Former McKinsey Partner: What People Get Wrong

what do people get wrong about McKinsey and Company this is something I talked about recently with Adam Braff who was a partner at McKinsey in the early 2000s I talked to him as part of a broader conversation about his own career Journey from becoming a partner at McKinsey and company moving around to multiple jobs and corporate strategy and eventually taking the leap to becoming a freelance consultant I reached out because of an essay he wrote about that McKinsey book it was a fascinating and entertaining article that I thought did a decent job of pushing back against a recent book that was published about McKinsey that really dunked on the flaws of the industry and the firms he did a mock interview with Marvin Bauer who is no longer alive but helped shape the real value and core of the culture at McKinsey in the middle of the 20th century Adam and I talked about the reality of working at firms like this why the criticisms often fall a little flat some of the valid criticism that people really should make and what it's really like to work at these firms yeah what what do people get wrong about McKinsey and I'm sort of teeing up uh article you wrote about that McKinsey book I mean there's been this media narrative for the past few years that like McKinsey is this evil empire I mean from my experience there most of the work is way more boring than people would think um done in a very intense way done for some interesting clients at high levels of organizations but what do people get wrong about McKinsey so one thing I'd start with is the idea that there is just one McKenzie and that there is a kind of an unchanging ethos of McKenzie there is something persistent about the firm and its values and the talent point that I that I made earlier but when you spend time inside of a firm like that it's just an enormous place that's extremely decentralized and it's decentralized to the point where there were multiple different groups working on customer experience initiatives at the time that I was forming that practice I had to exert myself quite a lot to rope them together and to say let's build something together so I guess the first thing I'd say is it's kind of a category error to even try to critique McKinsey as such in a way where you're trying to predict the next thing that McKinsey will do right because it's the part of McKenzie that you are talking about that is the relevant unit of measure so that's the first thing I'd say the second thing is is the point you made about the work being largely I'll call it boring right largely straightforward business uh advancing work to increase shareholder value increase other kinds of stakeholder value mostly by raising revenues by helping companies just grow better and like make more money and avoid doing stupid stuff and avoid waste right that that's that's the large majority of what McKinsey does and only a tiny fraction of it is serving clients who are in any material way like controversial on subject matters that are really controversial it's a bit like just hearkening back to my lawyer days if you talk to people who have clerked on appellate courts very little of the work in an appellate court clerkship or on the docket of an appellate court are these culture War constitutional questions about you know individual rights and stuff like most of it's like administrative law stuff and kind of procedural stuff that just has to get done for the efficient functioning of the law and it's very much the same inside of a of a consulting firm I think these firms have become so big I mean they're dramatically bigger than when I left or McKinsey is in 2010 and it is decentralized which is actually a great way to run an organization like this and this is probably why they continue to grow but when you are decentralized you are sort of I went deep into like chaos theory and complex adaptive systems um in a lot of my research and there's this phrase like surfing on the edge of chaos by this guy Richard Pascal he's actually a former McKinsey person but um yeah you're you're always kind of pushing the edges and most of what like pushing the edges looks like is basically like trying to move into new fields that like don't really work out right I do wonder if the media is almost creating like more demand for Consulting because these Executives will look like oh we can just blame MacKenzie for our own decisions yeah I like I like your idea about emergent order and the value that comes from people experimenting on the edges to create new ways to in my in my case use data and analytics to improve companies performance and the more you have people experimenting in this decentralized way with new fraud fighting use cases and revenue use cases and operations use cases people discover cool stuff they cross-pollinated across sectors and the winning ideas win the losing ideas just disappear and then unfortunately the really risky stuff that's happening that's reputationally bad for the firm as the firm gets bigger there's more of a risk of that kind of stuff happening which can you know kind of bring the house down right so they definitely need a different governance model from what they had when the firm was you know 8 000 people I guess when I left they need a better way to keep tabs on it and for all from all accounts that's what they're doing right they're trying to create various client committees and ways of screen screening work to avoid that very dangerous stuff on the edge um but you know it's it's not uh it's not easy there's definitely a growth imperative inside an organization like that and so there's going to be a lot of activity activity happening at that edge for sure yeah they they had 30 000 employees as of two years ago uh which is pretty wild and it really is creating a new kind of organization I mean even we've had massive manufacturing companies in the middle of the 20th century but we haven't had like organizations at this scale doing service at this scale in this way um and yeah it's gonna require new ways of thinking about how to run an organization which I don't know maybe there are limits to scale we have to uh find out if you want to see more videos about McKinsey you can check that out up here

Channel: StrategyU

Views: 12,710

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Id: TQQQNX_LPeM

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2022