[jncfhnb]

Ehhh. I think that is a stretch.

Corporate espionage implies theft of secrets. McKinsey isn’t handing out secrets. They’re handing out largely public info that’s a pain to compile for high level strategic stuff.

There’s literal benchmarks and industry reports that are more like products. There’s also just chatting with well connected people who know an industry. But most of the time it’s a junior hire using Google to fill out the basic rundown of what peers are doing on a problem.

But imo it’s just basic context setting.