In my first week on a new engagement at McKinsey, I’m putting together a powerpoint presentation for a client kickoff, and my new manager comes in and asks to take a look at what I’m working on. He takes a look at the first slide, starts flipping through the rest of it, and says “we don’t use font sizes bigger than 10 here at McKinsey. Reduce the sizes of all the fonts, and figure out some way to fill the empty space left on the slides to look nice” and then he left the room. I thought it was a joke, but this dude was deadly serious. Thankfully that guy did not make it at McKinsey; he was a caricature of all the things people detest about McKinsey consultants.
And while not everyone at McKinsey is like that, it IS a reflection of how much consultants agonize all of their energy just thinking about how to communicate something, down to cosmetics of a font size, which is really frustrating for people who like to actually just get stuff done.
But that’s NOT actually the reason I quit. McKinsey is perennially ranked the #1 consulting firm in the world, one of the most well run and presitigous companies to work with a less than 1% acceptance rate - much lower than getting into Harvard - and in fact, one of THE top choices to work for people who attend Harvard. BUT I actually think it’s not for everyone, probably not for most people, and I’m going to share some of the soft underbelly of what it’s like to work there by talking about the top 7 reasons I quit McKinsey.