Page 30 - The McKinsey Mind

01 (001-030B) chapter 01 1/29/02 4:48 PM Page 8

8 The McKinsey Mind

effective these same techniques can be in the short-of-cash, short-
of-time, short-of-people environment of a New Economy start-up,
as Omowale Crenshaw discovered at Africa.com, a Web portal for
the African continent:

We had to survey the marketplace and decide how to
develop products and services for our particular target mar-
kets: African ex-pats and the “Africa-interested.” That
meant analyzing a number of industries such as African
wine, or African home-decorative accessories, furniture, and
art, and making a decision as to which of them would be suf-
ficiently attractive to our target markets. By allowing us to
come to grips quickly with the market sizes, the competitive
environment, the key players, etc., the structural frameworks
that I learned at the Firm helped us decide which of these
markets made sense for us.

Structuring your thinking can add value outside the confines of
the business world. Sylvia Mathews was deputy chief of staff to
President Clinton, so she should know:

Problem solving at the federal government level tends to be a
little more complicated than in the business world, in that it
involves things that are less tangible than valuation of com-
panies, profit, loss, etc. But the same techniques still apply.
When I was in charge of the State of the Union production in
1996, in August (the President delivers the State of the Union
address in January), I started by doing something that I
called the Pillars Project. It covered every area of the State
of the Union and put all our policy examples together in the
same framework and with the same approach to show what
we were going to try to achieve over the second four years.
We then assembled them into documents that the President
and Vice President could respond to over their vacations.