34
131
Working with Clients
On an engagement for a large New York bank, my team
worked with a client team staffed with senior managers from var
ious departments within the client organization: lending, investing,
back office, and so on. Our member from the back office was a
man I’ll call Hank.
Hank was, shall we say, a diamond in the rough. He stood 6'4"
tall and looked like a former football player who had let himself
go—which, in fact, he was. His ties never matched his shirts and he
invariably had food stains on his suit coat. Also, Hank knew his
area of the bank inside and out and was probably as smart as any
member of the McKinsey team.
Hank didn’t want to work with McKinsey. He thought that the
Firm peddled an expensive line of baloney to credulous clients and
left the employees to clean up afterward He didn’t want to be on
the client team—he had real work to do. Still, his boss had assigned
him to the team, so he showed up every day, and stubbornly
refused to contribute. In short, Hank was useless.
How do you handle a Hank, or someone who is just too dumb
or incompetent to do the work required of him? As a first (and eas
iest) tactic, you can try to trade the liability out of your team and
get somebody better.
Trading doesn’t always work, however; there might be no one
better available and you’re stuck with your own Hank. In that
case, you have to deal with Hank. Work around him. Give him a
discrete section of the work that he can do; make sure it is neither
critical to the project nor impossible for anyone else on the team to
do. You’ll have to rely on the other members of the team pick up
the slack.
For all his faults, Hank was better than Carlos. A superslick
operator (BA, Oxford; MBA, Harvard) from Argentina, Carlos
was the leader of the client team and our main liaison with the
most senior management at the client. He was also a saboteur. Car
29
132
Selling Solutions
los had the patronage of a board-level faction within the client
company that did not want McKinsey there; these board members
felt they knew which direction McKinsey would recommend and
they didn’t like it.
Carlos subtly but actively prevented us from getting our job
done. He sent us down blind alleys; he bad-mouthed us to the
board behind our backs; he sabotaged us during presentations. We
quickly realized that Carlos was not our friend.
Handling a Carlos, or any hostile client team member, is trick
ier than dealing with a Hank. Again, the best tactic is to trade the
saboteur out of your team, but that’s usually not feasible. If you
have a Carlos on board, it’s because someone powerful in the orga
nization wants him there. The next best solution is to work around
spies and saboteurs. Make use of their talents where you can and
keep sensitive information out of their hands when possible. If you
know who is behind the spy, find out what the ring leader’s agenda
is—maybe you can use that to your advantage when it comes time
to sell your solution.
In our case, we had to leave Carlos to our ED, who had the
political skill and muscle to handle him. Even then, Carlos
remained a thorn in our side throughout the engagement.
Liability clients needn’t be a disaster. Sometimes, you can
even polish the rough diamonds. In Hank’s case, after several
weeks of working together, we managed to bond him to the team
and got him to understand and, at least partially, buy into the
McKinsey way of problem solving. In the end, he did contribute
to our solution.
30
133
Working with Clients
ENGAGE THE CLIENT IN THE PROCESS
If the client doesn’t support you, your project will stall. Keep
your clients engaged by keeping them involved.
To succeed as a management consultant or a business trou
bleshooter you must keep your client—be it your boss or the man
agement of an organization that has hired you from the
outside—engaged in the problem-solving process. Being engaged in
the process means supporting your efforts, providing resources as
needed, and caring about the outcome. With engagement thus
defined, it is hard to imagine how any project could succeed with
out an engaged client.
The first step in keeping your clients engaged is to understand
their agenda. Clients will support you only if they think your
efforts contribute to their interests. Remember that their interests
may change over time. Frequent contact and regular updates—
even if it’s just by memo—will help you keep in touch with your
clients and keep your projects “top of mind” for them. Get on a
client’s calendar up front. Schedule progress meetings with tenta
tive topics; if you need to reschedule, do it later.
Early “wins” (see “Pluck the Low-Hanging Fruit” in Chapter
3) will generate enthusiasm for your project—the bigger, the better.
They give your clients something to sink their teeth into and make
them feel included in the problem-solving process. The long-run
returns on your work will be much greater if your clients feel that
they were involved in reaching the solution and that they under
stood it, rather than being handed the solution neatly wrapped and
tied with pink ribbon.
This brings us to one of the ironies of consulting. If you are an
27
134
Selling Solutions
outside consultant, you will never get credit for your best work.
If your solution is truly effective, the client organization will claim
it for its own. Suzanne Tosini saw that firsthand as an associate
at McKinsey:
I developed a huge cashflow model that the client was going
to use to evaluate real estate acquisitions. I had spent months
on this project; it had been a Herculean effort. The client
team members did some work on it, but essentially it was my
model. When the time came to roll out the model, at a train
ing program for the senior people in the acquisitions depart
ment, the client team members got up and talked about the
model that they developed. I was sitting in the back and I
thought, “Hey, that’s my model.” But then I realized that it
was much better for them to think that it was theirs. It was
not McKinsey’s model, it was not Suzanne’s model—it was
their model.
In truth, that’s not such a bad thing.
GET BUY-IN THROUGHOUT THE
ORGANIZATION
If your solution is to have a lasting impact on your client, you
have to get support for it at all levels of the organization.
If you come up with a brilliant solution, structure it logically,
and present it to your client with clarity and precision, then your
job is done and you can go home, right? Wrong! If you want to
create real change that has lasting impact, you must get accep
30
135
Working with Clients
tance for your solution from everyone in the organization that
it affects.
For instance, suppose you tell your board of directors that they
can boost widget profitability by reorganizing the widget sales
force and streamlining the widget production process. Your argu
ment is compelling; the board ratifies your suggestion; champagne
corks pop and cigars ignite. One slight hitch remains: What do the
sales force and the production-line workers think about all this?
If they don’t like your ideas, if they put up a fight, then your solu
tion will not be implemented. It will end up on the great remainder
shelf of business, right next to the Betamax.
To avoid this dire fate, you must sell your solution to every
level of the organization, from the board on down. After you’ve
presented to the board, present to middle-level managers. They will
probably have day-to-day responsibility for implementing, so let
them know what’s going on. Don’t neglect the people on the line,
either. The changes you recommend may have the greatest effect on
them, so their buy-in is vital to a successful implementation.
Finally, serial presentations give the junior members of your team
a good opportunity to hone their presentation skills.
Tailor your approach to your audience. Don’t make the same
presentation to, say, the fleet drivers as you would to the CEO.
At the same time, respect your audience. Explain what is being
done and why. Show people the entire picture. Let them know
how their jobs fit into the organization as a whole. They’re not
stupid; they’ll understand. Treat them with respect (remember, a
lot of the time they don’t get any) and they will respond positively
most of the time.
27
136
Selling Solutions
BE RIGOROUS ABOUT IMPLEMENTATION
Making change happen takes a lot of work. Be rigorous and
thorough. Make sure someone takes responsibility for getting
the job done.
Implementing recommendations for change is a big subject. Whole
books can be (and have been) written on it. I will limit myself here
to explaining a few ground rules that McKinsey consultants have
learned for implementing change.
To implement major change, you must operate according to a plan.
Your implementation plan should be specific about what will happen
and when—at the lowest possible level of detail. Don’t just write:
We must reorganize the widget sales force.
Instead, write:
We must reorganize the widget sales force.
• Hold training sessions for all sales regions (Start: March
1. Responsibility: Tom.)
• Reallocate sales staff to new sales teams by customer type.
(Start: March 15. Responsibility: Dick.)
• Take new sales teams to call on top 20 customers. (Start:
April 1. Responsibility: Harriet.)
One former EM gave a no-holds-barred recipe for a successful
implementation plan:
State what needs to be done, and when it needs to be done
by, at such a level of detail and clarity that a fool can under
stand it.
23
137
Working with Clients
Enough said.
Make specific people responsible for implementing the solu
tion. Be careful about whom you pick. Make sure people have the
skills necessary to get the job done. Enforce your deadlines and
don’t allow exceptions unless absolutely necessary.
The right point person can make implementation a very smooth
process. If that person is not going to be you, make sure you pick
someone who can “kick butt and take names.” At one McKinsey
client, an international bank, the managers chose a rather frighten
ing fellow named Lothar to implement a major change program in
their back-office processing. Lothar, who looked and sounded a bit
like Arnold Schwarzenegger, had a very simple technique for getting
the job done. Using the detailed McKinsey implementation plan,
he assigned specific tasks to members of his team. Every two weeks
the team would meet, and anybody who had not accomplished his
or her tasks for the period had to explain the failure to the entire
group. After the first meeting, when a few of the team members had
undergone a grilling from Lothar, no one ever missed a deadline.
When, after a few months, the McKinsey EM rang Lothar for
an update, he replied, “Everyone talks about how tough it is to
implement. Seems pretty easy to me.”
1
This page intentionally left blank.
11
PA RT FO UR
SURVIVING
AT
M
C
KINSEY
Copyright 1999 Ethan M. Rasiel. Click here for Terms of Use.
18
In Part Four, you will learn a few tricks for surviving
not just at McKinsey, but in any high-pressure organi
zation. Whether you’re trying to maintain your sanity
while traveling for weeks at a time, trying to climb the
greasy pole to success in your organization, or just trying
to have a life while working 100 hours per week, there’s
something in Part Four that will help. As a bonus, I’ll
also shed a little light on the McKinsey recruiting
process and even give a few tips for those of you who
would like to try to join the Firm yourselves.
Contrary to what you might imagine after reading
this far, there is more to life at McKinsey than work.
Then again, there’s not all that much more, which is
why Part Four is so short.
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
