“My favorite moment was almost the last day of the study, at an offsite retreat, when I overheard two women talking. They did not realize I was there. One said to the other that she had been so frustrated she had literally written her letter of resignation, but this day had changed her mind. She felt like everything was going to be fixed and everything was going to be okay.”
“The team was fairly large, but we had a lot of fun; we went bowling and everybody had nicknames, and it was like a family.”
“At an offsite retreat, one client group took a process with 10 steps and cut it down to three. Instead of sending work back to vendors, they decided to fix it themselves. It had a tremendous impact on me, because it made me realize that the answers lie in the questions I ask, and in the way I can help other people think about a problem. The folks who are working in that environment have the answer somewhere; it’s just buried under stuff like ‘we have always done it this way’ or ‘that’s not my area.’ ”
“I was interviewing the editor and was in the editing suite with dancing imagery all around the screen. He said, ‘Do you want to see what I just did?’ He turned on all these surround sounds, and the screens are going and the colors are so bright and the animals are so fantastic, and I was thinking, ‘I cannot believe this cool stuff. He is showing cool stuff that is going to be on TV in a few months that no one else has seen.’ ”
“The McKinsey team tried to do a cultural event together - at least once a month. We went to baseball games. We went to the theater. We went to a documentary film festival. Things like that made the project more fun.”