Why mckinsey is so successful

Its Detroit office will have more automotive and manufacturing clients and its San Francisco office will have more high tech clients.

The presence of deep interest and experience in a particular industry can mean an office has an outsized percentage of the work in that industry. To figure out what industry or functional strengths of an office might have, look at the McKinsey Quarterly articles and white papers that its partners publish. You can also ask at on-campus or online information sessions. When you prepare your answer to Why McKinsey?

Offices can also have a different split of in-town work versus travel. This may not be important to you, but if it is, you should know what the split between in-town and travel is early in the application process.

Who have you met through the recruiting process that you connected with and would love to work with? Who does the type of client work you find interesting? Who would you not mind being stuck in an airport with? They give you the opportunity to meet people from the firm and figure out whose personality and problem-solving approach resonate with you. Ask yourself if you can imagine putting in late nights before a client presentation with the people you meet. This specificity will show your passion for working not just in the consulting industry, but for McKinsey in particular and for a specific office.

Goldielyn: I love McKinsey because:. If you have more questions about virtual case interviews, leave them in the comments below. Other people prepping for virtual case interviews found the following pages helpful:.

Thanks for turning to My Consulting Offer for advice on consulting interviews. We want you to be successful in your consulting interviews too. For example, here is how Tobias was able to get his offer from McKinsey. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The consensus inside The Firm is that a McKinsey consultant peaks somewhere around age 45, he gives up weighty committee responsibilities by his early 50s, and he must sell back his shares and settle into a reduced role by When a partner's time comes, says Gluck, ''we say: We love you.

We want to be your friend. We'll help you any way we can, but your partners don't think you're cutting it anymore. Not all is peace and love within The Firm's family. Five years ago, 16 consultants left McKinsey's then person Milan office, mostly in solidarity with a partner who had been forced out. Gluck has also learned the hard way that McKinsey's culture doesn't mix well with outside cultures.

In he attempted a wholesale acquisition of talent in the information technology field by buying a small New York company, Information Consulting Group. The organism tried to reject the transplant. One theory as to why the McKinsey culture normally functions so well comes from a man who has worked for several other major consulting outfits as well as The Firm.

At other consulting firms there's a lot more diversity. Out of partners, only 21 are women and just two are black; out of directors, three are women.

To which Ron Daniel, the former managing director who has done as much as anyone to shape the modern McKinsey, replies, in effect, so what? Put together 3, of these egocentric, task-oriented, achievement-oriented people, and it produces an atmosphere of something less than humility.

Yes, it's elitist. But don't you think there has to be room somewhere in this politically correct world for something like this? Says he: ''We have to accelerate our drive to make this place more attractive for women and minorities, not only because it's the right thing to do but out of self- interest. He was friendly enough until he asked the inevitable question: ''How many black partners do you have? In other words, ''Do you know how many service stations there are in Chicago?

Unfortunately, that's where client demand is increasing. We have major corporations asking us to help them change their culture; we need to make major changes in our own culture.

But in our search for bright guys, we throw out a lot of creative ones. We've got to be less cookie-cutter in our hiring. This sort of work was viewed within The Firm as the proper venue for more ''proletarian'' consultants such as Arthur Andersen or A. No longer. Says director Chuck Farr: ''Our value added today has to be that we make things happen. Says Steingraber of A.

Kearney: ''All of a sudden we see evidence McKinsey is holding itself out as willing to work on implementation. But if you visit their clients, and go down a level or two below the CEO, you'll find they get black marks in this area.

They're not good at achieving buy-in from the ranks. That arrogance they carry stirs up a lot of resentment. In those days the upstart Boston Consulting Group began boldly marketing corporate strategy ''products'' with scintillating names such as the growth-share matrix and the experience curve.

The Firm wound up watching BCG eat not only its lunch but its breakfast and dinner as well. All the partners still around from those days admit to feeling seriously threatened by the loss of business. We hope they won't have to.

The issue is: How do I sell my partners -- the classic skeptics? We are committed to knowledge building, but we reject the standard idea. And as choices are made, and the McKinsey of the next century begins to unfold, no one will be paying closer attention than the man who set it all in motion more than half a century ago: Marvin Bower.

Normally, the history of a hoary institution like McKinsey resides in a body of mythology passed down by several generations, carefully sculpted to invoke the spirit of some legendary founder. But in McKinsey's case, a quick trip to a retirement community in sunny Boca Raton, Florida, miraculously positions you face to face with the firm's fountainhead. On their office door, ''Mac'' McKinsey and his five partners -- one of whom was A.

Marvin Bower stayed on and ran the New York office of the promising little consultancy until , when McKinsey surprised everyone by dying of pneumonia at In the aftermath, Bower and A. Kearney disagreed over how to run the firm. In the two finally split up, with Kearney keeping the Chicago office and eventually naming it for himself -- A. Like everything that Bower does, the tribute also had a practical purpose.

McKinsey will be working on this study personally. I wanted my freedom. But also like those other two titans, Bower pounded his principles home so hard, so often, so repetitively, that they actually did finally define the institution. It is from them that the holy water flows. In short, the rules are these: A McKinsey consultant is supposed to put the interests of his client ahead of increasing The Firm's revenues; he should keep his mouth shut about his client's affairs; he should tell the truth and not be afraid to challenge a client's opinion; and he should only agree to perform work that he feels is both necessary and something McKinsey can do well.

Along with the professional code, Bower insisted on professional, as opposed to business, language, which is why McKinsey is always The Firm, never the company; jobs are ''engagements''; and The Firm has a ''practice,'' not a business.

Just as IBM's Watson had a thing for white shirts, Bower had one for hats, insisting that every McKinsey consultant wear one -- except in San Francisco, where executives didn't wear them. He also mandated that everyone wear long socks because he thought it inappropriate to show ''raw flesh'' in business settings. They still wear long socks. Another fascinating Bowerism that has stuck at McKinsey is the cultural attitude toward the public discussion of money. It simply isn't done. Even though those who knew him when describe Bower as among ''the most client- hungry consultants who ever lived,'' he vigorously maintained -- and still does today -- that ''if we do the right work for the client, we'll make more money if we don't think about it.

WHILE SOME maintain that supersalesman Bower's anti-greed aphorisms always contained a certain amount of hypocrisy, he did perform one act in the history of The Firm that permanently set him -- and McKinsey -- apart from its competitors. In an era when other consultants were taking themselves public, or selling out to larger companies, McKinsey was basically Bower's to sell, which he could easily have done at some huge multiple of earnings.

Instead, around the time he turned 60, in , Bower sold his shares back to The Firm for book value, setting an example for his partners to follow. It was a defining moment in The Firm's culture.

Bower still has strong opinions on several major issues facing today's McKinsey. He agrees with those who say The Firm overrates the analytical and underrates the intuitive in its hiring. And he comes down squarely on the side of those who believe McKinsey must remain a self-governing partnership, going so far as to add: ''Business should move in our direction. Command and control is out of date because it doesn't involve people, and you can't run a business today unless all the people are involved in thinking about serving the customer.

If an individual consultant has to make a professional decision on the spot and he has too many obligations, I worry that he is likely to make a decision to attract a client who shouldn't be attracted. The seeds of internal discontent were sown in the early Eighties when, they say, McKinsey decided to make a big distinction between partners and directors.

Those were the guys who built the firm that's there today, and they've done a great job. But when they moved the carrot of director ahead a few years, a whole generation of younger partners left. And the younger partners who stayed weren't necessarily the best.

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