In this interview, Seth Godin explains why hiring top consulting firms like McKinsey often provides organizations with a defensible narrative rather than new answers. He argues that senior consultants charge premium rates, but the real product is a story that protects leaders from blame. Godin illustrates his point with examples from the publishing industry, where publishers recognize the truth of his insights yet remain stuck in a failing system, and from public radio (WNYC), where he advised a shift to podcasting to capture audiences, only to be rebuffed by a culture that values control of the broadcast dial. The conversation highlights how entrenched institutional mindsets resist disruptive change, and questions whether a firm like McKinsey would have offered any different outcome.
Let me ask you an obvious question because, you know, most people listening to this are probably going to be consultants. So why not hire McKinsey? Why can't McKinsey come in and show you your system, show you the limits of your thinking, tell you what to do essentially?
So it's interesting you bring up McKinsey because we can learn a little bit about American enterprise just by thinking about McKinsey. McKinsey consultant, a senior one, probably makes $3,000, $4,000 an hour. And if they leave McKinsey with the same brain and start their own firm, they can't even charge a third of that. So what changed? What you buy when you buy advice from McKinsey is not the answer. You know the answer. What you buy is a story you can tell the board. What you buy is defensibility and some status. Well, McKinsey told us we got to shut this plant. Don't blame me. And so the book publishers that have thrown me out of their office over the years know that I am correct. They're not stupid. But when they think about the system that they're so, um, part of— the same way The New Yorker magazine is part of the system of magazines, and as magazines begin to disappear for the last time, they're no— they're doing nothing about it. Right? When I sat with the people at WNYC, the biggest public radio station in America, at the dawn of podcasting, and I said, "Look, you win. You have all the talent. You have the shows. You have the audience. What you need to do is make 100 podcasts and use the radio to promote them because you can then lock people into the podcasts that they love." They looked at me and they said, people go into the public radio business because we love spectrum. We love the fact that we own a slice of the dial and we decide what you're gonna listen to at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. That is what it is to be a program director. Think of those two words. So if I, if the president said, so if I go to all the other public radio stations and say, here's this huge list of stuff. Keep promoting people to turn off the radio. They don't want to live in that system. And she was right, but now it's over for radio because the smart people aren't listening to radio anymore. They're listening to the shows they want to listen to.
So they didn't— they didn't get the insight from you. Do you think McKinsey would have made a difference?
I, I think that McKinsey works if you choose to hire them, but that's the hard part, is the choosing, not them giving you the advice.
