Dire Wolf Brought Back from Extinction, Immediately Served on Brioche Buns at McKinsey Global Leadership Summit
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — In a stunning feat of biotech innovation, a team of international scientists announced the successful resurrection of the extinct dire wolf on Friday morning. Within hours, it was hunted, killed, and slow-roasted by managing partners from McKinsey & Company as part of a team-building exercise at the firm’s annual Global Leadership Summit.
“This wasn’t just about dinner—it was about leadership,” said Summit Director Trent Madsen, who personally organized the hunt, handing each managing partner a carbon-fiber spear before releasing the confused, newly-revived predator into the woods. “Normally I reserve this kind of exercise for ex-employees who defect to Deloitte. You should’ve seen the look on Mark’s face when I hit him with the horse tranquilizer in the Brazilian rainforest,” he said, chuckling. “That fucker really knew his way around an Excel sheet,” he added, staring wistfully into the tree line. “May he rest in peace.”
To heighten the challenge, interns were reportedly forced to dress in crude dire wolf costumes and scatter through the forest to create confusion. “We wanted our leaders to confront fear, uncertainty, and decoys,” Madsen explained. “Plus, the Zurich office had been asking for more hands-on training.”
The dire wolf, reintroduced into the Swiss forest at dawn, was pursued by 40 managing partners dressed in identical tactical ponchos and armed with spears custom-engraved with the phrase “Disrupt. Impale. Scale.” The hunt was described as “intense,” “transformative,” and “an absolute nightmare from a liability perspective.”
Tragedy briefly struck when Bryan Liu, a first-year analyst from the Singapore office, was fatally gored during a miscalculated flank maneuver. Madsen remained composed. “Bryan was really more of a personality hire,” he said while hunched over the still-warm body, drafting a job posting on his phone for Bryan’s backfill. He then sent a short message in the company-wide Slack channel assuring employees that this incident should have no effect on their annual bonuses.
Immediately after the hunt, attendees were ushered into the Post-Hunt Performance Review Debrief, where each was required to fill out 360° peer evaluations. Criteria included “kill zone agility,” “stakeholder spear synergy,” and “alignment with primal KPIs.” One partner was placed on a PIP (Predator Improvement Plan) for “excessive hesitation during the bloodletting phase.” Another was praised for “taking initiative by proposing wolf pelt coasters as limited-edition client gifts.”
The wolf—named Fenrir by scientists, then promptly rebranded “Q2 Appetizer” by McKinsey marketing—was seared over an open fire pit and served on brioche buns with truffle slaw and fig gastrique. Lead geneticist Dr. Lena Volkov, who spent eight years reconstructing the wolf's genome from ancient tar pit samples, appeared visibly shaken: “It was alive for just over an hour before they put an herb rub on it.”
As the summit drew to a close, the managing partners participated in a final exercise: voting on which extinct entity should be brought back next solely to be killed and consumed with a balsamic reduction. The top contenders were:
The dodo bird, for “branding synergy with flightless middle management,”
The saber-toothed tiger, for “greater yield per carcass,”
And John F. Kennedy, for “cross-functional symbolism and potential media buzz.”
The vote was split. A runoff and cost-benefit analysis are expected by early Q3.