Global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company marks 100 years
The global consulting industry will this year celebrate a number of major milestones, including that of Arthur D. Little, Kearney, Cognizant, and Accenture – albeit none bigger than McKinsey’s.
While Arthur D. Little trundles on to its 140th anniversary, and Cognizant and Accenture were effectively spin-offs and rebrands, the biggest celebrations will be reserved for McKinsey & Company, which this year reaches its centenary.
Established by James O. McKinsey in Chicago in 1926, the world’s premier management consultancy has watched as its closest rivals, Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company, respectively celebrated their 60th and 50th anniversaries in 2023.
Now it’s McKinsey’s turn, but with a triumphant 100-year banner reminding the world that it’s one of the oldest continuously-running global consultancies of its kind behind only Arthur D. Little and the 1914-founded Booz Allen, the latter morphing over time to spawn Booz & Co and then Strategy&, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024 alongside Oliver Wyman’s 40th.
It’s difficult to conceive of the business world at the time of McKinsey’s founding, with America at the height of its prohibition era and Al Capone running the streets of Chicago, where horse-drawn carriages were still a common sight. Nowadays, McKinsey is releasing AI chatbots, such that anyone anywhere can access a century worth of the firm’s research via a phone in their pockets.
As a further symbol of its evolution in more recent times, McKinsey also just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its acquisition of analytics firm QuantumBlack, prior to which it had less than a dozen data scientists of its own. That figure has now swollen to more than 1,000 professionals working on a wide variety of projects across every industry with an ever-increased focus on AI.
And should the artificial intelligence bots ever take over, McKinsey’s impact on the globe will remain unmatched, not just from a business perspective, both directly and indirectly as a CEO factory, but also in shaping the economic policy and direction of many nation states over a very long period, including as to recent modernisation agendas in countries such as Saudi Arabia.
McKinsey in Australia and New Zealand
Back at home, McKinsey, currently led by A/NZ managing partner Wesley Walden, first arrived downunder in 1963 before he was born, or the introduction of the metric system for that matter, with its Melbourne office the first outside of the US and Europe. Nowadays, the firm has approximately 60 partners and a headcount of 650-odd advisors spread across Australia and New Zealand.
The firm’s regional footprint spans six offices – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and Auckland.
Meanwhile, while McKinsey’s traditional approach to public fanfare could be described as ‘understated’, fellow global management consultancy Kearney has taken the opportunity of the firm’s founding to celebrate its own centenary, with Andrew Thomas Kearney coming on board as McKinsey’s first partner in 1929 before later branching off on his own in 1947.
