On the McKinsey Way

The most striking thing about the “McKinsey Way,” as the book calls it, is how much of the model is a repackaging of social-science research methods for the private sector. Breaking a problem down into its constituent parts is how every doctoral candidate begins a dissertation proposal, and the individual methods here are familiar: reliance on secondary sources (McKinsey’s databases), archival research (the documentation within an organization), interviews (widely used), even ethnography (the same sort of insight you get from wandering around inside an organization). There was remarkably little here new to me beyond the nature of the questions. The primary divergence between social-science research and McKinsey-style consulting is what the research is for. In theory, much social-science research is a passion project — research for its own sake that someone may eventually use — or else it’s meant to illuminate problems and solutions for policy or for understanding a society; McKinsey’s aim is almost always financial, built around increasing a client’s profit. Social science can do that too, but often doesn’t.

This might give the impression the book is a comparative study of consulting and social science. It isn’t. But what’s in it isn’t limited to McKinsey either: there’s material on research technique, on how to think about problems, on designing presentations, on managing non-compliant or even hostile colleagues at a client firm, and the end of the book even covers how to manage life at McKinsey, which seems uniquely grueling (more than half of associates leave within two years, though they often land lucrative jobs afterward). Ethan Rasiel’s book is a fine introduction to what McKinsey is — I didn’t fully understand what it does until I read it, and now I know it does what I do, in a different capacity — and how it solves problems. It was published in 1999, though, and it would be nice to have an updated edition covering the developments of the past twenty-five years; business and technology have changed considerably, and surely the work at McKinsey has too, even if the core of the decision-making described here still rings true.