Marvin Bower: the man who built McKinsey into a profession

If James McKinsey invented the idea of management consulting, Marvin Bower turned it into a profession.

McKinsey was just forty-eight when he died of pneumonia in 1937, leaving behind a small firm of a few dozen professionals with a handful of offices. Over the next three decades, Bower would reshape that firm into what it is today. He did it by having an obsessive vision for how a group of professionals should behave and refusing to compromise on it for sixty years.

Every McKinsey consultant who has been told to call their customers “clients,” been given a copy of Perspective on McKinsey on their first day, or felt the pressure of living up to the firm’s values is experiencing something that traces directly back to Bower. He built a culture so specific that it survived his retirement by decades and continues to shape the firm today.

A Cleveland lawyer with a different idea

Marvin Bower was born on August 1, 1903, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family moved to Cleveland when he was young, and it was there that his worldview took shape. His father, William Bower, was the deputy recorder of Cuyahoga County. He regularly took Marvin and his brother on tours of Cleveland’s industrial plants so they could see how things worked firsthand. After each visit, he’d ask the same question: “What did you learn?”

Bower worked every summer growing up: surveyor’s helper, ice deliverer, grinding-machine operator, Boy Scout camp counselor during World War I. He attended Brown University from 1921 to 1925, studying economics and psychology, and then went to Harvard Law School on his father’s advice. His father thought law was the safe choice. Between his second and third years, he married his high school sweetheart, Helen McLaughlin.

After graduating, Bower wanted desperately to join Jones, Day, the most prestigious law firm in Cleveland. He was turned down because his law school grades weren’t good enough. So he went back to school, enrolling at the Harvard Business School to strengthen his credentials. It worked. He finished in the top 5 percent of his class and finally got hired by Jones, Day in 1930.

The timing was terrible. The Depression had hit, and Bower spent his time at Jones, Day serving as secretary to committees of bondholders for eleven separate troubled companies. The creative work of restructuring failing businesses appealed to him. The legal paperwork did not. As he later recalled, he found the drafting of bond indentures and similar documents “interminably boring.”¹

He started to dream about a different kind of firm. At Jones, Day, he had watched a senior partner named Frank Ginn decline a lucrative engagement advising Bethlehem Steel on a merger. Ginn believed the assignment would compromise the firm’s independence with its other clients. Bower never forgot it. The lesson was that a professional firm’s independence was worth more than any single fee.

By 1932, Bower had an idea forming. As he wrote in Perspective on McKinsey, an internal book he published for the firm in 1978: “don’t you think there is a need for a firm that can work on business and management problems in the same professional and independent way that a law firm works on legal problems?”

A professor at Harvard Business School told him about a man in Chicago who was already building something close to that vision. His name was James O. McKinsey.

Joining Mac

Bower wrote to McKinsey and traveled to Chicago for a meeting. It was a meeting of minds. McKinsey ran a thirteen-person firm of “accountants and engineers” who were working on the kinds of business problems Bower found interesting, while the lawyers handled the rest. McKinsey made the pitch: if Bower joined, he would enjoy himself 100 percent of the time instead of just half.

In Edersheim’s biography, Helen Bower recalled the couple’s circumstances. They were living in a cold-water walk-up off Shaker Square in Cleveland when Jones, Day cut all salaries by 25 percent. They went to “a little ice cream parlor right around the corner from Shaker Square — we couldn’t afford a restaurant — and talked about what we could do.”

When Marvin finally decided to make the trip to Chicago, they couldn’t afford two train tickets and shared a single Pullman berth. Helen waited at a hotel near the station while Marvin went to meet McKinsey. As she told Edersheim:

Two hours passed. Then four, then six. I was about to go out on the street to look for Marvin’s body when he came back to the room, all smiles. “We got a job!” he shouted.

Steve Walleck, a McKinsey partner who was present when Helen told the story in 1983, wondered what young recruits would think “if they had to pay their own airfare to come for a job interview, and, instead of wining and dining them, we offered them banana splits.”²

Bower’s first day at work was November 13, 1933.

His first assignment was helping the bondholders’ committee of New York’s Savoy-Plaza Hotel come up with ideas to boost sales and reduce costs. It was a natural fit with his Depression-era experience at Jones, Day. But an early engagement for Commercial Solvents, a medium-sized chemical company, taught him a harder lesson.

Bower had the temerity to tell the company’s president that it was unfair to hold the sales manager responsible for profits when the president himself set all the prices. The president was furious. “Young man,” he roared, “I retained your firm to investigate our sales activities, not my activities. I am going to call Mr. McKinsey and ask him to remove you from the study.” McKinsey did remove him. But he also told Bower that the problem wasn’t the substance of the criticism. It was the judgment. A man half the president’s age should have consulted McKinsey first before confronting a client executive directly.

As Duff McDonald recounts in The Firm, Bower translated this into a principle that is still taught at McKinsey: deliver the bad news if you must, but deliver it properly.

The death that changed everything

By 1935, James McKinsey had turned accounting into a management tool, written the first real book on budgetary control, and built a growing practice through willpower and personal connections. Then the board of Marshall Field & Company, the giant Chicago retailer, offered him the job of chairman and chief executive to carry out the restructuring recommendations his own firm had produced. McKinsey couldn’t resist.

He told Bower to stay with the firm and promised he would return. He never did. After an exhausting tour of Marshall Field’s textile mills in the South, McKinsey returned with a severe cold that turned into pneumonia. There were no specific antibiotics for his type of pneumonia at the time. He died on November 30, 1937. He was forty-eight.

Bower was devastated. He named his third son James McKinsey Bower. As McDonald recounts, Bower wrote of his mentor: “He felt that everyone who sought success wanted criticism, and he really gave it. Most of his criticism was negative. Indeed, his praise was so occasional that it made a deep impression when it was given.”

Years later, a McKinsey director asked Bower why he had never changed the firm’s name to his own. As McDonald documents, Bower explained that after McKinsey’s death he had to convince clients to stay with a firm whose founder was gone: “I resolved right then that I would never place my successor in the same position of having to explain why his firm wasn’t named after him. So we kept Mac’s name on the door, and I’ve never regretted it.”

The personal loss was compounded by a business crisis. McKinsey had previously merged the firm with Scovell, Wellington & Company, an accounting and management engineering outfit. The merger was falling apart. The Chicago and New York partners couldn’t agree on anything. As Bower described it, the arrangement had always been “a dual shotgun marriage” that lacked the essential ingredient for success.³

What followed was a series of splits that would determine the shape of the consulting industry. By October 1938, Wellington had withdrawn from the consulting firm. By 1947, Tom Kearney’s Chicago contingent had split off to form what became A.T. Kearney. Through all of this, as I wrote in the history of strategy consulting, Bower worked to consolidate the New York and Boston offices under the McKinsey & Company name and establish the firm’s identity.

Bower and Kearney had three fundamental disagreements. First, Kearney wanted a single Chicago office, while Bower wanted a national firm with multiple offices. Second, Bower had higher standards for staff selection and development than Kearney did. And third, Kearney was indifferent to building a firm that could outlast its founders. Bower was obsessed with it.

The law firm that didn’t practice law

Once McKinsey was dead and the mergers unwound, Bower was free to build the firm he had envisioned since his days at Jones, Day. As McDonald writes, Bower molded McKinsey into the firm he had imagined as a young lawyer: an organization that enjoyed the same prestige and influence as prominent law firms but didn’t practice law.

Bower implemented it through specific decisions, most of them small, all of them consistent, repeated over decades.

Language. McKinsey had clients, not customers. Its consultants played a role, not a job. They had a practice, not a business. The firm didn’t sell, nor did it have products or markets. It didn’t negotiate with clients, as that was too adversarial. It made arrangements. It didn’t have rules. It had values. And McKinsey was not a company. It was The Firm.

Some new associates were amused when Bower corrected their language. As Bower wrote in Perspective on McKinsey, they “obviously feel that it makes no real difference. I believe that it does. The terms we use reflect the way we think, and the careful use of professional and not business language will remind us, as well as others, that we do follow a professional approach.”

Appearance. Bower enforced an unyielding dress code: dark suits, long socks, garters, and hats. He abhorred the sight of “raw flesh” between trouser cuff and sock.⁴ One consultant who worked at the firm from 1963 to 1969 remembered the protocol clearly: “Definitely long socks. And a feather on your hat only if it was barely peeking over your hat band.”⁵ In one story from firm lore, Bower spotted a flash of argyle under a young associate’s trouser cuff during a client meeting and later whipped off one of his signature blue memos on appropriate sock wear.

In 1962, McKinsey staffers gently mocked the dress code by publishing The Consultants’ Coloring Book, in which every color suggested was black or gray. Longtime partner Warren Cannon compared the look to that of “moderately well-to-do morticians.”⁶

Bower wasn’t entirely blind to the times. Three years after John F. Kennedy went hatless at his 1961 inauguration, Bower turned up at the office without one. His consultants were suspicious. As McDonald recounts, one told another: “I’d wait six weeks. It may be a trap.” It wasn’t. But the dark suits stayed until 1995, when McKinsey finally conceded business casual.

Billing. In the early 1940s, Bower shifted McKinsey away from per-diem billing and toward what the firm called “value billing.” As McDonald recounts, the logic was simple: “You cannot measure value by hours.” If the firm ran up hours that weren’t producing value, they shouldn’t charge for them. Some partners resisted. The fear that clients wouldn’t accept it turned out to be unfounded. Value billing became one of McKinsey’s most important competitive advantages, and the practice continues to this day.

One firm. Bower mandated that all consultants share in one big pool of company earnings, not just their office’s revenue. This boosted the entrepreneurial spirit within the firm, encouraged talent to move freely between offices, and sent a clear signal to clients: when you hire McKinsey, you get the full resources of the firm.

Independence. The firm’s mythology is full of stories about partners walking away from clients who wouldn’t follow their advice. Bower set the tone himself. As McDonald recounts, when Bower flew to Los Angeles to meet the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes about consulting for Paramount Pictures, Hughes’s assistant told him Hughes would come when he could. A day and a half passed. Bower called Hughes’s secretary and told her that if Hughes didn’t show by two o’clock the next afternoon, he would lose the chance to ever meet him. Hughes showed up. After the meetings, Bower concluded that Hughes was never going to listen to anyone, and walked away from what would have been a lucrative engagement.

Any one of these decisions could be dismissed as trivia. But repeated and enforced over decades, they accumulated into a culture that no other firm managed to replicate.

The defining act

Ask anyone at McKinsey what defined Bower, and they’ll tell you about what he did with his money.

In 1963, at the age of sixty, Bower could have sold his equity in McKinsey at market value or taken the firm public, as many of his contemporaries did. George Fry & Associates and Barrington Associates both cashed out in the 1950s. McKinsey’s competitor Cresap, McCormick and Paget sold itself twice, first to Citicorp in 1970 and then to Towers Perrin in 1982.

Bower sold his shares back to the firm at book value.

Book value was a fraction of what they were worth on the open market. By selling at book value, Bower ensured that younger partners could afford to buy in without mortgaging their houses. He sent the message that McKinsey would be a self-perpetuating institution, not a vehicle for personal enrichment.

As quoted in McDonald’s The Firm, Bower’s son Dick recalled the moment:

“Let me just say there was shock on people’s faces when he told us that he was selling his shares back to McKinsey at book value. It felt unbelievable, to tell you the truth. But that was Marvin for you.”

Bower gave up a guaranteed fortune. And every subsequent McKinsey partner has been expected to do the same. The practice set McKinsey permanently apart from firms where founding partners cash out and leave the next generation to fend for themselves.

Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, one of McKinsey’s first female partners and Bower’s biographer, wrote in McKinsey’s Marvin Bower that Bower’s decision reflected a core belief: a professional service firm that also had to answer to public shareholders could never consistently put its clients’ interests first. He didn’t believe those incentives could coexist.

The repeater

One of Bower’s least appreciated qualities was also, according to McDonald, the main reason for his success: a willingness to repeat himself.

Lou Gerstner, the former McKinsey consultant who went on to lead RJR Nabisco and IBM, observed that Bower “never deviated from his message.”⁷ James Gorman, the former McKinsey consultant who became CEO of Morgan Stanley, was more direct about it: “Being a great leader is often less a matter of eloquence and more a matter of repetition and consistency. What a great quality. I wish I had more of it.”⁸

The obsessiveness extended to everything. As McDonald recounts, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who knew Bower well, once remarked that if you sent an engraved wedding invitation to Bower, he would return it to you “with revisions.”

Bower wrote the firm’s first Basic Training Guide in 1937. It included everything from expense protocols to how to write a proper letter to a client. Every consultant was required to read at least fifteen books a year and submit book reports.⁹ The guide suggested what could only be described as a rudimentary speed-reading technique to get through the required reading load.

He wrote Perspective on McKinsey in 1978, at the age of seventy-five, as an internal book for McKinsey partners and consultants. He wrote The Will to Manage in 1966, which became one of McGraw-Hill’s best-selling business books. In 1997, at ninety-four, he published The Will to Lead. The themes across all four works were the same: professionalism, independence, client service, values.

He spent fifty years saying the same things over and over. By the time he retired, the message was so deeply embedded that new consultants absorbed it without ever meeting him.

As I’ve written about in how to build a culture of excellence, excellence can never be proclaimed from the top. It must be emergent out of a strong process and culture. Bower understood this before anyone was writing about organizational culture. He built the systems, artifacts, and behavioral norms that made the values self-reinforcing.

The firm after Bower

Bower stepped down as managing director in 1967 but continued to work at McKinsey for another quarter century, formally retiring at the age of eighty-nine in 1992. During that time, the firm grew from a few hundred consultants to thousands, opened offices on every continent, and became the institution it is today.

But the firm’s story after Bower is complicated.

McKinsey was Enron’s outside adviser during the Houston energy company’s rise and fall. McKinsey emerged from the scandal largely unscathed while Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, a former McKinsey consultant, went to prison. In the 2009 insider-trading investigation of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, two figures convicted were ex-McKinsey: former director Anil Kumar and former managing director Rajat Gupta, who was found guilty of passing client secrets.

Bower’s vision was that the firm’s values would act as a self-correcting mechanism. That clients’ interests would always come first. That professionalism meant something higher than ethics, because professionalism encompassed a broader set of responsibilities than merely acting within the bounds of morality.

Whether that vision survived intact is a question that people who care about McKinsey still argue about. What’s clear is that the vision existed in the first place, that one person held it with total conviction for six decades, and that its effects are still visible in how the firm operates.

What Bower got right

When I arrived at McKinsey in 2008, one of the first things that happened was watching a thirty-minute video of Marvin Bower talking about the firm’s values. On your first day. Before you do any work, before you meet your team, you sit and listen to a man who retired decades earlier explain what kind of place he was trying to build.

You’re also handed a copy of Perspective on McKinsey, Bower’s internal book that isn’t available to the public. It’s not the most beautifully written book in the world, but it is a clearly and powerfully communicated vision for what a lasting consulting firm might look like. What surprised me was how directly I could connect the values, principles, and stories in that book to the day-to-day actions I was seeing at the firm, fifty years after Bower wrote them.

And then there was Values Day. Every June, the entire firm takes a full day off from client work to talk about the values. Not a half-day workshop. Not a town hall with a keynote. A full day where teams sit together and discuss what the values mean and whether the firm is living up to them.

What still amazes me is how seriously people took it. Other companies talk about values. At McKinsey, people actually lived them and held themselves to a high standard. You’d look around the room and think: I’ll be part of this, because I know I’ll do the best work of my life here. That feeling traces directly back to Bower.

Bower died on January 22, 2003, at the age of ninety-nine, in Delray Beach, Florida. When he was elected to the Business Hall of Fame, he said: “It must be a mistake. I’m not a businessman. I am a professional.”¹⁰

He meant it. That single distinction, the insistence that what McKinsey did was a profession and not a business, shaped everything else. The language, the billing, the dress code, the ownership structure, the values day, the institutional humility, the expectation that every partner would sell their shares at book value when they left.

Most founders try to build a company. Bower tried to build a profession. McKinsey is still around, still attracting talent, and still arguing about its values ninety years after he walked through the door. Whether you think the firm has lived up to his vision or fallen short of it, the fact that the argument still happens on his terms is the most Bower thing about McKinsey.