| Topic Name: |
McKinsey in decline? |
| Message Name: |
Interesting banter |
| Date Posted: |
02/01/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
I'm sure your data for the Stanford GSB are correct.
I am referring to the "average" of all new recruits at McK, which includes a lot of "non-traditional" hiring, especially APDs or students from other backgrounds than business.
Again, the informal survey suggests that these "non traditional" recruits consider that "the best and the brightest" of their respective classes do not go to management consulting.
Please take into account that the survey includes recruits from other geographies than North America (that represents no more than 35% of The Firm, these days).
Question to ponder : are these "non-traditional recruits" becoming the mainstream source of recruiting, since total amount of recruits necessary can no longer be satisfied by just GSB "bets and brightest"?
NO, I did not not go to Wharton (but I was accepted at the MBA programme) and, NO, I never worked at a pharma company. |
| Message: |
At the end of the day, this is the kind of conversation that is better had over beer than over bytes (or not had at all: "Don't long for 'the good old days,' for you don't know whether they were any better than these!" -Ecclesiastes).
None of us have the data that one would need to answer the question "Are less b&b going to McKinsey now, than in times past." As a thought experiment, what would you need to do to answer that question?
1. Define best & brightest.
1a. best: at what? at what time? post-hoc (i.e., looking back at what someone achieved) or on a predictive basis?
1b. brightest: GPA? Emotional Intelligence? SATs? Human calculator ability? Creativity? That you got into (insert favortite MBA school) b-school?
2. Come up with a measure for b&b
[This is really where anyone trying to do this comes up on the rocks. Not only do you have to measure for b&b, you have to do it in a way that you can look at historical data (i.e., folks that came in 10 years ago.)]
3. Apply that measure on internal McK data.
Here's one way, most unsatisfactory in my opinion. Define b&b based on SAT scores. Then, using McK application materials ask: Has the average SAT score for incoming McK consultants gone up, down or stayed the same.
Here's maybe a better way: Define b&b by some measure of "impact" (that's easy, right?) Looking at where people who stayed at the firm x # of years (to control for # of years @ McK, and also for some rough control of how well they could hack it), measure their impact x # of years from their leaving McK. So compare Joe, who joined McK in 1990, stayed for 3 years and left, and then 1 year later had impact of x to Jon, who joined McK in 2000, stayed for 3 years and left, and then 1 year later had impact of y. If you did that for Joe and Jon's cohort, and xbar is > ybar, then you can say, less b&bs (as measured by impact) are coming to McK.
To me, it sounds like an awful lot of work to answer a question which is somewhat irrelevant. The questions need to be: how does McK attract the b&b? Where is MC going, and do we like that? Can we do anything about that? etc. Not, are we where we were 10 years ago...
Anyway, that was a fun exercise. I needed a little case practice anyway (I'm interviewing w/ McK).
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