McKinsey & Company

In 1926, University of Chicago professor James Oscar McKinsey opened a consulting office in Chicago. A lawyer and certified public accountant who was keen on the emerging science of management, he had a door sign describing the firm as “consultants and engineers,” and one of his partners was A. T. Kearney; according to Marvin Bower’s recollection, in its early days the firm mostly audited clients’ books.⁠[1][2][2][2][2]

In 1933, Marvin Bower, who held both a HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry law degree and an MBA, joined the firm and became McKinsey’s protégé. A few years later McKinsey left the firm to take a temporary position running and restructuring the department store Marshall Field & Co., while Bower stayed on to run the New York office.⁠[1][2][2][2]

In 1937, James O. McKinsey died at the age of 48. Bower and Kearney then disagreed over how to run the firm, and in 1939 they split: Kearney kept the Chicago office and later named it for himself, A.T. Kearney & Co., while Bower named the New York firm for his late mentor, McKinsey & Co. Bower explained that he avoided using his own name so that clients would not expect him to personally handle every engagement.⁠[2][2][2]

Bower’s aim was to advise top executives on management with the professional standards of a leading law firm. He set out a few principles for the firm: consultants should put clients’ interests ahead of increasing the firm’s revenues, keep clients’ affairs confidential, tell the truth and be willing to challenge clients’ opinions, and accept only work that was necessary and that the firm could do well; he also insisted on professional rather than business language, so that the firm was called “The Firm” and projects “engagements.”⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 1959, McKinsey opened its first international office, in London, and has expanded around the world steadily since.⁠[1]

In an era when other consulting firms were going public or selling themselves to larger companies, Bower could have sold the firm for a high price, but around 1963, when he was about 60, he sold his shares back to the firm at book value, setting an example for his partners and preserving the firm’s partner-owned structure.⁠[2][2]

By 1993, McKinsey had doubled in size in five years to annual revenue of $1.2 billion and 58 offices worldwide, with about 60% of revenue coming from outside the United States; its managing director was Fred Gluck. The firm was then debating internally issues such as overly rapid growth, partner promotion, and pay gaps, and the 90-year-old Bower said what worried him most was greed “now.”⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

From 1994 to 2003, Rajat Gupta served three three-year terms as McKinsey’s managing director, a period of rapid expansion in the firm’s size and office network; some partners worried that such fast growth was at odds with the traditional partnership structure.⁠[3][4][4]

Enron chief executive Jeffrey SkillingJeff SkillingJeff Skilling is an American business executive and former McKinsey partner who joined the energy company Enron in 1990, became its president and chief operating officer in 1997, and served as chief executive officer from February to August 2001. After Enron’s bankruptcy in December 2001, a federal jury in 2006 found him guilty on 19 counts including conspiracy, securities fraud and insider trading; he was originally sentenced to 292 months in prison, resentenced to 168 months in 2013, and left prison for a halfway house in 2018.Open the full entry had worked at McKinsey from 1979 to 1990. McKinsey helped Enron transform itself from a gas pipeline company into an energy trading marketplace, carrying out about 20 projects with billings of more than $10 million a year, and a McKinsey director regularly attended Enron board meetings; McKinsey’s quarterly once praised Enron as one of the world’s most innovative companies for “atomising” traditional industry structures.⁠[5][5][6][5]

After Enron went bankrupt in 2001, its auditor Arthur Andersen was driven out of business, while McKinsey escaped largely unscathed. Writer Malcolm Gladwell argued in a 2002 article that the “war for talent” approach advanced by McKinsey partners, which called for sorting employees into A, B, and C groups by performance and lavishly rewarding star employees, had been followed by Enron almost to the letter.⁠[6][6][6][6]

On March 6, 2003, McKinsey announced that its partners had chosen Ian Davis, head of the London office, as the new managing director, to succeed Gupta in July for a three-year term. The firm was then facing economic uncertainty, clients cutting back on consulting spending, and competition from IBM, Accenture, Bain, the Boston Consulting Group, and others.⁠[4][4][4]

On March 1, 2011, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Gupta, accusing him of passing inside information obtained as a Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry director to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. On June 15, 2012, a federal jury in Manhattan found Gupta guilty of leaking confidential Goldman information to Rajaratnam on three occasions and of conspiracy, while acquitting him on two other counts, including one involving Procter & Gamble; he was the most prominent corporate executive convicted in that wave of Wall Street insider trading investigations.⁠[3][7][7][7][7]

In December 2019, the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica published an investigation, based on interviews with people involved and 1,500 pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, arguing that after the Trump administration tightened immigration policy in 2017, McKinsey’s consulting for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was redirected toward helping hire 10,000 immigration officers and reducing the cost of handling migrant detainees, and that McKinsey had proposed cutting spending on detainees’ food, medical care, and supervision. McKinsey issued a statement of about 800 words saying the article misled readers and ignored facts it had provided; ProPublica then responded point by point and stood by its reporting.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

On February 4, 2021, McKinsey and 47 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories simultaneously filed a settlement agreement and consent judgment under which McKinsey paid more than $573 million for opioid addiction treatment and abatement, resolving state attorneys general’s investigations into its marketing consulting for opioid manufacturers including Purdue Pharma; New York State was to receive more than $32 million. Under the agreement, McKinsey was to make public tens of thousands of internal documents concerning Purdue and other companies, adopt a strict document retention plan, continue investigating allegations that two partners tried to destroy documents, and stop advising on potentially dangerous opioid-based Schedule II and III narcotics.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9]

Including a separate $13.5 million settlement with Washington State, McKinsey paid nearly $600 million in this round of settlements. North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said McKinsey had worked for Purdue for 15 years; then–global managing partner Kevin Sneader said the firm deeply regretted not adequately acknowledging the tragic consequences of the opioid epidemic, while McKinsey maintained at the time that the settlements did not mean it admitted wrongdoing.⁠[10][10][10][10][11]

In February 2021, McKinsey’s roughly 650 senior partners did not advance Kevin Sneader to the final round of the leadership election, making him one of the few recent global managing partners to serve only one term; the firm then had about 30,000 employees in 65 countries. Bob Sternfels subsequently became global managing partner.⁠[12][12][12][13]

On November 19, 2021, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that MIO Partners, a wholly owned McKinsey subsidiary offering investment services to current and former partners and employees, had agreed to pay an $18 million penalty. The investigation found that MIO invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies McKinsey was advising, that some McKinsey partners overseeing MIO’s investment decisions also had access to material nonpublic information about clients such as financial results, planned bankruptcy filings, and mergers, and that MIO lacked reasonably designed policies to prevent misuse. Without admitting or denying the findings, MIO consented to a cease-and-desist order and a censure.⁠[14][14][14][14][14]

In 2022, When McKinsey Comes to Town, a book by two senior New York Times reporters based on a five-year investigation, was published; it recounts McKinsey’s marketing advice to Purdue Pharma, for which it received $83.7 million in fees, and its consulting for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other episodes. McKinsey responded that the book did not represent its values.⁠[15][15][15][15]

On October 18, 2024, John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Senators Marco Rubio and Joni Ernst released a document of nearly 17 pages and wrote to the attorney general and the defense secretary, alleging that McKinsey had received more than $480 million in U.S. military consulting contracts since 2008 without disclosing, as required by law, its consulting for the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises, and arguing that its global managing partner’s sworn testimony to Congress that year that the firm had never worked for China’s central government was inaccurate; the lawmakers asked the officials to evaluate whether McKinsey had complied with U.S. law and whether it should remain eligible for Defense Department contracts.⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

In November 2024, internal documents analyzed by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and The Guardian showed that Saudi Arabia’s Neom project accounted for at least 5% of McKinsey’s revenue in the United Arab Emirates in 2023 and Saudi Aramco for 1% to 5%; the documents also indicated that McKinsey advised clients on the energy transition while also helping clients boost fossil fuel production or sales. Sternfels had said in 2021 that working with high-emitting clients was necessary to help them decarbonize.⁠[13][13][13][13]

On December 5, 2024, with confirmation by a U.S. federal court, McKinsey and its South African subsidiary reached a corporate alternative dispute resolution agreement with South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority, paying about R1.1 billion into the country’s Criminal Assets Recovery Account and concluding the U.S. Department of Justice’s and the authority’s investigations into McKinsey South Africa’s work in 2012–2016 for state power utility Eskom and transport company Transnet. McKinsey attributed the problems to former partner Vikas Sagar, saying he had concealed his unlawful conduct from the firm and his colleagues; Sagar had worked with Salim Essa, an associate of the Gupta family, and McKinsey thereby obtained contracts with Transnet and Eskom worth nearly R2 billion.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17][17]

On December 13, 2024, McKinsey reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to pay $650 million over five years, resolving the investigation into its role in the opioid crisis: the firm accepted the facts underlying one felony count of obstruction of justice and one count of conspiring with Purdue and other drug makers to help misbrand a prescription drug, with the charges to be dropped if it complies with the agreement for five years, and it pledged not to do any work related to the marketing, sale, promotion, or distribution of any controlled substance. A former senior partner agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying records related to the firm’s work for Purdue.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

Chris Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said it was the first time a management consulting firm had been held criminally responsible for advice that resulted in a client committing a crime, and that the $650 million was 85 times what the firm had earned from Purdue. Departing from its earlier position that its settlements did not admit wrongdoing, McKinsey publicly apologized, saying it was deeply sorry for its past client service to Purdue and for a former partner’s deletion of documents.⁠[11][11][11]

As of October 2026, McKinsey is headquartered in New York, its global managing partner is Bob Sternfels, and it has about 40,000 employees and more than 100 offices in over 50 countries; ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry, using FactSet data, estimates its 2025 revenue at about $16 billion.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

McKinsey & Company: Official website: https://www.mckinsey.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]