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tv   Business Beyond  Deutsche Welle  October 2, 2024 5:15am-5:31am CEST

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stacy more in using the information on our website, dw, dot com, and you can follow some social media or handle is dw news. me on the team here in berlin. thanks for watching. take care costs. the innovation green, the green revolution global sold listen to a whole lot of crime. it's probably up to speed is secure. subscribed to this channel. subscribe to plan as a, as a kid to make sense of how the world works. sometimes imagined a group of invisible people who ran everything. they turned red lights,
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green dissolve, traffic jams made sure there's running tap water. once i got older, i realized there was no global cabal running the world. but there are management consultants. a lot of them. they design hospitals and prisons, advice, governments on the climate crisis, and map out the cities. they even help build up entire economies, but they aren't elected politicians to most people. they remain in the shadows, but they work for many of the world's most powerful government. and some say they're gaining more and more influence. so let's explore those hidden worlds and look at how consultants have captured the government sector and what it means for societies around the world that's coming up on business beyond. consultants have become a big deal over the past decades. you might already know some of them estimate, say the consulting industry expanded from $100000000.00 to $1.00 trillion dollars in the past 2 decades. but what is in our consultants,
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garrett and lovely used to be one. ready ready ready it was the, the most depressed i remember being in my adult life more than that later. the term consultant of broad and essentially just means someone who has higher to give professional advice like how to improve a company's profits. consultancies themselves promise nothing less than to make the world a better place. so you want to advance the world. give it a push, lose it in the right direction. there are many different types of consultancies, but in this explain or we will look at management consultancies. mckenzie boss and consulting group b, c, g, and pain and company. the 1st 2 we will be focusing on, they are the most prestigious firms in the industry. the firms that do management consulting pitch themselves to young college students at a top school, which is like the place to go to solve hard problems and work with the smartest people. i think they also pitch themselves as like,
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more out trista can more publicly interested then, you know, goldman sachs, or bridgewater, or some other lead financial institution. and among their biggest customers, are governments. rosie calling to and wrote a book about this exact phenomenon. we know that spending on consulting companies pretty much everywhere and by governments has steadily increasing for the past few decades. management consultants have been hired to solve and economic crisis and costa rica design, the smart city in kenya, or roller cove at vaccines in france. an impressive track record, but some experts are warning, but the consulting industry isn't all it promises to be the consulting industry. it has expanded not necessarily because it is able to create value useful. busy economies and societies for organizations, but actually because it invested in the ability to create a, to create the illusion about you to create the perception that is creating value.
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before we dive deeper, let's take a quick look at how we even got here. late 18 hundreds. the 2nd industrial revolution companies like general electric start to employee engineers on a short term basis. the contracting model spreads so called consult and started optimizing manufacturing processes across the us and europe. by the mid 19 twenty's, even lennon and trotsky ask in american consultant to develop the national industries of the soviet union. but that's just the beginning. after the 2nd world war consultants start carving out more space in the public sector and one organization in particular, the us space agencies, nasa, people, we're going to go to the move and the question was, did you want to hire an enormous number of people to work in the american federal government, when this was politically unpalatable, or did you want to find some sort of structure literally. how were we going to do
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that? how is the statement do that? 3 years after it was founded, 85 percent of nasa, as $1000000.00 budget went to outside contractors. one of the main recipients, mckinsey hiring consultants became attractive to governments for 2 main reasons. firstly, they have expertise. steven funded by looks into how the public sector can be reformed and we can actually work with people who do this all the time. roland is having the civil servants who will work on such for you to as well as apply for the lifetime. and secondly, they are flexible. i need someone here and now, what can i find that i cannot hire someone of the public sector? this takes way too long. in the 1980s consulting found a new fuel, some governments began slashing what they believed for bloated ranks of civil servants ending to make the public sector more business like heres former
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us president ronald reagan talking about it outside of its legitimate functions. government does nothing as well, or they cannot make late as the private sector of the economy. reagan and the us sometime minister, margaret satcher in the u. k. outsourced more and more government work to consultancies. in 1979, the u. k. government was spending around 6000000 pounds on consulting, 11 years later that amount was more than 40 times larger. that has been this, you know, again, since the 1980s, a ton of growth in the assumption or oh and imagine some entrenchment of the assumption that simple 7 saw, you know, not necessarily the most innovative people pay up, pay for pushes, and then you know, that that idea is they can come trusted with the idea of, of the management consultant who is, who represents the kind of private sector ingenuity and an innovative potential.
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the dissolution of the soviet union in the ninety's opened a whole new market for consultancies. and those international monetary fund and the world bank spread new liberal policies across the globe. so the public sector consulting. so to summarize, behind the consulting goal is this idea of government should not do things, which would see ethics, government sets the policy. all this is to manage the execute policy. we don't do policy, we do execution is also lined that consultancy stress in 2017 mckenzie was doing just that for the us immigration office. i then us president at the time donald trump has the string of executive orders. they significantly increase the number of immigrants eligible for deportation. garrisoned lovely wasn't analyst on the project. and the mckenzie project like fully dropped behind this and all hands
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on deck to figure out how to comply with the executive orders. mackenzie's mission, hiring more ice officers, speeding up deportations and cutting costs. their recommendations included cups and spending on food for detain, migraines. some stuff on the side of things were actually concerned about the severity of, of the recommendations coming from mackenzie. because mckinsey looks at things and like spreadsheets and its like optimizing and turning dobson widgets and everything to like make some process like cheaper or faster. whatever the, the metric is to optimize for and, you know, it, when the metric is like the putting more people faster or more cheaply, you can imagine how that has like really negative repercussions. mckenzie stopped consulting ice in 2018. some of its recommendations were never implemented, but the case still opens
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a question when you're working for immigration and customs enforcement and the administration changes to the trump administration. and then you go full in on helping the trump administration implement. it's very harsh, you know, immigration policies, how can that not be political? so i'm also worried that living profit driven companies execute government policies can mean a clash of values. mackenzie makes the public sector more. if the private sector there is a clear potential there for, for a clash of values. uh huh. i'm not convinced that the public sector itself wouldn't be able to take those decisions itself. so governments also have a pretty bad record in making probably the volume driven decisions. mackenzie declined to provide a comment for this video. and there's another issue that's being flagged. consultancies don't just make deals with democracy. if mckenzie has consulted ukrainian oligarchy, kremlin linked russian companies and the south african government,
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under former president, jacob summa, one of mackenzie's and pc, g 's, largest clients, saudi arabia. in 2023, the kingdom spent nearly 2000000000 euros and consulting services compared to the rest of the world. the tasks, mackenzie, and co take on in the kingdom reach much deeper into governing territory. including advising the kingdom, sovereign wealth fund, worth more than $900000000000.00, and helping to construct a mega city in the desert. saudi arabia's ministry of economy and planning has even been dumped. the ministry of mackenzie says siri for like, mackenzie work in saudi arabia where at least like that, that kind of justification that will be given as something like a will be a liberalizing force will help them like open up. um and you know, help empower women and modernize the economy and, and do all these things. but there is evidence that their work goes further. in 2016, mackenzie prepared
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a report for the saudi government to investigate the popularity of their policies. it included a power point, slide identifying 3 people who had been critical of the regime. you're one of those people was arrested and other people. the person of the account disappeared and another person and his brothers were arrested. so there's, you know, bad things happened after mackenzie made this slide deck. mckenzie defended itself by stating the slide was prepared for internal use only. and this is not the only time they've come under fire. if you have like saturday be as a quiet you have to like, be differential to saudi arabia to some extent, to continue, continue working there in 2018, saudi american journalist stomach, how strongly was assassinated by agents of the saudi government. the killing put a strain on traditionally strong us ties with a kingdom. in the aftermath,
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many was firms boy caught at an investment summit in the country, but mackenzie and b. c. g, stayed on, and even less paneled discussions at the event. according to the new york times, both firms have state, if a decline work in the country, it linked to military and defense. but still, critics say what mckenzie is doing and saw your ravia isn't in line with an image of projects like their code of conduct, which says we have the duty to speak up and to never engage in harassment or discrimination. mackenzie itself, likes to think of itself as a moral company with values. it's, uh, it's got all these values, you know, and it takes them very seriously. rosie also pointed out possible conflict and consulting governments across the democratic spectrum in countries that are less democratic, which have both or it's higher in government sense that and the consultancy companies might be built a tool or in theory could be wielded in ways that further of escape the power and
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decisions of those um, making these decisions earlier this year. the us congress question the cdn. mackenzie for failing to declare details about their work for the kingdom. and this isn't the only time consultant fees have advised both sides of the geo political table at the beginning of this year. and mckenzie c o, bob stern phelps was questioned about it's work for chinese companies. let's it looks like most of our clients, like the china communications construction company. this is a firm that is blacklisted by the united states government. this is a state owned enterprises that is responsible for building artificial islands in the south china sea. probably indirect contravention of international law, certainly in direct contribution to united states security interest. you help them develop their 5 year plan. my question is, why should you be able to get any contracts? so united states government, if you're going to advise for
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a nation's who are hostile to us and make gobs of money off of them, why should you be getting us government contracts? sen, we've never worked with the chinese communist party or the central government in china to the best of my knowledge. you're working with. state owned enterprises. this is, this is time is not a democracy. mackenzie's work in saudi arabia and china shows a concerning side of government, consulting, their profit driven company advising governments and their rivals. and until now they've gone largely unchecked. mckenzie works with all the most of the biggest companies in the world, works with governments around the world works with nonprofit's around the world. we can't buy the idea. they're making these for profit seeking company. and as a moral the living scientists dw postcards how to make greener choices in your everyday lives.
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but honestly, try to move, you're going to be working 32 hours a week to be better for the environment than 40. but of course we shouldn't be not . you'd be the living scientists just had subscribe, whatever you listen to about cost. the no, one of the things i love the ball to show is this cover and stuff to the blow ideas and innovations to help our communities and the planet also hold there. so many of them i'm, that's all these aspiring i am personal lives in legals by jerry a great to have you with us here as to what's coming up all digital.

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