We Spent 170 Years Inside the Machine
Former Big 4 and MBB partners on why the firms they spent their careers in are overdue for a reckoning.
Every partner writes an exit memo. Some firms call it a transition document, some a handover note. At one firm we know, they call it the “legacy brief,” with no apparent irony. Whatever the name, the ritual is the same: before you leave, you write down what the incoming partner needs to know. Client relationships. Engagement history. Where the risks sit. What the numbers actually look like behind the dashboard the executive committee presents at town halls.
We have written a lot of exit memos. Between us, we have left firms 14 times at partner level. Some of us made partner at one firm, left, and made partner again at another. One contributor held senior partner roles at two Big 4 firms and an MBB. We have written exit memos that ran to forty pages and exit memos that fit on a single sheet. We have written memos where the honest version bore no resemblance to the version we submitted.
This publication is the honest version.
The exit memos we filed were constrained by diplomacy, by ongoing commercial relationships, by the knowledge that the people reading them would be deciding our deferred compensation. So we described client risks without naming the partners who created them. We flagged engagement economics without pointing out that the margins depended on staffing models we considered reckless. We noted “areas for development” in the practice without saying plainly that the quality had declined because nobody with authority was willing to pay the cost of maintaining it.
Those memos were useful. They were also incomplete. This publication exists because the incomplete version, multiplied across thousands of departing partners over two decades, has left the outside world with a dangerously inaccurate picture of what these firms have become.
Who we are
We are former partners and senior partners of Big 4 and MBB firms. Ninety years at partner level between us. A hundred and seventy years inside the machine in total, counting from our first days as associates and analysts. Some of us were direct-admit partners. We are not going to tell you our names.
That is not false modesty or cowardice. Most of us still work in the professional services orbit as advisors, board members, investors, and clients of the firms we left. Attaching names would make this publication about us rather than about the argument. It would also end several professional relationships that, selfishly, we prefer to keep.
So instead of credentials by name, here are credentials by experience. Between us, we have sat on partner compensation committees and watched the sausage get made. (It is worse than you think, and the opacity is deliberate.) We have run engagement quality reviews that flagged serious deficiencies, then watched those reviews get filed without action because acting would have meant writing down revenue. We have hired thousands of graduates and watched the training pipeline that used to produce excellent professionals get hollowed out by cost reduction. We have signed off on deliverables we were proud of and signed off on deliverables that made us wonder who we had become.
We know how partner election cycles create incentives that have nothing to do with client service. We know what happens in the first executive committee meeting after a scandal breaks. (The first concern is always the insurance position.) We know the economics of the leverage model in granular, uncomfortable detail: what utilization rate a partner needs to hit bonus, how many hours of a $1,200-per-day engagement are performed by someone billing for the first time, what happens to quality when the ratio of experienced professionals to juniors passes the point where mentoring becomes impossible.
We know all of this because we lived it. Some of us contributed to the problems we are about to describe. We are not writing from moral high ground. We are writing from a position of specific, hard-earned knowledge.
What we remember
There was a time when the work was worth something. We need to say this up front, because the criticism that follows will be more useful if you understand it comes from people who once believed in these institutions.
The training at its best was extraordinary. In our first years, we learned to think about problems with a rigour that no MBA programme could match, because the problems were real, the clients were paying, and the consequences of getting it wrong were immediate. A good partner in the 1990s was a genuine expert. Not just a salesperson with a Rolodex for cold calls, but someone who had built relationships over years with people who took their call because they had earned it by being consistently useful. The partner knew their clients’ industries, sometimes better than the clients did. The client was paying for that person’s judgment, their willingness to deliver a difficult message and stand behind it.
That kind of partner still exists, scattered across the firms. But the model that produced them has been systematically dismantled, and what replaced it produces something else entirely.
What changed
Around 2005, the buyers started purchasing the brand rather than the partner. Procurement teams centralised buying. RFPs replaced relationships. Boards discovered that “we hired Deloitte” or “McKinsey recommended it” provided career insurance for decision-makers regardless of whether the advice was any good. Once the buyer is purchasing the logo, the logo no longer needs to employ the kinds of people who built its reputation in the first place. It needs people who can sell, manage the pyramid, keep utilization high, and navigate the internal politics well enough to survive the next partner election. Deep expertise became optional. The client was paying for the name on the cover page.
The quality erosion followed. A typical Big 4 engagement today bills around 60% of its hours through professionals with fewer than two years of experience. The client pays rates that presume senior judgment. The partner shows up for the kickoff meeting and the final presentation. Everything between is a production line. We have all received the client feedback surveys that say “we expected more senior involvement.” We have all sat in the post-engagement reviews where that feedback was acknowledged and nothing changed, because changing it would have meant the partner being present, and the partner was already spread across five engagements simultaneously, because that is what the utilization model requires.
The ethical failures are a symptom of the same economics. KPMG’s $456 million criminal settlement for fraudulent tax shelters. McKinsey’s $650 million settlement over the opioid crisis. EY missing €1.9 billion that never existed at Wirecard. PwC leaking confidential government tax policy to corporate clients in Australia. Three of four Big 4 firms caught publishing reports with AI-fabricated citations in the past eighteen months alone. This is not a series of isolated incidents. The incentive system rewards growth and punishes caution. When the person deciding whether to accept an engagement is the same person whose compensation depends on revenue, the answer is almost always yes. When the compliance function reports to the partners it is supposed to constrain, the constraints loosen over time. Inevitably.
We watched this happen from the inside. We participated in some of it. When we raised concerns, the response was usually a version of “trust the process” or “this is how the profession works.” For a long time, the profession did work, in the narrow sense that the firms kept growing and the partners kept getting paid. What stopped working was the quality. And then the scandals started arriving faster than the firms could absorb them.
What we believe
The collapse of the current model is overdue. We do not mean that the firms will disappear tomorrow, or that nobody inside them is doing good work. We mean that the model itself has been running on inherited credibility for over a decade. The combination of extreme leverage, audit-consulting conflicts, partnership governance designed for consensus rather than decision, and a market reputation that diverges further from performance every year is not sustainable. The credibility account is drawing down.
We would rather see these firms reborn than buried. We spent our careers inside them. The institutional capabilities they possess, the global networks, the accumulated knowledge across thousands of engagements, the ability to mobilise hundreds of professionals across borders on short notice, those capabilities are worth preserving. What is not worth preserving is the way they are currently deployed: the cost-cutting that guts quality, the partner politics that block adaptation, the relentless optimisation of the leverage ratio at the expense of the people doing the work and the clients paying for it.
The choice is between reinvention and decline. Reinvention would mean confronting questions that no current managing partner has the tenure security to ask. Whether audit and consulting should share a brand. Whether partner compensation should be transparent. Whether the leverage model can survive AI-driven productivity gains without prices collapsing. Whether the firms can retain their best people when boutiques and PE-backed platforms offer better economics and fewer committee meetings. Decline means continuing to do what these firms have done for the past fifteen years: cut costs, issue press releases about innovation, win on brand recognition, and hope that nobody notices the gap between the reputation and the work.
We are betting on decline, because we have sat in the rooms where reinvention proposals get discussed, and we have watched them die. They die because the partnership governance model gives veto power to the people who benefit most from the status quo. EY spent $600 million trying to split its audit and consulting businesses. The partners voted it down because the partners who would lose from separation outnumbered the partners who would gain from it, and the governance rules require supermajorities. That dynamic will play out again and again on every consequential question these firms face.
What we are not
We are not bitter ex-employees with a grievance. When something works, we will say so. We have a post coming on what the Big 4 actually do well, because the lazy version of this argument, the one that says everything inside is broken and everyone inside is complicit, is wrong and counterproductive.
We are not a competitor. We are not selling an alternative service, running a boutique firm, or using this as a recruitment funnel. We are not anti-consulting. We believe in the value of expert advisory when it is delivered with genuine expertise, honest pricing, and accountability for outcomes. We are critical of how that advisory is delivered at scale by firms that have confused brand recognition with capability.
We are not going to be a one-note publication, either. We will take positions and defend them, but we will also publish pieces that argue the other side, because the best thing this publication can become is a place where people who know these firms from the inside can have the conversation that LinkedIn will never host. LinkedIn is where partners perform enthusiasm. Every city is amazing. Every initiative is transformative. Every team is incredible. The partners’ silence about what is actually happening inside these firms is not agreement. It is compliance with social media policies that require positive messaging and punish candour.
We are the people who have left. We can say what they cannot.
Why now
Because AI is about to accelerate every dynamic we have described. The leverage model sells human hours of analysis. AI compresses the value of those hours. The firms know this. They have collectively invested over $10 billion in AI initiatives since 2023. They are also selling AI transformation engagements that, in our experience, amount to a strategic assessment recommending the client hire specialists for implementation. That is a seven-figure slide deck with a chatbot demo attached.
Because the scandals are arriving faster than the firms can process them. KPMG Australia’s audit-consulting wall breached for the second time in a country where PwC’s confidential tax leak was still fresh in regulatory memory. McKinsey facing a congressional inquiry over whether its global managing partner misrepresented the firm’s work for the Chinese military while holding $480 million in US defence contracts. BCG’s CEO apologising after the firm modelled “voluntary relocation” plans for Palestinians. Four separate Big 4 firms caught publishing reports with citations that did not exist, generated by the AI tools these same firms are selling to clients as the future of professional services.
Because the people who know the most are the people who can say the least. Current partners cannot write what we are writing. We are under no such constraint.
One last thing. We are not jaded. Jaded people stop caring. We are writing because we care enough to say what current partners cannot say on the record.
For those who have been inside these firms: when did you first notice the gap between what was promised and what was delivered? Was there a specific engagement, a specific meeting, a specific number on a utilization report? We want to hear it. The comments are open.