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xii Introduction

By necessity, The McKinsey Way was more descriptive than
prescriptive. With The McKinsey Mind, we take the opposite tack.
Whereas The McKinsey Way dealt with what McKinsey does, The
McKinsey Mind shows you how to apply McKinsey techniques in
your career and organization. To accomplish this, we build on the
knowledge base of The McKinsey Way but offer a different per-
spective, as we shall explain later in this Introduction. At this
point, however, we want to assure you that if you haven’t read The
McKinsey Way, you need not read it in order to understand or
profit from The McKinsey Mind.* In fact, we even provide sum-
maries of the relevant lessons from The McKinsey Way at the start
of each section of this book, as well as a list of where to find them
in Appendix B.
Anyone can use the problem-solving and management tech-
niques described in The McKinsey Way (and The McKinsey Mind);
you don’t have to be in (or even from) the Firm. We also recog-
nize that McKinsey is a unique organization. Its consultants can
call on resources not usually available to executives in other com-
panies. Its flat hierarchy allows junior consultants to make deci-
sions and express their ideas in ways that would be impossible in
more-stratified workplaces. And when working with clients, the
Firm’s consultants generally have a freedom of access and action
unavailable to most executives. With these thoughts in mind, we
realized that to take The McKinsey Way to the next level, we had
to adapt it to organizations that don’t enjoy McKinsey’s peculiar
advantages.
Fortunately, we did not have to look far for inspiration in this
regard. In researching this book, we relied on interviews with and
questionnaires from more than 75 McKinsey alumni who have

*One of your authors, specifically Ethan Rasiel, would be very happy if, having read this
book, you decided to buy the The McKinsey Way as well.