McKinsey

Tuesday

Susie Mesure

An unlikely alliance: Drayton and Mackenzie, by Alexander Starritt, reviewed

Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It’s more fun that it sounds. The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. ‘He supposed he’d been naive

Thursday

Ross Clark

The truth about ‘boardroom diversity’

We all know that increasing the diversity of your boardroom increases the success of your company because politicians, business leaders and academics keep telling us so. No one has ever got into trouble for making this assertion and, in any case, we have the scientific evidence to prove it – in the form of four studies pumped out by management consultants McKinsey & Company over the past decade. The first of these, Why Diversity Matters (2015), claimed, for example, that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15 per cent more likely to outperform the median company in their industry, and companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic