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6 The McKinsey Mind

standard rule that once a day is better than twice a day. It’s
easier for people to take, so ultimately there’s a market-
driven push to develop the once-a-day dosage. He has pre-
sented this as a binary decision: either we invest in it, or we
don’t. But the idea of thinking through the various options
that might really be possible in a MECE way, opening out all
the possibilities and then considering or rejecting them inde-
pendently, hasn’t really occurred to him.
In fact, there are a number of options, including launch-
ing as a twice-a-day formulation, getting through a lot of the
development risk that way, then moving to a once-a-day for-
mulation once the drug has proved efficacious and mar-
ketable. Taking the all-or-nothing approach may not
necessarily be the best way to create value; the incremental
sales may not be worth the incremental costs and risks.

Between inappropriate thinking processes and the complete
absence of structured thought, there appears to be a lot of room for
someone with a McKinsey Mind to add value.
Use structure to strengthen your thinking. In all sorts of
places—whether huge corporations, new economy start-ups, or
even nonbusiness organizations such as nonprofits and govern-
ment agencies—McKinsey-ites have been able to apply structured
thinking in ways that allow them to add value to their organiza-
tions. For example, making strategic decisions requires under-
standing the capabilities of your organization and how to utilize
those capabilities to maximize performance. That’s what Jim Ben-
nett did during his tenure as chairman of retail banking at Key
Corp.:

I became chair of the retail bank at a time when we really
needed to grow our operation. It was a third of the company,
and we had to grow at 10 percent per year for the rest of the
company to do well. I had to determine whether that was