Quotes About McKinsey

'In Search of Excellence' was an afterthought, the runt of the McKinsey consulting litter, a hip-pocket project that was never supposed to amount to much.

As a consultant at McKinsey, I learned the value of data and the ability to shape that information into an answer.

The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2020 the world will face a "skills gap" of nearly 40 million people, meaning that employers will need that many workers with a college degree or higher than the global labor force can supply.

In McKinsey's world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.

Suppose your team has come up with some interesting ideas that don't fit under the main issues. What then? You could ignore those points, but that wouldn't help Acme. You could make them issues in their own right, but then you would have too many issues. A good McKinsey issue list contains neither fewer than two nor more than five top-line issues (of course, three is best).

In another case, a McKinsey team went in to evaluate expansion opportunities for a division of a manufacturing company. After a few weeks of gathering and analyzing data, the team realized that what the division needed was not expansion; it was closure or sell-off.

Critics of McKinsey (and management consulting in general) say that the Firm bases its solutions on the most current management fad—the favorite tool in its intellectual toolbox.

At the start of a McKinsey-ite's career, most of his time is spent gathering data, whether from one of the Firm's libraries, from McKinsey's many databases, or from the Internet. Gathering, filtering, and analyzing data is the skill exercised most by new associates. As a result, McKinsey-ites have learned a number of tricks for jump-starting their research. You can use these tricks to find the answers to your business problem too.

The moral of this story is that an initial hypothesis is not a prerequisite for successful problem solving. Having one will help organize and forward your thinking, but if you can't come up with one, don't despair. Any McKinsey-ite will tell you that no business problem is immune to the power of fact-based analysis. Put together enough facts, combine them with some creative thinking, and you will come up with a solution.

others will see McKinsey as an invading army to either flee or drive out, depending on their power in the organization. As one former McKinsey-ite put it, "It was a rare engagement when there wasn't at least one sector of the client organization that did not want us there and did not want us to come up with a real answer.

will be either converted to McKinsey's cause or bypassed. Sometimes, however, one powerful faction in an organization calls in McKinsey against the wishes of another powerful faction. That's when trouble arises, as we found out.

McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

My first college internship was at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Los Angeles. My second internship was at McKinsey & Company as a consultant - that turned into my first job after graduation.

If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.

Nowadays, everyone—whether we're the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

Part I opens the kimono with a hairy entrée into the global megaverse of top-tier management consulting, with these observations: 1. A bloodcurdling litany of betrayal and alcoholism 2. Behind-the-scenes truth about a very powerful, very short man 3. A lighthearted look at global consulting behemoth McKinsey and its resemblance to a certain Renaissance warmonger 4. Why your child will never go to Harvard Business School 5. A consulting hymnal and songbook3

In fact, during my research and interviews with McKinsey alumni, the Talk element of the model was consistently ranked the most important of all interpersonal elements. Why is it that the simple act of talking can cause so many problems in team problem solving? Generally, because we don't have specific Rules of Engagement; because we like to speak more often than we listen; and because we get personally attached to our own points of view.