Two top BCG executives stripped of leadership roles over Gaza project

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Two of Boston Consulting Group’s senior executives will leave their leadership roles in the wake of revelations about the firm’s work in Gaza, according to people familiar with the matter.

Adam Farber, chief risk officer, and Rich Hutchinson, head of BCG’s social impact practice, will lose those jobs following the results of an internal investigation, the firm told staff on Thursday.

They will remain at BCG in client-facing roles, the people said. BCG declined to comment.

The two men were named in a Financial Times report last week as having been involved in discussions about BCG’s expanding work related to Gaza, although the firm says they were misled about the exact nature of the project. The firm has already fired the two partners who led the work.

The FT revealed that a BCG team helped model the costs of relocating Palestinians outside Gaza as part of a project examining how the shattered enclave could be rebuilt as a regional trading hub.

BCG staff had also been more involved with the launch of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) than the firm had publicly acknowledged, the FT reported. GHF is an Israel- and US-backed aid programme designed to replace UN administered aid, whose launch has been marred by the killings of hundreds of Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Farber is a 27-year veteran of BCG and led the firm’s global healthcare practice before, in 2022, moving to become chief risk officer. In that role, he oversaw BCG’s risk management function and had responsibility for ensuring it has policies and procedures designed to protect the firm, according to an online biography.

In a memo to alumni earlier this week, BCG chief executive Christoph Schweizer said that there had been “process failures” related to the work in Gaza and that the project to model the relocation of Palestinians in particular had been “reputationally very damaging”.

“Our involvement with the work in Gaza was the result of deliberate individual misconduct and it was enabled by unwarranted process exceptions, missed warning signs, and misplaced trust,” Schweizer wrote. “Our processes were not applied as they were designed to be.”

Hutchinson has been at BCG for more than 25 years, bar a short stint running a start-up, according to his LinkedIn profile. As head of the social impact practice, he greenlit and funded the initial pro bono project in which BCG helped sketch out the aid organisation that became GHF.