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 Bower’s 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 Bower’s astute direction McKinsey

became the world’s 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 (1889–1937) in

1933 at a time when management consulting was still called ‘management

engineering’. Bower was a Harvard–trained lawyer, originally from Cleveland.

Soon

after Bower’s arrival, McKinsey left to run Marshall Field & Company. He died in

1937 and this left Bower in the company’s 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.

That’s 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.

Bower’s gospel was that the interests of the client should precede increasing the

company’s 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.)

Bower’s other rules were that consultants should keep quiet about the affairs of

clients; should tell the truth and be prepared to challenge the client’s 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.

Bower’s 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 company’s 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 Bower’s 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 IBM’s 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 firm’s 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 company’s 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.

Bower’s 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. Clean–cut and conservative. It is obsessively

professional and hugely successful; a slick, well–oiled financial machine not given

to false modesty –’We do not learn from clients. Their standards aren’t 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.