Duff McDonald

Founded in 1926, McKinsey consultants have brought change to the nation’s best organizations, remapped the power structure within the White House, and even revo­lutionized business schools. Financial journalist Duff McDonald shows how McKinsey hasinfluenced the course of American capitalism. In The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business he looks at how McKinsey helped invent most of the tools of modern management, it's successes, and its failures.

The dot com bubble of the 1990s was marked by a “growth-over-profits” mentality. During that period, Web entrepreneurs made “free-money” selling popular, but hugely over-valued dot coms in initial public offerings to people who either didn’t understand or didn’t care that these businesses were never going to turn an actual profit. Today, websites like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora are each valued in the billions (and tens of billions), and are expected to go public soon. Is history repeating itself; and if so, should we be worried about a second (or is it third?) dot com bubble?