The business of "global management consulting" has always existed in a realm of nebulous amorality. In a recent interview with Isaac Chotiner at Slate, Duff McDonald, a financial journalist who wrote a book on McKinsey, spelled it out neatly:

In their typical strategy work, they gave advice and made no representations about implementation. So if a strategy that McKinsey offered someone went horribly wrong on the implementation level, their response was always, "We have nothing to do with this. We simply gave them some ideas."

The genealogy of this attitude--or this affect of having no attitude at all--dates to the birth of management consulting at the start of the last century, to the work of the former engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who dreamed up the idea of "scientific management." Taylor was himself an engineer, and like so many of our own contemporary gee-whiz tech boys, his "scientific" was less about a rigorous method of inquiry than about replacing "Should we?" with "Can we?" in a model universe free of social consequence.