McKinsey Way - A critique

Hey,

this is the first time I am writing a critique on any book .Infact I was asked to write this otherwise i would ne'er have written this

The author’s main emphasis in the book has been to showcase the techniques that are currently being used by McKinsey. The book does not give any insight into either the early days of McKinsey or the processes evolution used by McKinsey. As this book revolves around ‘The Firm’ , its experiences and practices , the critique sometimes touch the practices and approach of ‘The Firm’.


1) The author’s approach on most of the section has been of the type Touch and Go. The author has tried to cover the complete cycle of project starting from before the meetings with the client start to interviews with the client, understanding the problem and formulating and selling the solution to the client all packed in the small book. As a result, at more than one place, the reader is kept high and dry and is longing for more.For example, the book describes about the presentation with the clients but does not mentions as to how tp present or what should be kept in mid when presenting to client. Another ex. of this is “FIND THE KEY DRIVERS”. The section tells the user to look for the factors that affect business but do not hint on what can they be or how to identify them.

2) The Author contradicts itself at more than one place. For ex., at one place it asks users to “trust facts” and “not to hide/avoid facts”. At the same time, in some other section, the author is found preaching “Present a solution acceptable/implementable to the client” which indirectly means to overlook facts discovered and suggest something flexible to the client. This nullify the complete strategy chalked out by the McKinsey for approaching a problem. As per the author, McKinsey approach is Fact based ,Rigidly structured and Hypothesis Driven. But if the solution derived from this is not acceptable to the client then this approach , is of no good to the consultants.
Another citation of the contradictory view point are the sections “MAKE SURE YOUR SOLUTION FITS YOUR CLIENT” & “DON’T MAKE THE FACTS FIT YOUR SOLUTION” . Still another example would be sections “JUST SAY, “I DON’T KNOW”” & “DON’T ACCEPT “I HAVE NO IDEA”” . While the former section tells to accept the fact that you do not know things, the latter tells you to contradict this and live with the assumption “You know it”.

3) The book tells the reader to make there Boss Look good in front of the client. But this is not a good approach. This is fine as long as it dwells with the fact that you are executing your responsibilities as per or above the expectations. But if this means to use flattery to bring you in his good books, then it is a debatable topic. No firm will ever pronounce such things in its hierarchy let alone ‘The Firm’.

4) The book tells that the firm relies on its previous experiences for its current study but in this dynamic environment where each day is a new challenge,we should not be relying too much on such studies. Also, even though there are similarities in the different businesses no two businesses are identical(even if they are in the same domain) and hence using the research/study from another client for current project can be disastrous. The consultant has to be really careful in using the knowledge from the older projects and should not blindly rely on the facts gathered earlier. For ex., if the export of a company is $50 million and the company wants to double it and older studies tells to increase the marketing effort for the company. But there can be a govt. ruling that exports in a particular industry could not be more than $60 million to avoid shortage in the home country.

5) The idea of initial hypothesis (IH) seems to be a vague approach to me. Until you have atleast one meeting with the client, we should not set anything on our mind. The consultant should perform the first visit with an open mind and should record everything like a detective. He should be recording even the body movements and way of handling queries of all the people present in the meeting. I do agree that before we go for the first meeting, the consultant should get himself accustomed to the terminologies of that domain but making an initial impression of the problem may result in overlooking of some basic/obvious things which can lead to a wrong solution. Also incase IH is wrong, then the entire effort put in setting up the IH goes in vain and the only gain I can think of is that we know one option which is not correct.

6) There is another thing that I noticed in the course of reading this book. At more than one place, the author is referring to imaginary people as if they are females. The better way to refer to such people is to refer them as things or in case you want to save yourself from any controversy we can use both pronouns for both the genders(like he/she) to refer to them.