The Firm Quotes

“Enron followed the unwise practice of paying bonuses based on forecasted profits, not actual cash flows, a system that posed a problem remarkably similar to the R&D issues Gluck and his colleagues had solved at Northern Electric years earlier. In short: You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story. The emphasis on forecasts also neutralized Enron’s so-called risk-management group, which became a shrinking violet in the face of ever more outrageous estimates.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“A transformational relationship is where we transform their money into our money.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“What have they fixed?” asked former McKinsey consultant Michael Lanning. “What have they changed? Did they take any voice in the way banking has evolved in the past thirty years? They did study after study at GM, and that place needed the most radical kind of change you can imagine. The place was dead, and it was just going to take a long time for the body to die unless they changed how they operated. McKinsey was in there with huge teams, charging huge fees, for several decades. And look where GM came out.”13 In the end, all the GM work did was provide a revenue stream to enrich a group of McKinsey partners, especially those working with the automaker. The last time McKinsey was influential at Apple Computer was when John Sculley was there, and that’s because he’d had a brand-marketing heritage from Pepsi. And Sculley was a disaster. Did McKinsey do anything to help the great companies of today become what they are? Amazon, Microsoft, Google? In short, no.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Hiring McKinsey was a sign of affluence.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Smart clients say that the best way to use McKinsey is not to let them insinuate themselves—to prohibit walking the halls of the client’s offices looking for new business. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, for example, will hire McKinsey, but for one-off projects in which the entire body of knowledge generated is transferred to JPMorgan Chase at the end of the project. The firm’s operating committee has to approve any consulting engagement, and the JPMorgan Chase executives don’t take just any consultants; they pick and choose the specific people they want on the project.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“if God decides to redo creation, He will call in McKinsey.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“In organization theory, they call this “mimetic isomorphism”—the tendency to imitate another organization in the belief that, if others are doing something, it must be worthwhile.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“It says much that Matassoni, who went on to spend five years at BCG after leaving McKinsey, still considers himself a McKinsey man above all else. “BCG asked me how come their alumni aren’t as happy as McKinsey’s,” he said. “I told them it was simple, that when a guy left BCG they shat all over him and considered him a failure. When people leave McKinsey, they are counseled out and are proud of their time there.”10 There is no McKinsey boneyard, in other words; you’re still McKinsey, even after you’ve left. Even”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“How the fuck can you coach a football team if you’ve never played football in your life?” he continued. “And I’m not talking pro. I’m talking at any level. They don’t have a clue. I don’t care how many hours they spent firing people at Time Inc. or Meredith Corporation. They had this stupid red/yellow/green system, which they explained to me like I was a five-year-old. I wanted to reach across the table, grab one of them, and throw him across the room. And you should have seen them when the press reports of their engagement started piling up. They were bug-eyed, like white-gloved society women who only want to be in the paper when they get married and when they die.” McKinsey”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“By the mid-2000s, many of those spreadsheets were once again focused on helping executives make the case for one of McKinsey’s bestselling products: a justification for corporate downsizing. In”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“major private equity firm. “We don’t need them for strategy. But they will do anything you want them to do, including filling out spreadsheets. I use them at twenty cents on the dollar so I don’t have to hire more associates. They generally cost me about a hundred thousand dollars a week.” By”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“Ron Daniel was one of the first to recognize the importance of delivering content-driven expertise into the client agenda,” said McKinsey alumnus James Gorman.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“McKinsey can also be hired when one executive needs “disinterested” support for an idea that might just also result in the removal of an internal rival. Lee Iacocca wrote in his autobiography that when Henry Ford wanted Iacocca out of the firm, he hired McKinsey to recommend a new organizational structure. Iacocca went to Chrysler, where he used Bain & Company instead of McKinsey.29 Finally,”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business

“What you get from Harvard Business School is a wonderful network of people who were there with you and a set of tools that you can then bamboozle people with for the rest of your life,” Radio 4 business reporter Peter Day told London’s Sunday Times in 2009.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“The fact that just about anyone could call himself a consultant meant that shysters and scam artists abounded, tarnishing the entire field’s reputation. E. N. B. Mitton, a mining engineer who joined the British office of Bedaux in the 1930s, joked at the time that he would rather tell his mother that he was working “as a pianist in the local brothel” than admit that he had joined a consulting firm.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Gulf War, BusinessWeek advised readers to skip the book and read the McKinsey Quarterly article by Bose and Sharman instead. The shift to a knowledge culture that had begun”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“You’re right when you’re right, and they’re wrong when you’re wrong.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“We stand for doing what’s right. It gives us a lot of clients and followers and friends. But you know, if you stand for anything, you’re going to have critics.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Keep it simple, boys. Not everybody went to Harvard Business School like us.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Marvin Bower told his protégés that the secret to success was to act successful.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“It’s like being a doctor. You do the best you can, but if the patient won’t quit smoking, he still dies. This is a problem the world over. Corporate executives are not risk takers. They don’t see trouble clearly until they’re going down the drain.”17”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Nothing happens in Germany without McKinsey being consulted first.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Everyone wants to have specialists around and to have access to them, but no one wants to be one,”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“McKinsey research correctly predicted that the code would revolutionize the grocery business and improve Americans’ quality of life at the same time. That is exactly what they did, making shops vastly more efficient and dramatically reducing checkout times.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“GE’s Borch, for one, read the profit-and-loss statements of all his departments every year and told them to stop spending on paper clips. Budgeting and control were at least one part of leadership, but such immersion in detail has its obvious limitations.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“they all had the very same goal: how one could contemplate one’s competitive position in a brand-new light.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Consultants will carry information in and information out. The client has to decide which of those flows is worth more.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“It’s the only job I can think of where you start in general management, and then, if you’re successful, you end up in sales,”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm