Then & Now: 100 years of cutting through the noise

McKinsey’s first client engagement in 1926 began a century of working with leaders on some of their toughest problems. The challenge at the heart of that work has remained constant: helping leaders navigate complexity and make decisions grounded in facts.

While McKinsey had a tradition of publishing management ideas from its earliest decades, in 1964 it gave that work a dedicated platform. McKinsey Quarterly launched that year, initially bringing together management articles—some by McKinsey consultants and others by outside thinkers—that partners believed would be useful to clients.

It gave McKinsey practitioners a way to share their management thinking with leaders. The magazine gained a devoted audience and remains a presence in executive offices today, with nearly 400,000 subscribers to its digital and print editions.

Our archives show “there was real internal debate about whether publishing looked too much like advertising,” notes Raju Narisetti, McKinsey partner and leader of global publishing. “But the conviction that good ideas, freely shared, would be better for business than keeping them internal won out—long before ‘thought leadership’ became commonplace across the business world.”

But sharing ideas externally was only part of the challenge: Much of the knowledge emerging from McKinsey’s client work remained within individual teams and offices.

Another step change came in 1977, when Senior Partner Fred Gluck brought together colleagues from across the firm to connect and advance strategy thinking emerging from client work. The group introduced internal papers and seminars to develop and share those ideas more systematically—an approach that eventually became a model for knowledge development across other areas of the firm.

As that body of knowledge grew, so did the ways McKinsey shared it. In 1990, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, and David Wessels gave leaders a rigorous approach to making capital allocation and investment decisions and remains, in its eighth print edition, a trusted textbook and guide today. The McKinsey Global Institute was also founded that year to provide rigorous, independent analysis of the forces shaping business, economies, and society.

Through publishing, McKinsey could make its broader expertise and research available to a much wider audience of leaders.

“We have this privilege of spending time with some of the highest-performing CEOs in the world, across industries and geographies,” says Carolyn Dewar, McKinsey senior partner and coauthor of CEO Excellence and A CEO for All Seasons. “Publishing gives us a way to bring together lessons and perspectives from that broader body of experience and make them available to leaders everywhere. In a way, it allows one generation of leaders to apprentice the next.”

Dewar has seen that knowledge put to use: Readers have approached her with dog-eared copies of her books filled with notes and Post-its. “They’ve basically made the book into their own workbook,” she says.

In 1996, McKinsey brought its publishing online with the launch of its website, giving leaders around the world access to the firm’s insights.

When the COVID-19 pandemic made digital publishing even more central to its work, McKinsey expanded the breadth and variety of its content to help businesses navigate uncharted territory. Podcasts, interactive experiences, newsletters, and social platforms gave leaders more ways to engage with the firm’s thinking. The Quarterly’s Five Fifty format, for example, allows readers to choose between a five-minute briefing and a deeper 50-minute exploration. In 2023, McKinsey Quarterly’s digital edition went live, expanding free access to the best of the firm’s thinking to hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Podcasts allow McKinsey experts and guests to explore ideas in greater detail and nuance, through longer conversations that also make room for personal experiences. For Brooke Weddle, McKinsey senior partner and cohost of the podcast McKinsey Talks Talent, that value often extends beyond the episode.

“What I’ve loved about the podcast is seeing the conversations continue,” she says. “A CHRO [chief human resources officer] heard our discussion on agentic organizations and asked to meet and explore what those ideas could mean for her organization. That’s when you know an idea has connected with a challenge a leader is trying to solve in practice.”

Gen AI has opened another way to access the firm’s knowledge. In 2025, the firm introduced Ask McKinsey, a public-facing chatbot built on its internal AI platform, Lilli, that provides direct, cited answers grounded in McKinsey’s published research.

That easier access comes with its own challenge, Dewar says. “The blessing and the curse of AI is that you’re deluged with insights. That makes it even more important to have sources that are well reasoned, balanced, and willing to give you the hard truth.”

Next: Moving toward real-time insights

As information becomes more abundant, leaders will expect more from the insights they rely on—including greater relevance to their roles, industries, and priorities.

McKinsey aims to have its expertise meet leaders wherever they are, whether they’re asking an AI assistant, watching a short video, or looking for actionable insights in real time.

“For most of our history, the bar McKinsey set for its publishing was: ‘Is this the smartest, most distinctive insight on a business topic?’” says Raju. “Today, a business leader reading our work should see examples of applied impact of our knowledge while also finding what to do differently in their own workplace. Increasingly, we are looking to close the gap between a McKinsey insight and a McKinsey answer.”