Page 123 - The McKinsey Mind

04 (083-102B) chapter 4 1/29/02 4:50 PM Page 98

98 The McKinsey Mind

for the client. Does your client have the skills, systems, structures,
and staff to do what is required? Will outside forces—competitors,
suppliers, customers, regulators—take actions that will nullify the
effects of your strategy? If you’ve planned your analysis correctly
in the first place, you should be able to answer these questions
before you make your recommendation.
At a level below that of grand strategy, you should also con-
sider whether your analysis and recommendations will be under-
standable to the organization as a whole. We will examine this
issue with regard to the actual packaging of your message in Chap-
ter 5, but your analysis itself, in most instances, should be under-
standable to outsiders. The main reason is that by making your
analysis accessible to those who have to decide on and implement
it, you will make it easier for them to support it. Paul Kenny dis-
covered that principle at GlaxoSmithKline:

A lot of the models that we use for analyzing diseases are
overly complex: they are multimegabyte, hundreds of pages,
or interlocking Excel spreadsheets. You wouldn’t believe
some of the ones I’ve inherited. I’ve had a two-megabyte
model linking with another model linking with another
model, and you’d look at one of these things and have no
idea how to work your way through it. One of the principles
that I learned at McKinsey that I always apply when build-
ing any sort of model is to keep it simple, keep it focused,
keep it brief. As a result, I typically do one-page models, and
I try to keep them simple and transparent, so that the audi-
ence can see the mechanics rather than getting lost in the
detail. You don’t lose much by leaving out that detail either;
on the contrary, you can focus on the key drivers and see
what is happening.