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What type of consulting does McKinsey do?
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Can you describe your work for clients in practical terms?
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What kind of expertise do McKinsey consultants bring to specific engagements?
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What criteria does McKinsey use when accepting studies?
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What type of consulting does McKinsey do?
We are a management consulting firm that helps corporate, nonprofit, and government organization clients achieve lasting and substantial improvements in performance. We concentrate on matters of concern to top management.
Our work focuses on strategy initiatives, major redesign programs, IT-enabled business solutions, mergers and acquisitions, and performance and productivity improvements.
We do not offer any of the following types of services: auditing, legal, or political advice.
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Can you describe your work for clients in practical terms?
For each project, we put together a team of three to five consultants who work full-time for the client for the duration of the study, usually three to four months. The team is led by an engagement manager, who provides "thought leadership" for the group and is responsible for the day-to-day planning and distribution of tasks. The team is also aided by a team assistant, who provides secretarial and administrative support.
We usually include the client's managers on our teams, often working side-by-side with them in doing detailed analytical work. This helps ensure their commitment to the team's recommendations, as well as building their own skills and knowledge for the benefit of the entire organization.
To clarify and focus our thinking, we regularly step back from the detailed analysis and think about its implications. This allows us to report back to the client in regular (often weekly) progress reports and bring up issues requiring senior client input.
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What kind of expertise do McKinsey consultants bring to specific engagements?
The expertise we contribute to a study runs along two main axes - the general problem solving skills our consultants apply in an engagement and the industry specific experience/knowledge with which we supplement our analyses.
We believe our unique, analytical approach to problem solving is the core asset we bring to our clients. In practice, these skills may, for example, involve our ability to handle complex financial modeling, to assess the economic value of a specific market strategy, or to structure a complex business problem into a series of simple, actionable alternatives. In order to build these skills we seek to attract people who excel at problem solving and we invest a great amount of resources in developing analytical tools and frameworks that we then apply in our client work.
Deep knowledge and an understanding of a specific sector by the McKinsey team are crucial to the full success of the study. McKinsey provides this knowledge via a group of senior consultants/industry experts who possess extensive experience in relevant fields and participate in the study full time, as team leaders, or on a part-time basis. Moreover, every McKinsey professional can draw on a network of consultants and information across the firm.
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What criteria does McKinsey use when accepting engagements?
Before accepting an assignment, we make every reasonable effort to ensure that, first, there are opportunities for significant benefits to the client, and second, that the objectives are attainable..
As a rule of thumb, we only accept studies where the potential benefit to the client is several times the amount of our fee. However, since it is not always possible to determine in advance that such conditions do in fact exist, we agree that if at any time the client decides that the expected benefits are not likely to be achieved, he/she is free to terminate the relationship. Likewise, we want to be free to withdraw from an assignment should circumstances arise that, in our judgment, make the objectives agreed upon unattainable.
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