You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Joining me this week is Laleigh Khalili, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London,

whose most recent book is Sinews of War and Trade, Shipping and Capitalism, in the Arabian Peninsula.

The last time she was on the podcast, we talked about General Stanley McChrystal's business self-help manuals.

Today we're going to be discussing the mysteries, or maybe that's not quite the right word, and for management consulting. Lally recently reviewed in the LRB when McKinsey comes to town, the hidden influence of the world's most powerful consulting firm by Walt Bogdanovich and Michael Forsyth.

McKinsey's unethical activities pack the pages of this book, she writes, while it's supercilious vocabulary of values and

service runs like an oil slick over slurry. Hello, Lally, and thank you very much for joining me

again. Hi, Tom. Nice to see you. So when I graduated from university in the late 1990s, a lot of my

contemporaries were recruited by management consulting firms.

There was this process known as the milk round, where companies would tour British universities

gobbling up the most promising candidates. For some reason, they didn't come after me,

but I have occasionally thought, as Alan Ginsberg didn't put it, that I saw the best minds

of my generation destroyed by management consulting.

You have since escaped, but you were hired by a consulting firm straight out of university.

How did they lure you in?

I was indeed.

Okay, so I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I had for the two last summers that I had still been a student,

worked as a student intern at a chemical plant, which at the time was owned by Amaco and was later

acquired by BP. And these, the chemical plants were, the chemical plant produced olefins, which are the basic building block for a number of chemical, petrochemical materials, including plastics.

And so the particular chemical, this particular chemical plant was in an area called Chocolate Bayou, which is near Galveston in Texas. And I worked there as a summer

engineer for two summers, along with other summer engineers from, I think one of the people

there was from the South Dakota School of or North Dakota School of Mines and a couple of others

from other places. And we all lived together in a

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