The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

it takes no stretch of the imagination to conclude that financial problems can submit to McKinsey’s style of fact-based analysis.

Did you have a problem in your business? Let him have a look at it, and he was confident he could help you figure out what to do about it. Not only that, he promised to tell the rich and powerful what they were doing wrong.

“bad apples” theory: Every organization has them, and the thing that’s important is that once they’re discovered, you do your best to make sure there aren’t any more.

Barton cited McKinsey research that has found that 70 to 90 percent of a company’s market value is related to cash flows expected three or more years into the future.

“Its nerve center sits in New York,” the Sunday Times wrote in 1997. “Its managing partner works in Chicago. Its Global Institute is in Washington. But its truest address is in the world’s capital and industrial centers. It is a United Nations of consulting, with one crucial difference: It works.”8

In 2007 Google knocked McKinsey out of the number one spot on the Universum MBA student ranking of preferable employers, a spot the consulting firm had held for the previous twelve years.

Marvin Bower instilled the firm’s values system, Ron Daniel perfected its personnel processes and institutionalized the place, and Fred Gluck was the architect of the firm’s knowledge culture.

The firm claimed to do more research on business issues than the business schools at Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton combined. With n

Let’s say a client asks us what time it is,” Balloun offered. “If you ask Booz Allen, their response will be ‘What time do you want it to be?’ If you ask A. D. Little, who are a little more technical, they will tell you that ‘It’s 9:45:20, Greenwich mean time.’ But if you ask McKinsey, we will say, ‘Why do you want to know? What decisions are you trying to make for which knowing the time would be helpful?’”

revenues almost doubling, from $350 million in 1985 to $635 million in 1989. Over the next three years they nearly doubled again, hitting $1.2 billion in 1992.