Big Five does not only sell methods, but import a way of seeing the world and not just any. Thus their recommendations reflect Harvard -shaped software to Stanford, with the obsession with critical size, the taste for outsourcing, or even faith in “proven” technological solutions. When one advises an energy reorganization or the other a hospital digitalization plan, the implicit orientation goes in the same direction, that of globalizing, standardizing, rationalizing, but rarely in the strengthening of local resilience. The cultural bias is almost invisible, and often ends up translating into irreversible industrial choice.
Thus, a strategic report is never trivial, behind a benchmark or a risk map often hides the complete radiography of an infrastructure, or the detailed diagram of a data flow. These analyzes, which seem purely technical, actually guide major industrial decisions. However, in almost all cases, the methodological framing and the references used, arrow the choice of technologies to solutions, presented as the only validated, which mechanically strengthens our dependence.
You will understand, sovereignty is not played on production channels or in underwater cables, it is well before it disappears, from the first meetings, where the decision is delegated to these Big Fives. When a minister or a CEO says that “McKinsey recommends”, he recognizes that he no longer assumes responsibility for his choice. And this dependence is psychological as well as methodological, it installs a reflex which consists in waiting for the Slide validated by a foreign consultant rather than building his own analysis grid.
In 20 years, this influence has become structural, to the point of shaping the French elites, many of which have made their classes there. Thus many leaders of the CAC40, Next40 and SBF 120 and their entourage passed through these firms, learned to think, often to decide, and this in a framework which is not that of national interest.
The irony of the fate wants that in addition we pay so that others think in our place and pull the carpet under the feet.
