Welcome to My World

Abstract

In the heady atmosphere of 1975 McKinsey, we prided ourselves on being a tribe of generalists. The idea was to begin each assignment with a clean sheet of paper: to assume nothing, to have no prepackaged solutions, to treat every client situation entirely on its own merits. Our mantra was “fact-based analysis.” Our mission was to leave no data source unturned, to gather and process everything that could be written down and, through detailed deconstruction and analysis, be turned into an illuminating “fact.”

These are personal recollections, with no pretence at objectivity or completeness. Their purpose is to indicate a starting-point: a context out of which my own practice and thinking has gradually developed. I hope my contemporaries from those McKinsey days will recognize at least some of what I describe. Nonetheless, I will tell it as best as I remember it.