| Type | Incorporated Partnership |
|---|---|
| Industry | Management consulting |
| Founded | 1926 |
| Founder(s) | James O. McKinsey and Marvin Bower |
| Number of locations | over 100 offices over 45 countries |
| Key people | Dominic Barton (Managing director) Ron Daniel (Senior partner emeritus) Fred Gluck (Senior partner emeritus) Rajat Gupta (Senior partner emeritus) Ian Davis (Senior partner emeritus) |
| Services | Management consulting services |
| Revenue | $ 6.6 billion (est. 2009)[1] |
| AUM | over $ 5 billion (MIO Partners) |
| Employees | 17,000 (9,000 consultants)[2] |
| Website | www.mckinsey.com |
McKinsey & Company, Inc. is a global management consulting firm that focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management. McKinsey serves as an adviser to many businesses, governments, and institutions. It is recognized as one of the most prestigious firms in the consulting industry[3][4] and has been a top employer for new MBA graduates since 1996.[5]
Contents |
McKinsey & Company, while formally organized as a corporation, functions as a partnership in all important respects. Its managing director (currently Dominic Barton) is elected for a three-year term by the firm's other senior partners. Each managing director can serve a maximum of three terms, a policy instituted by Rajat Gupta.[6] At a strategic level, a number of committees are charged with the development of policies and making critical decisions. Committee memberships, senior roles, and the managing director position all rotate regularly among the firm's senior partners and directors.
Former managing director Rajat Gupta explains McKinsey's structure as follows:
It is very much, in many dimensions, like an academic organization. We have senior partners who are very much like tenured faculty: they are leaders in their own right. [...] We have about 80 to 100 performance cells -- a geographic office or industry practice or functional practice. They are very much autonomous and they are not organized in any hierarchy beyond that. We don't have any regional structures or sectoral structures. So all these performance units, in a theoretical sense, report to me, which means they don't report to anybody, because nobody can have 80 or 100 people reporting to them.[6]
McKinsey operates under a practice of "up or out", meaning that consultants must either advance in their consulting careers within a pre-defined timeframe or leave the firm. "25% of the firm is new every year," Gupta says, "so half the people have less than two to three years' tenure in the firm, and their values need to be reinforced."[6]
All leadership positions, including the position of managing partner, rotate among the senior partners and directors.
McKinsey has about 9,000 consultants in 97 locations in 55 countries,[7] working with more than 90% of the 100 leading global corporations and two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 list. Forbes estimated the firm's 2009 revenues at $6.6 billion.[8] The notion of company growth has been controversial from the 1970s as the firm began its global expansion; McKinsey opened many new offices under Rajat Gupta's tenure in the late 1990s. The election of British-born Ian Davis as Gupta's successor was seen as "a return to McKinsey's heritage".[9]
Another controversial McKinsey practice is its non-exclusivity policy: a conflict of interest could arise as different teams of consultants might work for direct competitors in an industry. This works to McKinsey's advantage, because it does not rule out working for potential clients. Furthermore, knowing that a competitor has hired McKinsey has historically been strong motivation for other companies to seek McKinsey's assistance themselves. The policy also means McKinsey can keep its list of clients confidential. However, because of this there is great emphasis placed on client confidentiality within the firm, and consultants are forbidden from discussing details of their work with members of other teams. While still working for McKinsey, consultants are prohibited from serving direct competitors unless they wait two or more years between the date they cease serving one competitor and begin serving the next; in some cases, consultants are forbidden from ever serving a competitor.
This philosophy has come under increased scrutiny with the Galleon case, with some questioning whether the firm is a discreet broker of confidential or even inside information marketed as "best practices".[10]
McKinsey & Company was founded in Chicago in 1926 by James O. ("Mac") McKinsey as James O. McKinsey and Company. Previously, McKinsey served as an accounting professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is considered the father of managerial accounting. In 1935 Marshall Field's became a client and in 1935 convinced McKinsey to leave the firm and become its CEO. This led to a merger between James O. McKinsey and Company and Scovell, Wellington & Company as McKinsey, Wellington & Company. The new firm had both an accounting practice and a management engineering practice.
In 1937 James O. McKinsey died unexpectedly of pneumonia, which led to the division of McKinsey, Wellington & Company in 1939. C. Oliver Wellington returned to manage Scovell, Wellington & Company full time and took the accounting practice with him. The management engineering practice was split into two affiliated firms: McKinsey & Company and McKinsey, Kearney & Company. McKinsey & Company was led by Guy Crockett, Dick Fletcher, and Marvin Bower. McKinsey, Kearney & Company was led by Andrew Thomas Kearney.
By 1952 McKinsey & Company formally parted ways with McKinsey, Kearney & Company, which was renamed A.T. Kearney & Company. At the time, McKinsey was led by Marvin Bower as then-managing director. Bower had joined the firm in 1933 and served as managing director from 1950 to 1967. During his tenure he oversaw the firm's rise to global prominence and established many of its guiding principles. Even after formally leaving McKinsey in 1967, Marvin continued to provide guidance and counsel to the Firm for many years. He is called the father of modern management consulting.
Ron Daniel was Bower's protégé and managing director from 1976 to 1988. He remains a senior partner and “the bridge between McKinsey's founding generation and the present.”[11] The firm takes mentorship very seriously; Daniel mentored Rajat Gupta, who mentored Anil Kumar, who advised current managing director Dominic Barton. Gupta and Kumar were later entangled in the Galleon scandal.
Marvin Bower broke with then-common industry practice by hiring recent graduates from the best business schools rather than among experienced managers.[12] Today the firm is among the top recruiters of graduates of the top-ranked business programs in the US and overseas, in addition to hiring a significant number of people with other advanced degrees in science, medicine, engineering and law. The firm is notable for the number of Rhodes Scholars it is able to attract.[13]
The Firm is organizationally divided into partners and non-partners. It is generally not possible to join the firm as a partner; instead, partners are promoted internally from the existing ranks of principals and associates. According to the Firm's career website, "successful consultants who join McKinsey early in their career can expect election to principal (the first stage of partnership) within five to seven years. ... There is no limit to the size of our partnership."[14] Successful partners are sometimes elected senior partner after at least seven years as partner, though there are fast-rising exceptions (notably Ron Daniel, Rajat Gupta, and Anil Kumar) who become senior partner ~10 years after joining the firm as associates.
Officially, "senior partner" is the highest position (other than the rotating managing director) at McKinsey, though top senior partners are distinguished by reputation and influence. The firm's mandatory retirement age is 60, after which directors become "senior partner emeritus."[15]
As a private firm, McKinsey is not required to disclose any compensation figures. Compensation also differs from the financial services sector in that consultants are not paid proportional to the business they bring in; top senior partners and the managing director (also a senior partner) maintain similar compensation. This was estimated to be $2-4 million in 1994 dollars ($3-5 million today),[16] and has at least doubled ($6-12 million) today given the Firm's growth over the last 15 years. Other estimates place top senior partner compensation between $5 and 10 million.[17]
Junior directors were said to earn at least $1 million a year in 1994 dollars ($2 million in 2009).[16] There were over 400 directors at the Firm in 2009, up from 150 in 1994.[18][19]
A 1993 Fortune profile says, "The Firm places itself above discussing money as a motivation, yet senior partners often earn as much, or more, than the CEOs they advise"[19], though over the last 15 years CEO compensation has increased disproportionately.[20]
Three firms compete in providing management consulting services to Fortune 500 and large enterprises, consistently recruiting top talent from elite colleges and professional/graduate schools globally: McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).[21] This top tier of the consulting industry is commonly termed the MBB by executive recruiters and industry insiders.[22]
Although these three firms compete directly across all major sectors and geographies, each firm possesses its own unique profile that defines its sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. McKinsey & Co., on account of its experience, deep board/C-level relationships and scale, is currently a strong player in general strategy, financial services, operations and IT (through its BTO subsidiary). McKinsey holds the highest market share among the three firms globally with geographic strength across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
BCG displays competitive strength in general strategy and holds the second-highest market share globally after McKinsey. Having pioneered private equity (PE) consulting, Bain & Co. is the strongest player in the PE/LBO space, servicing most of the major private investment firms globally; Geographically, Bain displays a strong market share in the Americas but is weak in Europe, Asia and other emerging markets.
McKinsey publishes several journals, most notably McKinsey Quarterly.[23] It also publishes McKinsey on Business Technology, McKinsey on Payments, McKinsey on Corporate and Investment Banking, and McKinsey on Finance. Several business books have been authored by McKinsey consultants, including Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, The Alchemy of Growth, Creative Destruction, and The War for Talent. Former consultant Tom Peters authored the well-known book In Search of Excellence based on a project initiated by Ron Daniel in 1977.
McKinsey invests significantly in its knowledge management system to support field consultants. The system includes generalist researchers, industry- and function-specific experts and librarians, and access to journals and databases. McKinsey maintains an organisation called the McKinsey Knowledge Centre (McKC) that provide rapid access to specialized expertise and business information.[24] In addition, consultant-authored internal "practice development" documents capture generalizable insights from client engagements. There are also methods to access individual consultants with expertise from previous client studies or previous employment, for background assistance (competitive information is not shared).
This system was created and chaired by former senior partner Anil Kumar as an early example of knowledge process outsourcing.[25]
McKinsey maintains a secretive and low-profile family of hedge funds and private equity firms collectively known as the McKinsey Investment Office (MIO Partners) for its own exclusive use. MIO is a wholly owned subsidiary of McKinsey and Company and reports to its finance and investments committee, which is chaired by a top senior partner (formerly William Meehan).[26][27]
These funds have had over $5 billion in assets under management (AUM).[26]
From the firm's website:
This firm manages a wide array of investment vehicles for the Firm’s Partners and pension plans, with significant expertise in alternative strategies including hedge funds and private equity. A principle objective of the Investment Counseling Function is to help our investing partners create long term wealth by constructing appropriate investment portfolios and avoiding expensive and/or inefficient products. At the same time, the products and services offered must save Partners time relative to those which are available externally. This firm’s role is to provide investment education, counseling and select products to Partners.[28][29]
MIO is "responsible for pension and discretionary partner investments, with a particular focus on alternative investments."[30]
McKinsey has produced more CEOs than any other company and is referred to by Fortune magazine as "the best CEO launch pad".[31] More than 70 past and present CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are former McKinsey employees. Among McKinsey’s most notable alumni are:
Notable longtime McKinsey partners include:
Academics who were formerly McKinsey consultants include:
According to firm policies, firm members may not discuss specific client situations. The firm also maintains a deliberate and low-profile external image. Maintaining client confidentiality protects client interests and allows McKinsey continued license to operate. However, it also blocks public scrutiny and assessment of its client base, success rate, and profitability.[32] This confidentiality also helps conceal McKinsey's fee structure.
The policy of client confidentiality is maintained even among former employees; as a result, journalists and writers have had difficulty developing fully informed accounts of mistakes which McKinsey employees may have made. It naturally also prohibits quantifying the benefits that good advice may have delivered. Despite this difficulty in attributing mistakes to McKinsey employees and alumni, some suggestions have been put forward:
Among other books and articles, The Witch Doctors, written by The Economist editor-in-chief John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, presents a series of blunders and disasters alleged to have been McKinsey's consultants' fault. Similarly, Dangerous Company: The Consulting Powerhouses and the Businesses They Save and Ruin by James O'Shea and Charles Madigan, critically examines McKinsey's work within the context of the consulting industry.
In March 2011, longtime McKinsey top senior partners and Indian School of Business co-founders Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar (with Gupta also having served as managing director of the firm) were charged by the SEC for illegally tipping the Galleon Group hedge fund with insider information about Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and other McKinsey clients. Gupta and Kumar were close friends of each other and of Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam.[55][56]
The SEC alleged in its civil administrative action that Gupta, who had since retired as a senior partner of McKinsey and was serving on the board of Goldman Sachs, had passed information to Galleon about Goldman that yielded nearly $20 million in profits and losses avoided.[57] The SEC also alleged that Gupta passed information to Rajaratnam within 4 minutes of the completion of a special Goldman Sachs board meeting to approve a capital injection by Warren Buffett during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. Gupta also stood to profit as would-be chairman of Galleon International and chairman of New Silk Route.[58]
Gupta has maintained his innocence and countersued the SEC;[58][59] in August 2011, both Gupta's and the SEC's suits were dropped.[60] Gupta surrendered to the FBI on criminal charges on October 26, 2011; the case is ongoing.[61]
Kumar, who pleaded guilty and was fined nearly $3 million for his role in the scandal, provided insider information on the acquisition of ATI Technologies by AMD while at McKinsey.[62][63] He was the government's "star witness" in U.S. v Rajaratnam.[64]
In U.S. v Rajaratnam, it was also revealed that a third McKinsey partner, David Palecek — now deceased at age 37 — had been involved in the insider trading scandal, though did not accept money from Rajaratnam.[65]
The firm has come under significant controversy for having its former leaders and senior partners (Gupta and Kumar) as well as a “rising star” junior partner (Palecek) all implicated with the Galleon Group and insider trading. In the Financial Times, J. Robert Brown, Jr., a securities law professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, said “Every reputable company and advisory entity, including investment banks and McKinsey, has got to be horrified by this.”[66]