McKinsey and the problem of relationships

MBA — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:58:02 +0000

McKinsey receives praise for many different practices, but none have been mentioned as frequently, by professors and students during my first year of business school, as the way in which it handles its clients. I’m not talking about how it chooses its clients, but how it maintains relationships with them. If you’re a McKinsey client and you want a point of contact at the firm, forget it. Your point of contact is the Firm (capitalization McKinsey’s), not the partner who brought in your business, not your engagement manager. Now, the first problem here is that McKinsey refers to itself pretentiously, arrogantly, and moronically as the Firm in its communications, but I digress.

Back to the point, you may think, Well, that’s interesting. But everyone who mentions this aspect of its business universally praises the practice because it prevents consultants from leaving McKinsey and taking clients with them. This issue exists in several businesses: the lawyer who leaves the large firm to start her own boutique, the editor who brings her writers with her to a new publishing house, the agent who takes his star client out of his firm.

And so that McKinsey considers this a problem it has solved seems to me a bit troubling. After all, aren’t people and relationships the core of all business? In every company I’ve worked for, it’s been people I’ve worked with—co-workers, clients, writers—who made the experiences worth my while. Perhaps, instead of eliminating personal relationships with clients, you should value them and the people who create and maintain them accordingly. Then you would reduce the risk of losing your clients, but—oh! wait!—that wouldn’t maximize profitability, would it? Take your eyes off the margins and you lose, boys.

I don’t have a problem with the whole notion of making personal sacrifice for the good of the company, team, country, et cetera, but there’s something utterly dehumanizing about removing the importance of personal relationships and individual value from doing business. Is this any shock, though, in a society that prizes conformity and a firm that has a strong up or out policy and hires the smartest, most insecure graduates for a relatively low hourly fee of around $14? Perhaps, it’s good for business and I’m proving myself an idiot, and maybe it’s good for business but it’s not good and my choosing good over good for business (or even recognizing the distinction) is what makes me an idiot. And while I might not be able to take my clients with me when I leave my next company, at least I’ll be able to take my idiocy.

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McKinsey and the problem of relationships