I mentioned before that McKinsey Mind is the required text for my Consultative Processes course. I started to read it after the first class and I cannot get my hands off of it. I am half way through now. I plan to read it twice, as was suggested by the authors. One time – straight through, and then by pieces for my actual class assigned reading.
The book is written by two alumni of the Firm, as the associates of the company refer to it internally. Notice they don’t use ex-employees, but alumni, which is supposedly render more dignity than the ex- or former employee and underscores the overarching sense of belonging to an exclusive elite club that does not have membership expiration date. This term alumni refers to all former employees who left McKinsey for one reason or another. Present employees of the company, on the other hand, are called McKinsey-ites. When I read that I immediately remembered Nordies from the Harvard Business case Nordstrom: Dissention in the Ranks, which I had a group project on in Human Capital Management course in Spring term. (Along those lines, the George Washington University students are refered to as Colonials, Georgtown University- Hoyas, University of Maryland – Terrapins, American University – Eagles).
I have really enjoyed reading the book. As is well-known, and I mentioned already, McKinsey is indeed a very elite and exclusive company (as are Bain and BCG – the other two of the Big 3 Consulting companies). However the authors have managed to maintain rather humble general position. You can see on almost every page their pride in belonging to the alumni club of the company, but they do not slide into arrogance and snobism.
The intent of the book is not to spill the (dirty) little secrets of the company, but rather to share the methods and techniques that has earned the company its reputation for solid and rigorous analysis, and actionable value-adding recommendations and solutions to the clients’ problems. What the authors do is give a general overview of how the company addresses its consulting engagements through the structured framework and describe the elements of the framework, such as stating the hypothesis, desinging analysis, gathering data, interpreting results, and presenting recommendations. These elements are further divided into smaller chunks and all of them are presented in a very formalized, well-structured way. The authors bring a lot of real-life examples and quotes from McKinsey alumni and current McKinsey-ites which really gives ultimate relevance and credibility to the book.
Even if you are not interested in Management/Strategy Consulting this book gives a lot of references to how the McKinsey mind, methods, techniques could be adopted at any organization for approaching and solving their internal problems. McKinsey is very picky in their hiring, but with this book you can take a peek at what is going on the inside and learn some valuable lessons.
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