1960s
The first issue of the McKinsey Quarterly was published in 1964. In the beginning, it was primarily a vehicle for reprints of management articles—some by McKinsey consultants, and some by external thought leaders—that the firm’s partners thought their clients would like to receive as a bundle. Soon, though, the Quarterly began publishing original management content.
In 1966, just two years after the Quarterly got started, then–managing director Marvin Bower wrote The Will to Manage. Management thinkers had been writing books for decades, dating back at least to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. But Bower’s book, like Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, which appeared a year later, was unusual at the time for taking a rigorously top-management approach that spoke directly to CEOs and other senior corporate leaders. Two chapters of The Will to Manage—“Company philosophy: The way we do things around here” and “Helping people pull together”—subsequently appeared in the Quarterly, as did a third article, “Developing leaders in a business,” which was excerpted from one of Bower’s later books, The Will to Lead.