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12 The McKinsey Mind

Widget North
Grommets
Sales America
Widget
Revenue Europe
Leasing

Acme Widget
Widgets Asia
Widgets Service
Expenses

Thrum-mats

Figure 1-1. Acme Widgets Logic Tree

fillment, etc.). This perspective could point your team in other,
potentially useful directions. Just make sure, whichever view you
take, that your logic tree is MECE, so that you miss nothing and
avoid confusion.
In a real-life example of a logic tree at work, Naras Eecham-
badi, when he went to First Union after leaving McKinsey, had to
put together the business case for his customer information man-
agement unit in order to get funding approved by the president of
the corporation:

The question boiled down to, “If we are going to produce a
return on investment for the company based on how we
build and leverage customer information, where are the
sources of revenue and profit? Where is the money going to
come from?” I came up with a MECE breakdown showing
how we could make money by adding or selling more prod-
ucts and generating more revenue from existing customers,
cutting costs to serve the existing customers, reducing the
attrition of existing customers, or being much more effec-
tive and efficient in bringing on new customers. And I was