Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  She says she was “simultaneously dazzled and horrified” by what she found. She was hugely impressed by the talent around her. “I remember sitting in orientation, and you have all of these well-groomed, super-articulate, high-performing people, and you have real questions about, ‘Do I belong here? Am I really one of these people?’—that kind of thing. I was dazzled by the stature or seeming appearance of my peers and colleagues.” She also soon came to be bothered by the overwork and by the reality that most of the projects were corporate humdrum, not world-saving. She had been pitched, as she saw it, on “the fact that you are going to have access to problems that typically people don’t have access to for decades, the ways in which you’re going to change the lives of your clients for the better.” But most of the projects she came across were just your usual corporate advisory tasks, cutting costs here, devising a market-entry strategy there. “A lot of it is just executing on stuff that’s a bit more mundane,” she said.

  And if the work was duller than the recruiters had promised, her fellow consultants’ workaholism was out of step with that dullness. They worked as though they were solving the urgent problems they had been pitched on fixing but weren’t. They built Excel models over dinner, which shocked Cohen, who grew up in a family “where you would be severely reprimanded and castigated” for answering the phone at mealtime. In a five-minute car ride from the hotel to a client’s office, it was customary to get on the phone and seek to squeeze as much productivity as possible from that shard of an hour. “That’s the reality,” Cohen said. “It’s just a crazy culture.” Then, she added, “Slowly but surely, you too begin doing it.”

  Cohen began to doubt her decision, and she found herself wondering if she should instead be doing what those who knew her best often pressed her to do—training as a rabbi. So powerful, though, was the logic of business as a path to service that she told herself it was a useful prologue even for spiritual work—and if “the rabbi thing doesn’t work out,” she said, her time at McKinsey would give her a “backup plan.” She added that it was probably better to be a rabbi known to have passed through McKinsey. “I think that we make sense of each other based on a very, very limited amount of information, and that certainly choices or brands or symbols signify certain things,” she said.

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  In taking the McKinsey job, Cohen joined MarketWorld. MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory—including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated and translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.

  These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.

  In her first weeks at McKinsey, Cohen had yet to see MarketWorld for what it was, and despite her own discomfort with the work, she could tell herself what so many bright young people tell themselves these days and thereby get through the months and years: that they are entering the world of money in order to master the tools needed to help those it has forsaken. Cohen says she reassured herself: “Now that I’ve been trained to structure, break down, and solve business problems, I can apply those same skills to any issue or challenge I choose.”

  Then she began to see through that idea. From the outside, she had been awed by the claim that people trained in business would gain some elusive way of thinking that was vital to helping people. Once inside, though, she realized that while this way of thinking was indeed useful for helping a tire company shave costs or a solar panel maker select a promising market for global expansion, it didn’t deserve its status as a cure-all across domains. Accountancy, medicine, education, espionage, and seafaring all have their own tools and modes of analysis, but none of those approaches was widely promoted as the solution to virtually everything else.

  Cohen began to worry that this idea of business training as a way station to world-changing was just a recruiter’s ruse, and one made easier to sell by the glow of MarketWorld’s seemingly noble intentions. What was the value in the problem-solving methods she had signed up to learn? Working on client projects, she began to run a parallel exercise in her own mind, ignoring the McKinsey toolkit and just asking herself what she thought the right answer was. “Very rarely, if ever, did the step-by-step, perfectly linear process of ‘here’s how we’re going to conduct this exploration’—very rarely did that actually surface the right answer,” she said. Often, that process—the thing for which McKinsey was famed—was “used primarily for communicating the answer, rather than generating it,” she said. The answers were derived through intelligence and common sense, and then the team would make them look more like trademark McKinsey answers: “We would backfill them into the template,” Cohen said.

  Given what she felt to be the fallibility of the methods she was learning, she was amazed at the hunger for them outside the precincts of business. In our age, many domains lack confidence in their own methodologies and are often desperate to inject business thinking into their work. So successful is the belief in business as the universal access card for making progress, helping people, and changing the world that even the White House, with its pick of the nation’s talent, under Republicans and Democrats alike, grew dependent on the special talents of consultants and financiers in making decisions about how to run the nation. In 2009, the Economist had declared it “McKinsey’s turn to try to sort out Uncle Sam,” suggesting that “Obama may favour McKinseyites in much the same way as his predecessor seemed addicted to hiring alumni of Goldman Sachs.”

  There was a case to be made that the very people being brought in to advise the government on the public good were implicated in many of the public’s most urgent problems. Management consultants and financiers were critical protagonists in the story of how a small band of elites, including them, had captured most of the spoils of a generation’s worth of innovation. The financial sector had extracted more and more value from the American economy, at the expense not only of consumers and workers but also of industry itself. More and more of the nation’s financial resources were swilled around Wall Street without taking the form of new investment by companies or higher wages for workers. Meanwhile, the consultants had brought a productivity revolution to corporations. They had taught them how to optimize everything, which made their supply chains leaner and their income statements less volatile. This optimization, of course, made companies less hospitable to workers, who faced such things as layoffs, offshoring, dynamic scheduling, and automation as the downside of corporate progress. This was part of why their wages stagnated while companies’ profits and productivity rose. Cohen said that her colleagues were often undeterred by these facts. “It’s like, ‘Okay, we caused these problems, but we also know how to solve problems,’ ” she said of the prevailing attitude. “So this is just the new problem that we’re going to solve—the one that we have caused.”

  Cohen, though, was losing faith in the power of these solutions. And she had begun to flirt with the dangerous idea that she wasn’t really being groomed to change the world. She pondered her next move.

  Meanwhile, President Obama, who did his own post-collegiate teeth-cutting as a community organizer in Chicago, was approaching the end of his second term. In the modern custom, he would soon be creating a founda
tion and a library. He had resolved that the renewal of civic life would be among their priorities. He had often spoken of corporations and wealthy people having too much of a say in American life and of ordinary people having too little. Still, as this president turned his thoughts to making democracy more vital, he decided to seek advice from McKinsey, as so many change-makers now tended to do.

  Cohen was asked to join the team, and she began to work on the question of what the president should do to reinvigorate citizenship. She said Obama’s turning to McKinsey consultants to analyze the problem was both “a silencer of my doubts and the conjurer of many doubts.” If a president whom she deeply admired thought McKinsey consultants should be thinking about these things, then maybe they should be. On the other hand, she suspected the president had been influenced by the same myths that had misled her. “Why wouldn’t he go to a group of community organizers to do this work?” she wondered. The project gave her “more pause than hope,” for it seemed to contribute to the business world’s growing influence over social change. She felt conflicted: That McKinsey had been given the work made her uneasy; at the same time, it was the most exciting work she could imagine doing.

  It was possible to interpret Cohen and her fellow consultants working to rethink democracy as capitalists stepping up, addressing a social challenge beyond their own self-interest. But it was also possible to ask, were the business elites chipping in, or were they taking over the work of changing the world? If the latter, perhaps putting the moneyed in charge of an effort to revive democracy would yield better results than putting others in charge. It is possible, but unlikely. For whoever treats a disease recasts it—with their own diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis. To take on a problem is to make it your own, and to gain the right to decide what it is not and how it doesn’t need to be solved. The problem of human want, for example, had found very different solutions when it passed from the care of feudal lords to that of republics giving representation to property-holding men to that of democracies with universal adult suffrage.

  The biggest risk of putting a corporate consulting firm in charge of designing fixes for societal problems is that it may sideline certain fundamental questions about power. The MarketWorld problem-solver does not tend to hunt for perpetrators and is not interested in blame. Cohen said she and her fellow consultants also risked ignoring or minimizing the concerns of people ill-served by democracy not out of malice or by design, but because of their mental model. If you think of the world as an engineering problem, a dashboard of dials you can turn and switches you can toggle and thereby make everything optimal, then you don’t always register the voices of people who see a different world—one of people and systems that guard what is theirs and lock others out.

  Eventually, Cohen would leave McKinsey and join the Obama Foundation full-time. But while she remained on the consulting firm’s payroll, she and her colleagues were subject to the delicate balancing act of corporate social change. They were supposed to make democracy more vital and effective for ordinary people, but preferably without challenging their fellow winners too much. They were to grow the public’s trust in institutions without digging too far into why the people leading those institutions were mistrusted.

  Part of what still drew Cohen to the rabbinate was the chance it offered to flee the compromises that arose from seeking to do well by doing good. “I would a million percent say I’d prefer to live outside of that market logic and world,” she said. But she would be lying if she said she didn’t like the prestige and the lifestyle. And she clung to the dream of making change at scale. In her continuing attraction to religious training, she seemed to long for one faith to deliver her from another—from a market faith that she had not chosen so much as given in to.

  This faith holds a great many decent, thinking people nowadays. Many of them are trapped in what they cannot fully see. Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead—or also—be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve. Many of them quietly wonder whether there is another way, and what their place in it might be.

  CHAPTER 2

  WIN-WIN

  Want to change the world? Start a business.

  —JONATHAN CLARK, ENTREPRENEUR

  It is dinnertime, and Stacey Asher is sitting at a window-side six-top, talking about how she helps poor people using the power of fantasy sports. She lives in Highland Park, in Dallas, not far from former president George W. Bush. Asher runs a charity called Portfolios with Purpose. It calls itself “a powerful platform combining healthy competition with giving”—a short phrase that manages to hit the notes of techno-utopianism, capitalism, and charity. Though she appears to be in her thirties, she says she worked at “six or seven” hedge funds in New York before moving to Texas, where her new husband had a job, also in finance.

  Like many from the business world who end up devoted to helping others, Asher has a story about an African epiphany. During a trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she found herself at an orphanage in Tanzania. There she met children who carried baby siblings on their backs for miles to secure a single daily meal. She learned that sometimes the orphanage kitchen shut down for lack of funds, though its operating cost was a mere $250 a month. “My life was forever changed in that moment,” Asher later wrote.

  She began to ponder how she could help. Like many MarketWorld do-gooders, she was more interested in starting something new than in examining how she and those around her—and the institutions they belonged to—might change their existing ways. She asked herself what she could do, but not what people in her universe might already have done. (It goes without saying, for example, that if hedge funders hadn’t been enormously creative in dodging taxes, the income available for foreign aid would have been greater.)

  At that very moment, one of the biggest banks in the world, Standard Chartered, was preparing to go to court in Tanzania to fight charges that it had knowingly bought “dirty debt,” tainted by corruption, from an energy investment, and then petitioned the country’s government to nationalize the project so as to pay the bank back with the money of ordinary Tanzanians. The practice was common—and was, at least theoretically, harmful to the government’s ability to care for the orphans that Asher cared about. The African Development Bank Group has said that so-called vulture funds—of the very kind that Standard Chartered stood accused of creating—routinely buy bad debt at a steep discount and then sue African governments to repay them in full with taxpayer money, threatening their foreign assets if they contest. It has said that “these vulture funds undermine the development of the most vulnerable” countries, citing Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Niger, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, and Uganda as victims of the practice, in addition to Tanzania.

  A well-meaning person like Asher, knowledgeable about and well connected in high finance, was in a good position to take on an issue like this. Given that vulture funds had extracted nearly $1 billion from debtor countries, according to the development bank, there was great potential to help orphans by beating back this dubious practice and leaving more money for social spending. But this was precisely the kind of undertaking that tended to get overlooked when MarketWorld’s winners took on the problems of others. Such an undertaking would be conflictual; it would name names of offending financial institutions; it would pick fights with people who might one day be useful to you. People like Asher were regularly told, and had come to believe, that there were less hostile ways of solving problems than systemic reform.

  She knew millions of people like fantasy football, and everyone likes making a killing on the stock market, and who doesn’t like helping people? Asher thought she would emulate the fantasy-football model, with stocks instead of players, and the proceeds directed to the winners’ favorite charities. (Ninety percent of Portfolios with Purpose’s players were said t
o work in finance—and at least one appeared to be an analyst at Standard Chartered.) As is often the case in MarketWorld, there is attendant irony: The same people who played the game could at the same time flash-trade commodities in ways that made prices unstable in the communities they were said to be helping, or continue to have their firms or clients buy up shady African debt, or pressure municipalities to repay their wealthy bondholders by raiding the pension funds of schoolteachers and firefighters. It captured MarketWorld values perfectly: You could change things without having to change a thing.

  Asher was drawn to the tantalizing promise of the win-win approach to social change. That approach is much in vogue in an age of market supremacy, and its allure was captured by Stephen Covey in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, whose fourth habit had been “Think win-win”:

  Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying. We both get to eat the pie, and it tastes pretty darn good!

  This idea fueled MarketWorld’s approach to change and the rise of such things as social enterprises, social venture capital, impact investing, benefit corporations, double and triple bottom lines, “shared value” theories of business’s enlightened self-interest, give-one-get-one products, and various other expressions of this presumed harmony between what is good for winners and good for everyone else. “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” asked the headline atop a New York Times Magazine article on the research of an organizational psychologist and self-styled “thought leader” named Adam Grant. In an ideal version of these endeavors, the winner could enjoy an enticing combination of making money, doing good, feeling virtuous, working on hard and stimulating problems, feeling her impact, reducing suffering, spreading justice, exoticizing a résumé, traveling the world, and gaining a catchy cocktail-party spiel.