Oh please. The fact that McKinsey exists and has done plenty of shady shit doesn't mean they coordinate stuff like this.
"People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers."
"People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers."
They absolutely have the power to move the chess pieces on both sides to guarantee an outcome.
[0] for which there is no communication between them required, or even conscious desire to "conspire" of single one of them. Consider how mobbing can go. People don't go "so, we're all racist, and this new guy is X, so I propose you are kinda sarcastic to him, and I forget to remind him of the thing tomorrow". It doesn't even happen that way in bad fiction, much less so in real life.
Or put more positively, consider how teamwork and healthy group behavior can go, too. Most of it is simply done, gets fine-tuned by doing, and only some of it is thought, spoken or written about, usually in hindsight, often as a rationalization.
Getting back to the original thesis of the article, the author is stating that people making the decision on RTO (the "elites", another nebulous scary term...) are doing so because commercial real estate is so critical to their decision making process. If anyone can provide any evidence that McKinsey could orchestrate such a thing (with actual details), I'm all ears.
The thing I hate about articles like this one, and claims like "look at the shady stuff McKinsey has done" is that they never really even attempt to provide evidence about how the incentives around propping up com. real estate values would be enough to sway decision makers. They just try to tie some loose threads together, and use scary terms like "elites" as if all of the elites acted with one mind.
There have been plenty of comments elsewhere in this thread making the argument that the connection between com. real estate values and people making the actual RTO decisions is far too tenuous to have that be a primary motivator. Also, having been a director and had lots of interactions with C-suite folks, I find it laughable to think that of all the concerns high-level execs have that "helping the stock portfolios of other rich people" is their primary driver.