Over the decades, McKinsey's success and its reputation have been determined by the quality of its clients — not just the institutions, but the individuals. The firm was founded in 1926, when the Universiry of Chicago professor James Mc Kinsey began recruiting experienced executives and trained them to be “accounting and engineering advisors”. When James O. McKinsey died in the late 1930's Marvin Bower, graduate of Harvard Law as well as Harvard Business School became the leader of his small consulting firm. He believed that management consultants should be professionals and initiated the upgrade of the firm’s image and broaden associates’ expertise. He placed client interests first, accepted only those assignments that we are fully qualified to perform and maintained independence and objectivity, even if it means declining or withdrawing from an assignment.The next decade the global economic environment changed drastically but the firm did not respond to those changes accordingly. That lead to a stall in the firm’s growth. The newly assigned Commission on firm aims and goals researched the problem thoroughly and concluded that the focus on expansion has diluted the professionalism. The recommendations included an increased number of MGM and utilization of narrow-specialized consultants. When Ron Daniel took over the company the Commission’s recommendations still were not met. Even worse, the company was feeling pressure from strong and innovative competition. Their local office based model was inadequate to the rising need of information and knowledge sharing. The first important step Daniel did was to emphasize on the training and developing process, creating the first Director of training position. Second step was to initiate structural changes creating cross-geographic Clientele Sectors and encouraging the development of functional expertise in the general areas. The concern was that the f...
