Comparing BCG vs. McKinsey & Company: My Experience Working At Both Firms

what's the difference between BCG and McKinsey I worked at both firms and I want to share with you insights or reflections from my experience where you have both firms if you're trying to decide which firm to work out and you have offers from both firms good news the main takeaway of this video is that these are two fantastic places to work I want to dive into some of the reasons and show you why before we dive into a breakdown of the two firms I want to qualify it with my experiences with limited and in specific functions and regions at both firms my views do not speak for the current state of the firm's or other people's opinions on the firm's I worked at McKinsey from Oh 8 to 2010 and I focused in operations practice working in the US with global operations teams focusing on manufacturing and supply chain projects and then joined BCG about five years after leaving McKinsey after go to grad school working at a couple other firms and there I focused on global organizational change projects I did research I collaborated with client teams and helped rebuild their transformation practice so a lot of this experience is specific to those experiences but I think speaks more broadly to the firm's and overall cultures as well I want to get some of the positives out of the way before we dive into some of the differences both firms have tremendous people great leaders really good cultures of mentorship feedback and skill building and really they're the two best places I've ever worked in terms of developing skills being challenged and really being pushed outside of your comfort zone both of these firms were voted best places to work in 2019 by Glassdoor BCG coming in fifth and McKinsey coming in 19th I don't really see a major difference between these two rankings it just shows that people really find these places valuable for us Consulting can be a very frustrating place to work but also a very rewarding place to work McKinsey is the bigger firm it has about 12,000 more employees as of the latest information on both company websites it's been around longer it's in more countries more cities and has higher revenue the interesting thing is that McKinsey also feels bigger I joined BCG five years later when it was catching up to McKinsey size that it was when I was at McKinsey so I still felt a smaller feel at BCG yeah BCG you get the sense that there are many different office cultures this played out in each office having their own reporting and financial statements and more diverse subcultures as I traveled around to different offices at McKinsey it could best be described as one firm which is encoded in the values of the firm and has been for a long time and there was this belief across the firm a story you're told when you join that you can call up anyone at any level and ask for help and in my experience is turned out to be true and is pretty cool when values like that resonate when you look at the current messaging on the websites this plays out in how they talk about their firm and their people rich lesser the current BCG CEO says we do this by channeling the diversity of our people and their thinking they embrace this value which they've updated recently which is respect for the individual so if you take that to its extreme you're going to get different personalities and diverse cultures across the firm whereas McKinsey has it in its values govern ourselves as a one firm partnership so you see a lot less thinking at the office level and more thinking around how can we be a great firm globally one of the differences in how the two firms operate is a orientation towards clients McKinsey embraces something they've called the top management approach which says we should orient ourselves to solve the biggest problems at the biggest companies this means in every single document here pairing you're always thinking about what is the sea level perspective on this sea level or Borg and this plays out in how teams approach problem solving and thinking and just pitching themselves to clients across the firm at BCG they are much more oriented around this word partnership which says how can we partner with an organization at all levels of the organization now a lot of the trends in consulting and really push both firms towards the partnership angle but McKinsey still has this orientation of saying how can we solve the biggest problems working with the highest ranking people across the globe somewhat related to this top management approach is how both firms think about credentials and think about being an elite firm I worked at McKinsey after going to a non elite school a they call them non target schools this was the University of Connecticut and when I did a search internally after arriving at the firm there were probably ten thousand employees at the time there were three from my University and about a thousand people with some connection to Harvard which I just thought was so crazy I think of both firms they hire people from all the elite schools around the world however at McKinsey there seemed to be much more focused on the importance of those credentials and achievements and it wasn't just schools you went to oftentimes it was being involved in impressive things being able to climb Mount Everest being able to be a surgeon all these different types of things whereas BCG is probably a little more focused on the deeply nerdy and truly into electoral person slightly more academics at BCG and an appreciation for kind of a weirdo that might have gone into academia 50 or 60 years ago I worked in McKinsey and BC G's knowledge networks now what is a knowledge network essentially what they are are networks of researchers and experts which help across industry and functional and topic lines globally now these expert networks and research networks came out of a history of both of these firms having internal librarians back when people had books and needed to find resources these firms had what they called librarians and then information specialists and then they became part of the knowledge network at McKinsey they got an earlier start and shifting away from this internal librarian model towards these deeper more analytical focused people I was part of Mackenzie's knowledge network in a time before BCG was really investing heavily in this space part of why I was recruited to BCG B was because I had worked at Mackenzie's knowledge network and they wanted to figure out some of the lessons that I could help bring to BCG and help build their network as well when I was at McKinsey the knowledge networks were pretty much set up separate from the offices in knowledge centers they have them across the world now I think in Poland Costa Rica Boston China India and at BCG given the history of the local firms and the more local nature of the cultures the knowledge network people were situated in the offices when I was at BCG I was in the boston consulting office they had separate offices for some of the researchers and we're moving more towards putting them in research centers to kind of get the economies of scale of the different services the coaching the knowledge sharing and things like that but when I was there I was still situated in an office whereas McKinsey you're separate in a separate building I'd say at this point both firms have already invested pretty heavily b/c G's caught up to a lot of the lead McKinsey had in building a pretty robust Network and both firms have shifted dramatically to investing in analytics and building out those functions across industries and building capabilities and solutions to really use those as even standalone service offerings they can bring to clients and new ways or add-on to existing traditional consulting projects another difference I've noticed in the firms is how they interact and engage with alumni perhaps building on this partnership theme which is core to BCG I found BCG to be a lot more proactive and inclusive in building their alumni community they include anyone who has worked at BCG in the alumni network where McKinsey I know they're working on this but they really only build a community around their frontline consultants which cuts out a lot of people who love the firm and care about it at BCG they're much more proactive about doing events I've been to alumni events around the world they do these once a year it's called worldwide alumni day and I believe McKinsey does this a little more at the local office level but again only invites consultants so I haven't really been to any of the events I've gone to one alumni event for my McKinsey Research Office which was pretty cool but they haven't really had many since one final difference which is really interesting is that at the firm's you hear different types of chatter about the other firms now most people think of the top firms as McKinsey being at BCG but what I found was very unique to these two firms McKinsey really doesn't focus on competition it focuses internally and is oriented towards how do we build a lasting firm whereas BCG is very much focused in a similar vein but is also obsessed with what McKinsey is doing I heard what is McKinsey doing on this for pretty much everything we were the other interesting thing is that neither firm ever really mentions B I hope this overview was helpful I'm Paul Miller the creator of strategy you I help people learn the tools frameworks and problem-solving principles of strategy consultants through my course and I also just love giving away some insights and tips through my youtube channel newsletter and website so if you want to follow along subscribe you can check the links and check our website and dive deeper if you want to learn more about the strategy consulting industry

Channel: StrategyU

Views: 108,011

Rating: 4.9079871 out of 5

Keywords: consulting, strategy, management consulting, work, careers, consulting companies, consulting industry, mckinsey, bcg, boston consulting group, mckinsey & company, comparison, alumni, management consulting prep, consulting firms, top consulting firms, mckinsey versus bcg, comparing bcg and mckinsey, mckinsey bcg

Id: eHdAJROE1FU

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019