This became a major piece of the firm's identity: Narrow expertise is for chumps; we do vision.
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The Firm | 
This became a major piece of the firm's identity: Narrow expertise is for chumps; we do vision.
CEOs like this [non-disclosure policy] because they don't want competitors, or anyone else, to know they need outside help. McKinsey in content to let credit for any success accrue to the client. As the journalist and biographer Rober Caro once observed: 'You can get a lot of good done in this world if you're willing to let someone else take the credit for it.' That's what McKinsey does: It *sells the credit* to its clients. And it's a good idea.
Most people don't strategize alone, however. And you certainly don't strategize with your competitor. Enter, once again, the disinterested consultant.
Consult recruits '[Flashman's] eyes [were] blue and prominent and unwinking---they looked out on the world with that serenity which marks the nobleman whose uttermost ancestor was a born nobleman, too. It is the look that your *parvenu* would give half his fortune for, that unrufflable gaze of the spoiled child of fortune who knows with unshakeable certainty that he is right and that the world is exactly ordered for his satisfaction and pleasure.'
On McKinsey's in-the-dark PR strategy: 'Management consulting is too complex an art to be explained effectively in the limited space of an advertisement,' wrote journalist Hal Higdon in The Business Healers. 'About all a consulting firm can talk about effectively is the extremely high competence of its personnel. The effect might be somewhat similar to the Roman Catholic Church's taking two pages of Life [Magazine] to advertise God.'
“Into the breach stepped a new economic actor who was neither capital nor labor: the professional manager. Gradually, he replaced the robber baron as the steward of American business...This was the beginning of a decades-long separation of ownership from control in corporate America, and the consultant was an able ally to the professional manager's job. Thus began the era of managerial capitalism.“
This is the interesting stuff, folks: context.
“Of [James McKinsey after his passing], Bower wrote: 'He felt that everyone who sought success wanted criticism, and he really gave it. Most of his criticism was negative. Indeed, his praise was so occasional that it made a deep impression when it was given. This approach appealed to me. (I have found that when praise is evenly balanced with criticism, only the praise is remembered.)' “