McKinsey & Lean In: Both Exposed for Scrutiny

It's so much bigger than a red cover report.

The new report by McKinsey and Lean In is devastating on so many levels. I will leave most of that to others who are covering it thoroughly. I want to look at the larger picture.

When McKinsey’s opioid documents were made public, I read them obsessively. The slides. The emails. The language. Cold and transactional. The consultants who helped Purdue Pharma push OxyContin harder into the market did not speak in terms of human suffering. They spoke in percentages and projected gains.

One line stopped me.

“It’s pretty clear we’re going to be doing this for a long time and that it’s going to be a growing business.”

A growing business.

That sentence should live in the public record forever. Not because it is shocking. But because it is honest. Honest about how McKinsey has always seen the world. Markets first. Humans second. Consequences externalized. Morality optional.

I wrote about it in June, 2025. I hope you will take a moment to read it.

The new report released by Lean In and McKinsey is devastating. On its face, it exposes patterns of exclusion and harm. But it is not an aberration. It is a continuation. McKinsey has a long history of operating as the dark architect of business building, paid by the highest bidder and largely indifferent to the public interest. If you had enough money, they would help you dominate markets and bend systems even when the human cost was obvious. Opioids were not the exception. They were the proof.

Lean In’s involvement here should give people pause. It certainly does for me.

When Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In was released, I gave it a scathing review. I wrote that it was deeply problematic coming from someone who sat on the board of what was then Facebook as the only woman other than the head of personnel, who had been brought in to manage internal crises. I questioned the credibility of selling empowerment while sitting inside one of the most powerful and opaque companies in the world. I was eviscerated by my feminist peers for saying it. I was fine with that.

What has emerged since only reinforces that concern.

Sheryl Sandberg has publicly acknowledged that after hearing George Soros speak at Davos about the dangers Facebook posed to democracy, she directed her team to research Soros and build a case positioning him as a hostile actor. Subsequent reporting detailed how Facebook amplified narratives casting Soros as a villain, narratives that fed directly into broader disinformation ecosystems. Soros himself has said he was unbothered by it. I was.

Recent reporting and the publication of a new book she has reportedly tried to suppress have raised serious questions about how power was exercised inside Facebook. About how women and other humans were treated. About how dissent was handled. About the mythology of her rise versus the reality of her conduct. Taken together, it paints a picture not of feminist progress, but of proximity to power pursued at almost any cost.

This is why the Lean In and McKinsey report feels hollow to me. You do not get to paper over decades of damage with a report. You do not get to brand your way out of moral failure. Power built through exploitation does not become ethical because it is wrapped in the language of inclusion.

McKinsey has always operated like a secret society. Not hidden exactly. But never fully honest about its reach or its intent. Its model mirrors efforts like Project 2025. Visible if you look. Opaque by design. Carefully framed. Rarely accountable.

This past year has been a year of exposure. Of looking back and realizing how blind we were. Blind to how power actually moves. Blind to how much of politics and business has been shaped behind closed doors by people who never intended to serve the public. Blind to how often we confused access with integrity and branding with truth.

That reckoning is uncomfortable. It should be.

The clean slate opportunity is that 2026 allows us to begin again with eyes wide open. To stop pretending we do not know how these systems work. To stop rewarding secrecy, paid access, and conquest. To move toward collaborative business building, shared analysis, transparent data, and responsibility that does not disappear behind a slide deck.

The old consulting and power brokerage model cannot survive daylight. It cannot survive distributed intelligence. It cannot survive a public that understands that strategy without conscience is not sophistication. It is danger.

We do not need another report. We need a different system.

- Christine Merser

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