Entrepreneurship valued
Encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit inside McKinsey has meant that a quarter of our alumni have started their own entrepreneurial ventures outside McKinsey. And with nearly 27,000 alumni, that’s a lot of start-up energy.
What are some examples of what entrepreneurship looks like inside McKinsey? We have many forms of entrepreneurs including practice entrepreneurs, geographic entrepreneurs, and new business leaders. Meet some of them—and learn about their amazing backgrounds.
Mona Mourshed
As an engagement manager, Mona Mourshed (pictured above) was determined to focus on education in the Middle East, even though we didn’t have a relevant client at the time. That didn’t stand in the way of this MIT PhD, who was elected the first female partner in the Middle East office. Mona built a practice from scratch and McKinsey now has more than 80 consultants serving clients on education reform around the world–a practice that Mona leads. Mona was named one of Fortune’s 40 under 40 leaders; she speaks at the World Economic Forum and the United Nations as a recognized leader on education.
Acha Leke
A native of Cameroon, Acha Leke wanted to have an impact in Africa. In 2010, Acha was working in McKinsey’s Johannesburg office when he co-authored a groundbreaking report, “Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies,” which examined the sources of past and future growth across the continent, and established a framework for understanding how challenges and opportunities will differ across Africa's 54 countries.
Seeing a need to expand McKinsey's presence in Africa, Acha recently set up a new office in Lagos—one of the dreams he had when he first joined McKinsey. You can hear Acha’s excitement about McKinsey's work in his own words: “The work we are doing across Africa is truly transformational. We're playing a key role in supporting the economic rebirth of the continent, whether by working with presidents and governments to develop strategies to grow their economies, or turning private-sector companies into regional and global champions.”
Ben Cheatham
Our Infrastructure Practice was started by an associate, Ben Cheatham, who owned a construction company in New York City before he joined McKinsey. Ben’s interest in infrastructure and construction began when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in architecture and continued after he received an master's in civil engineering from MIT. Now a partner, Ben leads the thriving practice he started, which serves prominent private-and public-sector clients.
Investing in infrastructure is recognized as central to economic growth and stability in both mature and emerging economies, and the Infrastructure Practice is making significant contributions in both dimensions—by providing support, for instance, to various countries’ infrastructure and economic-development strategies.
Jeremy Oppenheim
Working with a global philanthropic organization, Jeremy Oppenheim helped develop the methodology that became the renowned carbon-abatement cost curve that was central to the framework for the 2009 climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen. Fueled (sustainably, of course) by this important breakthrough, a team of internal McKinsey entrepreneurs—including Jeremy, Tomas Nauclér, Jens Riese, Per-Anders Enkvist, and others started the thriving Sustainability Practice, which serves a wide range of clients, from governments concerned about deforestation to large companies moving toward greener practices and to innovative clean-technology start-ups.
McKinsey Solutions
McKinsey Solutions is a remarkable startup within McKinsey—a practice that was created by an internal team that envisioned taking our expertise and turning it into a new way to serve clients leveraging data and technology. When given the opportunity to lead two of our Solutions, Chris Gagnon (Organizational Health Index) and James Eddy (Energy Insights), both former McKinsey consultants, jumped at the chance to return to the place that was such a meaningful part of their careers.
The elegance and breadth of McKinsey Solutions lies in the potential for developing a stream of new Solutions, based on focusing our deep resources—in analytics, insights, metrics and big data—on needs that are unique to individual clients and specific industries. It's fascinating to hear Chris and James talk about the creative synthesis involved in generating new businesses out of existing capabilities. “What I like most about leading Energy Insights is the excitement of growing a business, building an organization, and meeting a market need. You’re building a small company, a startup, together with other people, which has been great fun and an excellent experience,” James says.
Diana Farrell
When government service called, Diana Farrell left her role as leader of McKinsey Global Institute to become the deputy director of the National Economic Council and deputy assistant on economic policy to President Obama. Diana returned in 2011 to set up and lead the McKinsey Center for Government (MCG), a center of expertise and innovation within our Public Sector Practice. MCG allowed Diana to combine her passion for public service with the powerful connection she had to the people of McKinsey and their ability to take on outsize challenges and make a difference.
Diana says, “We created the MCG with the recognition that governments are being asked to do more in an increasingly challenging and resource-constrained environment.” That requires innovation—and the best of McKinsey to help clients navigate a difficult landscape. This new practice area is changing the ways governments and government institutions—local, national, and international—operate today, and for the future.