The McKinsey Way

Thinking Like a Consultant

Companies worldwide hire McKinsey & Company, a well-known corporate consulting firm, for its problem-solving expertise. McKinsey experts credit the firm’s success to the use of its proven guidelines for problem solving. Those guidelines include techniques you can use, including standard ways to think about problems, gather information, and present findings to clients.

The first rule of McKinsey’s approach is to embrace facts. Facts are the foundation of McKinsey’s advice, partly because the company’s consultants aren’t experts in any specific industrial field. Therefore, they don’t rely on intuition to guide their recommendations. Facts create credibility, a big issue to young consultants who are making presentations to skeptical executives.

McKinsey’s entry-level consultants typically finish near the top of their college classes, spend a couple years at a large company, and then earn an MBA from a top university. The entry-level consultants are in their twenties, so they’re vulnerable to being easily dismissed when they make presentations to top executives of huge companies. However, they find they can build effective cases when...