Marvin Bower - A Giant Has Left Us
© Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC

Marvin Bower, founder of modern management consulting and influential builder of McKinsey & Company, has died in his 100th year.

A giant - perhaps the giant - of management consulting died on January 22nd, 2003.  Marvin Bower was 99.  His two books - The Will to Manage and The Will to Lead - are exemplars of a pioneering professional's wisdom, written in a uncluttered, folksy style and permanent fixtures on my desktop.

After Harvard law and MBA degrees, Bower joined the law firm of Jones Day in Cleveland.  There he dealt mostly with corporate bonds in default, exposing him to management practices that led to poor performance.  To the dismay of his firm and his family, he left Jones Day after three years in the depth of the Great Depression (1933) for the simple reason that he enjoyed solving business problems more than the drafting of legal documents resulting from those problems.

Earlier at a bondholders' meeting in Chicago, he had met James McKinsey, who asked him to join the New York office of three consultants and to manage it a few months later.  An assignment in 1935 for Marshall Field & Company led to McKinsey's becoming its CEO.  In 1937 "Mac" died, throwing the consulting firm in disarray.  The partnership was dissolved and two new ones created - A. T. Kearney in Chicago headed by Tom Kearney and McKinsey & Company in New York headed by Bower.

Marvin Bower viewed consulting as a profession, not a business, based on three principles:

 

	putting the client's interest first
	conducting themselves ethically
	telling clients the truth

The rest, as they say, is history.  By explicitly targeting top management in top companies, Bower built the most powerful consulting firm in the world and imbued thousands of McKinsey consultants and alumni with the principles he preached and practiced.

Read our review of Bower's The Will to Lead.

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