The McKinsey way
In "The McKinsey
Way," Ethan M. Rasiel notes that things at McKinsey come in threes:
1. a topic is described in three bullets
2. issues are broken down into three subissues
3. a solution to a problem has three main components, etc.
It's a mental habit that forces a consultant to identify the key elements of anything.
In the early 1970s,
the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company felt that its
strong growth of the previous 50 years was slowing. An internal committee reported that the
firm had been neglecting the development of its professional and technical skills and was losing
ground to new competitors such as Boston Consulting Group, which emphasised "thought
leadership" rather than local client relationships.
McKinsey set up
working groups to develop knowledge in two key areas: strategy and
organisation. It developed firm- wide industry-based client sectors, such as banking and
consumer products, to cut across geographic boundaries. It began hiring some consultants with
specialist industry knowledge rather than the usual broad problem-solving skills. And it created
15 centres of competence in areas such as change management and systems. But still, most
internally developed knowledge remained undocumented, because of a suspicion held by many
consultants about trying to package ideas.
In 1987, McKinsey
launched a knowledge-management project, which recommended that the
firm build a common database of knowledge accumulated from client work. It also
recommended that each practice area hire a person to act as an "intelligent switch" to monitor
the quality of the data and help consultants find the information they needed.
From this project
came three important tools:
"MECE."
The hallmark of problem-solving at McKinsey is that every analysis is decomposed
such that the issues are:
This sounds
like the requirement of chance
events used in decision analysis. Chance event
outcomes, too, must be MECE.
Initial Hypothesis. McKinsey
teams usually work from an inital hypothesis. Then they work
to rigorously prove or disprove the hypothesis. Data and analysis are everything, and this
makes up for any (intial) lack of industry- or company-specific knowledge. Trust your gut, but
verify and verify. Test the hypothesis to destruction.
No business
problem is immune to the power of fact-based analysis. (p. 25)
Effective Communications.
The keys to effective presentations, memos, phone calls, etc. are:
brevity, thoroughness and structure. One message per chart.
If your presentation
is sloppy and muddled, your audience will think that your
thinking is also sloppy and muddled. (p. 106)
1. McKinsey Research
