Yet there it is.

If you cut out consultancy firms, we would still not be able to do anything close to that in America. There are many reasons. None that I would expect to figure out and resolve anytime soon , if ever.