| Topic Name: |
The day consulting died |
| Message Name: |
The day consulting died (Pt. 1) |
| Date Posted: |
01/26/2003 |
| Message: |
I'm surprised that no one has posted this already. My sympathies to my consulting brethren at McK.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/obituaries/24BOWE.html?ex=1043989200&en=e6a5f93417d54594&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
Marvin Bower, Who Built McKinsey & Co., 99, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
arvin Bower, whose leadership of McKinsey & Company turned the business of selling management advice into a keystone of American corporate culture, died on Wednesday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 99.
McKinsey was a small engineering and accounting firm in Chicago in the 1930's when Mr. Bower, abandoning his Cleveland law practice, went to work there. In the decades that followed, he helped McKinsey ?? and through McKinsey the entire management consulting field ?? to grow beyond the skepticism of those who called it a racket and into a serious and substantive industry.
Today, McKinsey advises 100 of the world's 150 biggest companies. Business Week magazine in 1987 termed Mr. Bower and Edwin B. Booz, founder of Booz Allen Hamilton, the two people most responsible for the growth of management consulting after World War II.
Jack Sweeney, editor in chief of Consulting Magazine, said business historians routinely hail Mr. Bower as "the father of the consulting profession."
Mr. Bower has been credited with taking a fledgling industry and setting its course not only as to the kinds of services it could sell but also the standards it must uphold for its work to be respected.
He displayed something of a passion for niceties. He insisted that McKinsey be called a firm, never a company. Jobs were engagements and the firm had a practice, not a business. Employees for many years were required to wear hats.
Mr. Bower's approach, beginning with common sense, was supercharged with the input of the brightest graduates of Harvard Business School, whom he preferred to long-serving executives. McKinsey's business grew beyond giving advice on far-reaching corporate reorganizations to the likes of General Motors and General Electric, in time advising Germany on how to rebuild the economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A current assignment is advising United Airlines, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, on how best to restructure its service and fares to remain competitive.
Mr. Bower stressed integrity. Consultants, he maintained, must always put the interests of a client ahead of McKinsey's own revenue. They were to do only work that was necessary and that they could do well.
He had the title of managing director from 1950 to 1967, and stayed on for many more years. In 1993, at the last of a series of retirement dinners, a colleague, Jack Crowley, recalled a meeting in which the head of the client company bellowed argumentatively. Mr. Bower told the executive that his company's problem was its top leadership.
"There was deathly silence," Mr. Crowley said. "It happened to be totally accurate. That was the end of our work with that client, but it didn't bother Marvin."
|
|
