In the next 10 year, McKinsey passed on the company concept to every partner and colleague, organized all branches into a close cooperative whole, broke the geographical division within the company, and emphasized that all employees worked for the whole company no matter where they were; And every customer, no matter which branch provides services to him, the whole company is responsible for it; Profits are distributed throughout the company, not borne by local branches, so as to ensure the unity of the company and enhance its cohesion.
McKinsey & Company achieved rapid development in 1950s and became the leading consulting industry in the United States, and made full preparations for its subsequent expansion in the international market in 1960s. By the end of 1960s, McKinsey & Company had become a large consulting company with a high reputation in European and North American markets. Since the early 1970s, changes in the internal and external environment have led to difficulties for McKinsey & Company. During 65,438+00 years, there were many unfavorable factors in the external environment and the company. For example, the oil crisis in the early 1970s led to the economic recession in Europe and America, which also brought about a sharp drop in the company's business volume. The company's management of customers is becoming more and more complicated; New competitors such as Boston Consulting Group continue to compete for McKinsey customers from their locked market segments, and so on. Many internal and external troubles make McKinsey's self-confidence and satisfaction seem to disappear overnight, replaced by self-blame, self-doubt and denial.
Only then did McKinsey's top management realize that the economic recession in Europe and North America is not just a cyclical economic crisis, and it is useless to passively hope for economic recovery. We must actively get rid of the influence of depression on the company's business. In this situation, McKinsey & Company convened the company's most elite consulting experts to form a special research committee to analyze the macroeconomic problems at that time and the company's way out.
197 1 in April, the Committee studying the company's goals and missions pointed out in an analysis report that the predicament of McKinsey & Company was largely due to the rapid development of the company in the early stage. In their view, in the previous stage, the company expanded too fast geographically and constantly expanded into new business areas, which made the company too busy to take care of improving its own business level, resulting in insufficient development potential of the company. The report also pointed out that McKinsey & Company used to accept too many routine consulting services and wasted time on many trivial tasks, so it was difficult to learn more new experiences and skills from each new customer. Lack of consulting tasks that are difficult to improve the company's level and strength.
In addition, the report also pointed out that the professional structure of McKinsey & Company is not reasonable. Although most consultants are effective problem solvers, most of them are just "generalists"; In the process of solving practical problems, customers often need very professional knowledge in this field, and there are very few "expert" consulting expert companies that can adapt to this demand and have in-depth, comprehensive and specific professional knowledge in a certain field. This leads to the company's lack of pertinence in solving customer problems in specific fields, and it is difficult to put forward in-depth and professional research, analysis and consulting programs. This defect points out the adjustment direction for McKinsey & Company in talent reserve and development. The company began to attract some professional experts with specific industry background knowledge, and together with the generalist consulting experts, formed the company's "T" talent structure. In the nine years since the report on the company's goals and strategic adjustment direction was put forward, five company leaders have worked hard to achieve the goals set forth in the report. During this period, the competition between McKinsey and two consulting companies in Boston became increasingly fierce. Their business methods are very different: McKinsey relies on local offices or branches to develop good customer relationships to expand its business. Usually, the consulting service of this kind of business is also done locally. On the other hand, Boston Consulting Group has established a highly centralized intellectual resource center at its headquarters, and is committed to becoming the founder of many representative advanced concepts and technologies in the consulting industry and becoming the "thought leader" in this industry.
Under the guidance of this concept, Boston Consulting Group has developed some simple but effective consulting and analysis tools in practice, such as the famous experience curve; Growth-share matrix analysis model, namely Boston matrix, etc. The extensive application of these analytical tools in practice has greatly improved the reputation of Boston Consulting Group. Moreover, Boston Consulting Group has firmly occupied the market segment of strategic management consulting. These effective strategies have enabled Boston to gain the upper hand in the competition with McKinsey, while McKinsey's customers and employees are constantly losing and turning to Boston.
The loss of competition made McKinsey executives realize that the original business model of the company can no longer meet the development trend and competitive requirements of the consulting industry, and it is imperative to adjust the company's strategy and organizational structure. McKinsey first reformed its new york branch, and after the successful pilot, it quickly promoted the reform plan throughout the company. The main reform measure is to implement the industry classification business division system for customers in different industries on the basis of the original branches established by regions, so as to make up for McKinsey's weakness in professional knowledge and strengthen industry background analysis.
Industries by industry include consumer goods, industrial products, banking and insurance. This reform changed the company's original model of solving specific customer problems into a product (service)-driven model, which weakened the close relationship between local branches and customers under the original zoning system, so it was criticized and opposed by former leaders within the company. However, under the firm promotion of the current leaders of the company, this business division system based on industry division has been successfully implemented, and their respective customer groups have developed rapidly.
At the same time, the company pays more attention to management function experts. In terms of management functions, strategic formulation, organizational planning and policy implementation all require flexible and diverse knowledge and experience. McKinsey & Company strengthens the training of experts in this field and sets up a special team of experts in each field. Mckinsey regards strategy and organization as the strategic focus of the company's business development, and has appointed leading experts in this field to take charge of its development respectively. After a series of reforms and adjustments, McKinsey & Company finally came out of the trough in the early 1980s and resumed its revival and prosperity. Since 1980, McKinsey & Company has taken the learning and accumulation of knowledge as an important task to gain and maintain competitive advantage, and created an environment of equal competition and stimulating wisdom within the company. After successfully overcoming the initial resistance from within the company; A new core idea has finally taken root in the company, that is, the accumulation and promotion of knowledge must become the central task of the company; The learning process of knowledge must be continuous, not temporary work linked to specific consulting projects; The process of continuous learning must be guaranteed and regulated by a perfect and strict system. After the company fixed the task of continuous full-time learning as a system, it gradually became a fine tradition of McKinsey & Company, which laid a solid foundation for strengthening the company's knowledge reserve and enhancing the company's core competitiveness.
Effective learning mechanism has brought McKinsey two benefits: first, it helps to train a group of consulting experts with good knowledge reserves and experience; The other is to constantly enrich and update the company's knowledge and information resources, provide convenient conditions for future work, and adapt to the changing external environment. McKinsey & Company has not only established a scientific learning promotion system, but also ensured it through a special organization: many experts who have made outstanding contributions in various fields are selected from within the company as the heads of the learning promotion mechanism in each department, and they are responsible for selecting six or seven people with rich experience and enthusiasm in practical fields and knowledge management from each department to form a core team.
Mckinsey's leaders also realize that the most successful employees in the company often have a huge personal network. Therefore, the original knowledge transfer method based on informal interpersonal relationship within the company can not be simply prohibited, but should be a useful supplement to the formal learning mechanism. The core learning leading group explores and uses this internal relationship network as a channel for information and knowledge dissemination in regional branches to realize knowledge sharing throughout the company.
In order to further promote the full circulation of knowledge and information within the organization, McKinsey & Company has also broken the previous internal bureaucratic organization system based on the size and importance of customers and replaced it with an evaluation system based on the contribution rate of knowledge. In this way, every department and member of the organization is under the pressure of knowledge contribution, not just focusing on developing customers. Knowledge management is a hot topic in current business circles. According to the survey of Business Weekly, 80% of 158 multinational companies are establishing formal knowledge management procedures. McKinsey & Company is recognized as a leader in knowledge management. McKinsey focuses on the exploration, dissemination and utilization of tacit knowledge in knowledge management. Although many creative opinions and ideas put forward by many consulting experts in the company have been written and published in academic journals, magazines and newspapers with wide influence, such as Harvard Business Review, and even some bestsellers have been published, such as The Pursuit of Excellence, co-authored by Peters and wortmann, experts in charge of enterprise organization development in McKinsey & Company; Kenichi Ohmae, an expert in strategic management development, wrote The Strategist's Thought, which was greatly welcomed by the academic and practical circles. However, compared with a lot of valuable experience and profound academic ideas in the company, these papers are just the tip of the iceberg. As tacit knowledge, more knowledge and experience exist in the minds of experts and are not written, let alone exchanged and enjoyed within the company.
In order to solve this problem, McKinsey has established an internal publication (McKinsey Senior Management Series), which is specially aimed at those experts who have valuable experience but have no time and energy to organize these experiences into formal papers or works, and simply summarize their thoughts and share them with colleagues. This informal way lowers the threshold of knowledge exchange and dissemination, so that many important and practical new ideas and experiences can be saved in a one-or two-page abstract and used for dissemination. At the end of each such essay, the author's detailed information is attached, and interested readers can follow the picture to find experts who can consult. This flexible way of communication not only makes useful knowledge and experience spread effectively in the company, encourages innovation and frank communication, but also helps to improve the personal reputation of knowledge providers and provide them with a good environment and opportunities for their development in the company. This method of free choice also helps to choose truly valuable ideas and creativity.
In order to communicate and spread the above information more effectively in the company, McKinsey & Company has also established a special database for storing experience and knowledge, which is used to store all kinds of information resources accumulated in the process of working for customers, and has also appointed full-time professional information management technicians to maintain the database to ensure the update of the data in the database; When consulting experts need to find information from the database, they will provide corresponding retrieval help to improve the efficiency of use. In the content management of the database, we pay special attention to the professional experts in charge of the professional field in the company's "T" expert team structure, gain knowledge and experience in the professional field, strengthen the perfection of professional knowledge in the database, and make the database a more comprehensive information resource. After several months' efforts, this database has collected more than 2,000 documents, providing sufficient data reserves for the formal operation of this database named "McKinsey Practice Development Network" (PDNet).
Since the 1990s, human society has entered the era of knowledge economy. The change of environment and the development of organizations have posed new challenges to every company, especially for a large knowledge-intensive international famous consulting company like McKinsey. 1April 1996, Rajat Gupta, the leader of McKinsey & Company, asserted that with the progress of science and technology and the development of the times, McKinsey & Company will face more severe challenges: how to manage more than 7,000 consulting experts in 84 branches of McKinsey & Company around the world, effectively integrate knowledge resources, and make the organization meet the needs of customers efficiently and better has become increasingly complicated.
Therefore, McKinsey & Company must constantly improve its learning mechanism and knowledge management in order to adapt to the severe test faced by the era of knowledge economy and remain invincible in the fierce competition.