Marvin Bower In all successful professional groups, regard for the individual is based not on title but on competence,

stature and leadership. Marvin Bower American management consultant Born 1903 Breakthrough ideas Corporate culture and values Teamworking and project management Professionalization of management consulting Key books The Will to Manage The Will to Lead The Ultimate Business Guru Book 22 Marvin Bower (born 1903) is the man who did more than any other to create the modern management consulting industry perhaps only Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group can come close to Bowers long lasting impact at McKinsey & Company. While few claims can be made for Bower as an outstandingly innovative thinker, he was a rigorous setter of standards and an extraordinarily successful practitioner. Under Bowers astute direction McKinsey became the worlds premier consulting firm. Interestingly, recent years have also seen the structure and managerial style of the company receiving plaudits. Marvin Bower joined the fledgling firm of James O McKinsey (18891937) in 1933 at a time when management consulting was still called management engineering. Bower was a Harvardtrained lawyer, originally from Cleveland. Soon after Bowers arrival, McKinsey left to run Marshall Field & Company. He died in 1937 and this left Bower in the companys New York office and A.T. Kearney in the Chicago office. In 1939 the two split with Kearney setting up a new company in his own name. Bower did not change the name of his firm as he shrewdly decided that clients would demand his involvement in projects if his name was up in lights. My vision was to provide advice on managing to top executives and to do it with the professional standards of a leading law firm, said Bower.1 Consequently, McKinsey consultants were associates who had engagements, rather than mere jobs, and the firm was a practice rather than a business. The entire ethos of

McKinsey was to be very respectable, the kind of people CEOs naturally relate to. Thats the enduring legacy of Marvin Bower, says former McKinsey consultant George Binney.2 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, McKinsey expanded in North America. It opened its first overseas office in 1959, followed by Melbourne, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Paris, Zurich and Milan. In 1997, McKinsey had 74 offices in 38 countries. Bowers gospel was that the interests of the client should precede increasing the companys revenues. Unless the client could trust McKinsey, we could not work with them, said Bower. If you looked after the client, the profits would look after Marvin Bower 23 themselves. (High charges were not a means to greater profits, according to McKinsey, but a simple and effective means of ensuring that clients took McKinsey seriously.) Bowers other rules were that consultants should keep quiet about the affairs of clients; should tell the truth and be prepared to challenge the clients opinion; and should only agree to do work which is both necessary and which they could do well. To this he added a few idiosyncratic twists such as insisting that all McKinsey consultants wore hats except, for some reason, in the San Francisco office and long socks. Bowers view was that values maketh the man and the business. American Express chief Harvey Golub, an ex-McKinsey consultant, labels Bower as one of the finest leaders in American business ever and says that he led that firm according to a set of values, and it was the principle of using values to help shape and guide an organization that was probably the most important thing I took away.3 Bower also changed the companys recruitment policy. Instead of hiring experienced executives with in-depth knowledge of a particular industry, he began recruiting graduates students who could learn how to be good problem solvers and consultants. This was novel at the time but set a precedent and changed the emphasis of consulting from passing on a narrow range of experience to utilizing a wide range of analytical and problem solving techniques. Another element of Bowers approach was the use of teams. He thought of McKinsey as a network of leaders. Teams were assembled for specific projects. The best people in the organization were brought to bear on a particular problem no matter where they were based in the world. McKinsey had a culture that fostered

rigorous debate over the right answer without that debate resulting in personal criticism, recalls IBMs Lou Gerstner, another McKinsey alumnus.4 Though the management consulting world developed a high charging, opportunistic reputation, Bower managed to stand apart. True or not, he created an impression of hard working, clean living, decency. Even now, once recruited, McKinsey consultants know where they stand. The firms policy remains one of the most simple. Seniority in McKinsey correlates directly with achievement, it says. The weak are shown the door. If a consultant ceases to progress with the Firm The Ultimate Business Guru Book 24 or is ultimately unable to demonstrate the skills and qualities required of a principal, he or she is asked to leave McKinsey, says the companys recruitment brochure. Bower himself set an impressive example in 1963, on reaching the age of 60, he sold his shares back to the firm at their book value. McKinsey laid its cards on the table. It played it hard, but straight. If Big Blue was the company to trust; McKinsey was the consulting firm to trust. This is something which McKinsey has largely managed to sustain. Bowers approach was commonsensical and free of fashionable baggage. Business has not changed in the past sixty years. The basic way of running it is the same. There have been thousands of changes in methods but not in command and control. Many companies say they want to change but they need to empower people below. More cohesion is needed rather than hierarchy, he said in 1995.5 The culture Bower created, continues. The mystique of McKinsey The Firm is untouched. It has become more than a mere consultancy. It is an ethos. Staid suits and professional standards. Cleancut and conservative. It is obsessively professional and hugely successful; a slick, welloiled financial machine not given to false modesty We do not learn from clients. Their standards arent high enough. We learn from other McKinsey partners, a McKinsey consultant once confided to Forbes magazine. And yet, McKinsey is not the oldest consultancy company. Arthur D Little can trace its lineage back to the 1880s. Nor is McKinsey the biggest consultancy company in the world Andersen Consulting dwarfs it in terms of revenues and numbers of consultants (but not, significantly, in revenue per consultant). McKinsey is special because it likes to think of itself as the best and has developed a selfperpetuating

aura that it is unquestionably the best. Marvin Bower was the creator of this organizational magic.