Wiley McKinsey's Marvin Bower

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.In appearing before the board theydescribed the approach, they told them about the work that had beendone during these three days, and they indicated that they were readyto sign a contract.Well, they had had some unfortunate experiencewith other consultants and they wanted to be very careful about sign-ing the contract and so our fellows said to them, You don t have tosign a contract with McKinsey & Company. They were quite sur-prised about that.They were more surprised about the fee.(Laughter)And Peter, who of course is fluent in German, heard one of the direc-tors turn to another on the side and he said, I suppose there are feesthat high but I didn t know it before. (Laughter)So they decided that they would put themselves in our hands, andtherefore the professional approach had great value.In the first place,11131_Edersheim_bapp03_f.qxd 2/10/04 3:21 PM Page 268268 McKinsey & Co.Partners Conference, 1964they had a study that was much more interesting to us and much moreimportant to them; we had it at a high fee; and we had it without acontract which was much to their liking and to ours, because if we arepursuing a professional approach and they lose confidence in us or wedon t think that they re going to act on our recommendations, we d liketo be free to discontinue the work.Now the third requirement for success in the future, it seems to me,is the perceptive and conceptual thinking that can detect client oppor-tunities and needs and can detect external and internal forces affectingthe firm you saw a diagram on these forces last night and can capi-talize on these factors through developing improved and new servicesand better firm management methods and program.That s what a lotof this conference has been about, how to do all those things, and wehave Warren Cannon to thank for the format of this.I believe that thisconference has been very well conceived and every session that I was inwas well prepared and well presented; so it has helped us in the devel-opment of new services and in the improvement of existing services.This firm has a set of concepts and beliefs that as Tom Watson saysought to be immutable, but if we get rigid and we feel that everythingought to remain the same, why then we re going to be in trouble.Sothis requirement says that we must be perceptive to changes going onabout us, we must be perceptive to things that are going on in the firm,and we must adjust our services to clients to meet the external factorsand we must adjust the policies, procedures and programs in leadership,personnel and everything else to the things that are going on in thefirm because we can t serve our clients well unless we have people in thefirm who are productive and the right people to do that job.And we have been sensitive to the external factors and you haveheard some client names of the 147 we re serving currently that couldn thave been client names a while back.In the insurance field, you hearda number of names and the figures behind those names are big.Thiscame about because we had leadership in Dick Neuschel and JohnGarrity to be sensitive to the first insurance study that we had quite bychance and to capitalize on that to apply one after another good piecesof work to the insurance field.Now in the railroad field we have thesame thing happening.We were sensitive to the opportunities for work11131_Edersheim_bapp03_f.qxd 2/10/04 3:21 PM Page 269McKinsey & Co.Partners Conference, 1964 269in the railroad field, and Bob Hall had the sensitivity to see the oppor-tunities in the railroad field and he immersed himself in several railroadstudies the Southern, the Reading, the B&O and C&O and he wasproviding at the time his career was so abruptly terminated a highdegree of leadership in the railroad field.This leadership which PhilBabb shared has been carried on by Phil Babb, but let me give yousomething that is quite interesting to me about Bob Hall.This is a memorandum that I received the day after Bob died.Itmust have been mailed from the airport from the date on it, and itshowed his continuing interest in the railroad field [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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