"McKinsey today is itself truly a global firm, with a non-American majority controlling its shareholder committee and the real possibility of electing a non-American as managing director in the near future."
I strongly believe in two things.
One, History repeats. At the least rhymes. Hence it is important to read history and learn a lot from it which helps to predict the future. Sort of like Machine learning but in a different sense.
Two, No one knows the future. Prediction is futile. So is planning. (Yet, I also annoy some folks with my super optimized planning running different options and scenarios)
As a result, one of my favorite thing is to read archives. Old articles, old books. What better way to time travel. (or Old Movies)
To give you a sense about articles, articles that wrote the obituary of Steve Jobs, Articles that praised the likes of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. HBR articles that talk about the might of Yahoo kind of ones are my favorites.
Well, one could argue, "Hindsight is 20/20" Journalists were writing what they say, it was the zeitgeist of the times. No one knew any better (well, thank you, exactly my point)
Neverthless, they are fun and helluva good reads and good intellectual exercises.
Hence it is rare to read articles, that are balanced, nuanced and in general stand the test of time. (say except for few things here and there, things spoken in the article would be relevant even today)
https://fortune.com/article/how-mckinsey-does-it/ A fortune article on mckinsey written in 1993 is one such article which calls Russia, Eastern Europe, China and India as fledgling markets to Mckinsey.
The opening lines of the post are from this article. If you haven't guessed it, in the election that happened in the next spring after this article was published, Rajat Gupta was elected as the MD. And yes, again, no where his name his mentioned in the article though it talks about the upcoming MD election and the front runners and favorites.
One could also argue, the takeaway is not more about the good article but more about Mckinsey
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