Inside the making of our film on reinvention

Our passion for helping our clients reinvent led us to make a short film on the topic, which was released a couple of weeks ago. “This video is meant to celebrate the successes of our clients’ truly transformative work,” explains Peter Dahlström, who heads McKinsey’s communications and is one of the leaders of Digital McKinsey, “and also to explain how McKinsey is different today than many people might expect.”

In this “behind the scenes” film, we go on set to talk to the film’s creators about how it was made and what reinvention means to both our clients and to our firm.

McKinsey has a long history of helping clients make significant, transformative change in their organizations. Today, partnering with our clients to reinvent themselves is more important than ever, and doing that today requires a lot more different tools and working models than it used to. In fact, more than 50 percent of the work we do today did not exist 10 years ago, like digital labs, analytics, implementation, design, restructuring, or our software solutions.

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Peter Dahlstrom, senior partner, on set with the creative agency that produced the film
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“Digitization is remaking almost every aspect of our personal and work lives, raising our expectations about customer experiences, and bringing a new transparency across the spectrum of products, customer service, and pricing,” says Peter. “Businesses are under pressure to cut costs and improve services, and to do that means they need to reinvent the way they do business, the kinds of people they hire, and how their organizations and processes are structured.”

“One of the things we are doing that is different and new for McKinsey is quickly developing solutions, prototyping, and building them with clients through an iterative and agile process,” says vice president of experience design Kwame Nyanning. “The average person doesn’t expect to have a conversation with McKinsey on a Monday and at the end of the week have something in their hands. And it’s this capability to rapidly demonstrate what's possible—and then scale it— that is so unique to us,” he adds.

The “star” of the film is a monolithic sculpture that has been programmed to shoot glass spheres into the air with such precision that they create an image to represent the featured client cases—including an insurer, a mining company, and a government.

“It’s a conceptual way of illustrating the reinvention work we've been doing with our clients,” explains Peter. “For me, the physicality of it reflects the new McKinsey—it required engineering, design, and hands-on operational work to build it.”

Interested to learn more about our reinvention? Take a look here.

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