Mckinsey Quotes

I'd rather be a little weird than all boring.

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.

One thing you have to realize from now on is that it doesn't matter if this is a dream or not. Survival depends on what you do, not what you think.

Well, here’s the shocker,” said Kirby. “Majors Miller and McKinsey believe our former Captain Paul Remmich is acting as a spy for the Iraqi government.

The ones who hate me the most are the ones who don't scare me.

Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.

When you feel like throwing rocks, make sure they're ones no one can throw back.

A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.

Never make the mistake of thinking you are alone — or inconsequential. Ignorance is voluntary and confusion is temporary. You see the world as-is, which is more than can be said for the vast populace.

When you don't change, history repeats itself. Then you have to decide if changing is for the best, or you keep seeing repeats because you're doing something right.

There seem to be two main types of people in the world, crosswords and sudokus.

Work like an angel, dress like a demon, live like a ghost, and dream like a human.

A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.

I respect you as my king, and I respect you as my father, but I do not respect you as a man!

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.

An apple cannot not become an orange simply because a McKinsey report concluded it would be beneficial for it to do so.

Part One describes how McKinsey thinks about business problems. It shows what it means to be fact-based, structured, and hypothesis-driven.

As an associate at McKinsey & Company, my first assignment was on a team that consisted of a male senior engagement manager (SEM) and two other male associates, Abe Wu and Derek Holley. When the SEM wanted to talk to Abe or Derek, he would walk over to their desks. When he wanted to talk to me, he would sit at his desk and shout, "Sandberg, get over here!" with the tone one might use to call a child or, even worse, a dog. It made me cringe every time. I never said anything, but one day Abe and Derek started calling each other "Sandberg" in that same loud voice. The self-absorbed SEM never seemed to notice. They kept it up. When having too many Sandbergs got confusing, they decided we needed to differentiate. Abe started calling himself "Asian Sandberg," Derek dubbed himself "good-looking Sandberg," and I became "Sandberg Sandberg." My colleagues turned an awful situation into one where I felt protected. They stood up for me and made me laugh. They were the best mentors I could have had.

That kind of imagination is why we're not dead.

I'd rather be a little weird than all boring.” ― Rebecca McKinsey

It is a good idea to start the year by writing down exactly what you want to accomplish, and end the year by measuring how much you have accomplished. McKinsey imposes this discipline on its partners and pays them according to how many of the things on their lists they accomplish. Leadership

Larry said he could understand the complaint, but what he did not understand was that all the people who quit - every single one - had unused vacation time. Up until the day they left, they did everything McKinsey asked of them before deciding that it was too much. Larry implored us to exert more control over our careers. He said McKinsey would never stop making demands on our time, so it was up to us to decide what we were willing to do. It was our responsibility to draw the line.

McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

My point is this — you don't know. When I was first here, people looked at my hair, noticed apples on my tray, and thought 'hippie.' Then, from 'hippie' they thought 'druggie.' From there it went to 'will get me in trouble' and 'not worth my time,' and then they stopped thinking at all. No one bothered to find out if what they thought about me was true. No one wanted to hear what I thought. No one cared what I believed in. No one cared about talking to me or asking what my plans were for the day or night. And then came you. Don't let what you think you know make him into what I could have been. Don't become someone who doesn't think, just because you don't like him for some reason. Because, quite frankly, I like how you think. Except for now, of course.

McKinsey & Company advised AT&T not to enter the mobile telephone business, predicting there would be fewer than one million cellular phones in use by 2000. In fact, by 2000, there were one hundred million mobile phones.

There’s a difference between a mistake and a regret. Everything up to this moment has made this moment. If you can change a mistake, then go out and do what you can to change it. If you can’t change it, there’s no use regretting it because it will just make you miserable. Live right now, even if that involves dealing with the consequences of your actions. Time travel always ends badly.

People are fascinating. Especially the ones who hate me.

One former McKinsey consultant wrote anonymously, ¨To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspect are Illuminati, Lizard People, or ´globalists.' They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.

Life is not a true or false question.

The essence of the initial hypothesis is “Figure out the solution to the problem before you start.” This seems counterintuitive, yet you do it all the time.

For example, how much do you think a senior vice president of Microsoft who came from McKinsey knows about starting a company?

Money is very seductive…However much you say that you will not fall into the trap of it, you do fall into the trap of it. —Rajat Gupta, former worldwide managing director, McKinsey

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work.9

Hiring McKinsey was a sign of affluence.

Bower had three unwritten principles: the client is everything; think the unthinkable; and it’s not about money, but influence and reputation. He applied these principles on a daily basis at McKinsey.

Seinfeld asked if McKinsey is funny. No, the magazine said. “Then I don’t need them,” he said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.” If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. That is so counterintuitive. But I think it perfectly highlights the danger of shortcuts.

The construction industry is the world’s second largest (after agriculture), worth $8 trillion a year. But it’s remarkably inefficient. The typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey.

When a client asks the question “How do I boost my profits?” the first thing McKinsey does is take a step back and ask the question “Where do your profits come from?” The answer to this is not always obvious, even to people who have been in their particular business for years.

The Effects of Personal Bias and Hiring Urgency There are other types of cognitive biases that affect the hiring process. Another harmful one is personal bias, the basic human instinct to surround yourself with people who are like you. People have a natural desire to hire those with similar characteristics: educational background, professional experience, functional expertise, and similar life experiences. The middle-aged manager who holds a degree from the University of Michigan, worked at McKinsey, lives in the suburbs with a partner and kids, and plays golf will tend to be attracted to candidates with similar attributes.

Men have an easier time finding the mentors and sponsors who are invaluable for career progression. Plus, women have to prove themselves to a far greater extent than men do. And this is not just in our heads. A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.

the most compelling business presentations are a form of strategic storytelling leading listeners down a controlled path.

When prioritizing, it is common to use a two-by-two matrix –

I refuse to hold the coats of this generation.

The desire to do so rarely feels small to people who cannot.

it is amazing what you can accomplish when you do it in a "take no prisoners" manner.

Is each one a separate and distinct issue? If so, then your issue list is mutually exclusive.

If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

Why is something done this way? Is this the best way it can be done?” You have to be fundamentally skeptical about everything.

In our business, it is helpful to get to the one or two really important numbers that need to be considered. There isn’t time for more." We concur.

Keeping Christ in Christmas" is like showing up at someone's house every year, insisting on a party they never planned and never agreed to.

Britain could become the first country in modern history to transition from a developed nation to an underdeveloped one.

In 1980, AT&T hired McKinsey & Co—one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world—to predict how many cell phone users there would be in the U.S. in 2000. Based on the large study they conducted, they predicted there would be around 900,000. There were actually about 100 million. So close! Only off by ninety nine million one hundred thousand—a factor of 120.14

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors “who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography.” Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it’s also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio.

Complaints: McKinsey and Company found: • customers who have major problems but don’t complain about them have a purchase intention rate of about 9% • those who do complain, regardless of the outcome, have a repurchase rate of about 19% • customers who have their complain resolved have a repurchase intention rate of 54% • customers who have complaints quickly resolved have a repurchase intention rate of 82%

If you are going to complain, blame, or criticize, then do something about it... Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.

Sydney tried — sometimes he really tried — but his default mindset didn’t have those kinds of manners. What he really meant was more like “Jacob, get over here or I’ll freeze your underwear.” Something like that.

What have they fixed?” asked former McKinsey consultant Michael Lanning. “What have they changed? Did they take any voice in the way banking has evolved in the past thirty years? They did study after study at GM, and that place needed the most radical kind of change you can imagine. The place was dead, and it was just going to take a long time for the body to die unless they changed how they operated. McKinsey was in there with huge teams, charging huge fees, for several decades. And look where GM came out.”13 In the end, all the GM work did was provide a revenue stream to enrich a group of McKinsey partners, especially those working with the automaker. The last time McKinsey was influential at Apple Computer was when John Sculley was there, and that’s because he’d had a brand-marketing heritage from Pepsi. And Sculley was a disaster. Did McKinsey do anything to help the great companies of today become what they are? Amazon, Microsoft, Google? In short, no.

Perhaps the most widely read piece of research that McKinsey has published in the past decade showed that companies that rapidly re-allocate capital to new growth businesses outperform those that take a steady-state approach.21 Yet, the social side of strategy is such that companies still tend to take what is known as a “peanut butter” approach—spreading a thin layer of resources smoothly across the whole enterprise, even though it’s clear that opportunities are far greater in some areas than in others.

As an organization, McKinsey is extremely good at figuring out how much a team can do over the length of a typical study. The best EDs can balance the competing demands of client and team to a nicety; they tell the client, “We’re going to do X and Y. We could do Z, but it would kill the team,” while telling the team, “Look, we’ve already promised the client that we would do Z, so we’ve got to deliver.” They then work the team to its limit while simultaneously making the client feel that he is getting value for money and exceeding his expectations.

Smart clients say that the best way to use McKinsey is not to let them insinuate themselves—to prohibit walking the halls of the client’s offices looking for new business. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, for example, will hire McKinsey, but for one-off projects in which the entire body of knowledge generated is transferred to JPMorgan Chase at the end of the project. The firm’s operating committee has to approve any consulting engagement, and the JPMorgan Chase executives don’t take just any consultants; they pick and choose the specific people they want on the project.

Digital educators Salman Khan and Shantanu Sinha contend the world is on the verge of another “printing press moment,” which will break the elite’s grip on the essentials of education, making available to millions of aspiring learners online knowledge and ideas once restricted to the lecture halls of Harvard or Stanford.

Larry implored us to exert more control over our careers. He said McKinsey would never stop making demands on our time, so it was up to us to decide what we were willing to do. It was our responsibility to draw the line. We needed to determine how many hours we were willing to work in a day and how many nights we were willing to travel. If later on, the job did not work out, we would know that we had tried on our own terms. Counterintuitively, long-term success at work often depends on not trying to meet every demand placed on us. The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately—to set limits and stick to them.

The flood of money from Amway’s founders failed, though, to quash an investigation by the Canadian government into a tax-fraud scheme in which both DeVos and Van Andel were criminally charged in 1982. The scandal exploded when Kitty McKinsey and Paul Magnusson, then reporters for the Detroit Free Press, shocked readers accustomed to DeVos and Van Andel’s professions of patriotism and religiosity with an exposé tracing an elaborate, thirteen-year-long tax scam directly to the bosses’ offices. At its highest levels, they revealed, Amway had secretly authorized a scheme creating dummy invoices to deceive Canadian customs officials into accepting falsely low valuations on products the company imported into Canada. Amway had thus fraudulently lowered its tax bills by $26.4 million from 1965 until 1978. Amway

A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.14 In addition to the external barriers erected by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives—the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet. Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

The need for managers with data-analytic skills The consulting firm McKinsey and Company estimates that “there will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.” (Manyika, 2011). Why 10 times as many managers and analysts than those with deep analytical skills? Surely data scientists aren’t so difficult to manage that they need 10 managers! The reason is that a business can get leverage from a data science team for making better decisions in multiple areas of the business. However, as McKinsey is pointing out, the managers in those areas need to understand the fundamentals of data science to effectively get that leverage.

Ethan, it’s eleven o’clock. The client will love this. No one will be able to absorb more than you have here. Call it a day. Don’t boil the ocean.” We shared a cab home. “Don’t boil the ocean” means don’t try to analyze everything. Be selective; figure out the priorities of what you are doing. Know when you have done enough, then stop. Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time and effort for very little return, like boiling the ocean to get a handful of salt.

Thus, the top-management approach has these essential characteristics: 1. We make an overall diagnosis before we decide on the specific problems to be solved. 2. We determine the order in which problems should be solved. We try to persuade the client to let us put first things first. 3. In the solution of problems, we take an integrating approach and recognize that: (a) external factors are usually important in the solution of internal problems; (b) very few problems can be solved in any single department or section of the business or government agency.36

Making your boss look good means two things. Firstly, it means doing your job to the best of your ability. Clearly, if you produce high-quality work, it will make your boss’s job easier. Second, make sure your boss knows everything you know when she needs to know it. Keep the information flowing. Make sure your boss knows where you are, what you are doing, and what problems you may be having. At the same time, don’t overload her with information. Think about what your boss needs or wants to know. Use a well-structured e-mail or voice mail to convey the information.

Take your team’s temperature. Talk to your teammates. Make sure they are happy with what they are doing. Find out if they have questions about what they are doing or why they are doing it, and answer them. If they are unhappy, take remedial action quickly. Steer a steady course. If you change your mind all the time about the team’s priorities or the analyses you’re doing, your team will quickly become confused and demoralized. Know where you’re going and stay your course. If you need an extra day to figure it out, take it. If you need to make a big change, let your team know, explain why, and let people contribute to, or at least see, your thought process.

Develop your characters well enough that they do stupid things on their own.

The difference between politics and religion is that the first makes it legal to hate, and makes the love of the second illegal.

A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.14

When you run for 30 minutes, for example, your perceived time slows down. In a busy day, a whole afternoon can go by in a flash. You need a way to control your psychological time, especially to distance yourself from normal distractions and preoccupations. When we engage in an even longer exercise like jogging, our brain gets to take a rest from its default mode or inward-focused state—known as a self-referencing in neuroscience—and be more attuned to the outer environment. By shifting in and out of these two states of mind—reference to ourselves versus our environment—we get a new frame reference to our lives that empowers us to look at things in a different light.

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

According to tech guru Tim O’Reilly, “data scientist” is the hottest job title in Silicon Valley. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2018 the United States alone will need 140,000 to 190,000 more machine-learning experts than will be available, and 1.5 million more data-savvy managers.

What appears to be a set of solutions is merely a set of initial hypotheses, proposed explanations that now must be rigorously tested. A good problem solver will search for facts, all the while updating the hypothesis. Great problem solvers not only seek information that confirms their hypothesis but also mercilessly hunt for disconfirming information.

Total global trade spend is now estimated to be over $125 billion, well above the total profits of the major retailers, and McKinsey estimate it to be typically 30% of an FMCG manufacturer’s cost base, second only to the cost of goods at 40%.1

If your audience is overly complacent, begin with the complication to create a sense of urgency.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —Mexican proverb There are some secrets we don’t share because they’re embarrassing. Like that time I met Naval Ravikant (page 546) by accidentally hitting on his girlfriend at a coffee shop? Oops. Or the time a celebrity panelist borrowed my laptop to project a boring corporate video, and a flicker of porn popped up—à la Fight Club—in front of a crowd of 400 people? Another good example. But then there are dark secrets. The things we tell no one. The shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives. For me, 1999 was full of shadows. So much so that I never wanted to revisit them. I hadn’t talked about this traumatic period publicly until April 29, 2015, during a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). What follows is the sequence of my downward spiral. In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality. I still vividly recall these events, but any quotes are paraphrased. So, starting where it began . . . It’s the beginning of my senior year at Princeton University. I’m slated to graduate around June of 1999. Somewhere in the next six months, several things happen in the span of a few weeks. First, I fail to make it to final interviews for McKinsey consulting and Trilogy software, in addition to others. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, and I start losing confidence after “winning” in the game of academics for so long. Second, a long-term (for

Un estudio llevado a cabo en 2012 por McKinsey descubrió que un trabajador promedio del conocimiento dedica más del 60 % de sus horas laborales a la comunicación electrónica y a la búsqueda por internet. Cerca del 30 % del tiempo lo usa exclusivamente para leer y responder correos electrónicos.11

Take whatever job you can at one of those companies. Don’t worry too much about the title—focus on the work. If you get a foot in the door at a growing company, you’ll find opportunities to grow, too. Just whatever you do, don’t become a “management consultant” at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry. They all have thousands upon thousands of employees and work almost exclusively with Fortune 5000 companies. These corporations, typically led by tentative, risk-averse CEOs, call in the management consultants to do a massive audit, find the flaws, and present leadership with a new plan that will magically “fix” everything. What a fairy tale—don’t get me started. But to many new grads, it sounds perfect: you get paid incredibly well to travel around the world, work with powerful companies and executives, and learn exactly how to make a business successful. It’s an alluring promise. Parts of it are even true. Yes, you get a nice paycheck. And yes, you get plenty of practice pitching important clients. But you don’t learn how to build or run a company. Not really. Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, “You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.” If you do choose to go that route and find yourself at one of the Big Four or the other top six firms, then that is of course your choice. Just know before you go what you want to learn and the experiences you need for your next chapter. Don’t get stuck. Management consulting should never be your endpoint—it should be a way station, a brief pause on your journey to actually doing something. Making something. To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together. You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.

talent?” the McKinsey authors ask in the book’s opening pages. Answering their own question: “In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities—his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive.

Today’s second wave of customer service as practiced by some organizations — and it should be the customer service delivered by all companies of one — focuses on emotion and ease. A study from McKinsey showed that 70 percent of buying experiences are based more on how customers feel they are treated and less on the tangibles of a product. The feeling of being treated exceptionally well can only increase in the context of a second purchase or a subscription renewal, because the customer has already developed a feeling about how the first purchase went or how any support requests were handled.

Clothes are our initial and most basic tool of communication. They convey our social and economic status, our occupation, our ambition, our self-worth. They can empower us, Imbue us with sensuality. They can reveal our respect or our disregard for convention. Shoppers snap up five times more clothing now than they did in 1980. In 2018 that averaged 68 garments a year. Americans now spend more time on digital media than working or sleeping and much of that time they are looking at or buying fashion. According to McKinsey, nearly 80% of all luxury purchases are "digitally influenced". Instagram begat a new pathology called the Cinderella syndrome: the resolute avoidance of being seen in the same outfit twice. Learning experience = tech talk fora way to harvest data.

John J. Lawler, who taught in the University of Illinois’s School of Employment and Labor Relations, believes management consultants mainly serve to legitimize the goals of their clients. “Clients like to be told they are doing the right thing,” Lawler said, adding that management techniques viewed as best practices “are very often propagated by consulting firms and thus these techniques become largely institutionalized in the business world.

Nick Seddon, a top official in the right wing think tank Reform, who would soon join Cameron's government as an adviser, recommended that the NHS reduce staffing by 150,000, eliminate up to 32,000 hospital beds, and reduce discretionary procedures "such as coronary bypass and mastectomy." Writing in The Guardian, Seddon said McKinsey had found that these measures, among others, could lead to annual savings to over £20 billion in 2014-2015.

if God decides to redo creation, He will call in McKinsey.

We were discussing the performance-potential matrix that so many companies use for succession planning or “talent management.” McKinsey & Company originally developed it to help General Electric decide which businesses to invest in, and HR departments

What? So what? Now what?

Duckworth, herself, grew up the daughter of privileged Chinese immigrants in the middle-class town of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and she studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at Harvard (Hartnett, 2012). After a masters at Oxford and then a year at McKinsey and Co., Duckworth became the CEO of the online public school rating company, Great Schools, before she altered course to become a charter school teacher on both the West and East coasts.

associate’s head from the moment of entering the Firm. Every document (including internal memos), every presentation, every e-mail and voice mail produced

Suppose you add another item, say, “Reengineering our widget production process.” How does that fit with the three issues you already have? This is certainly an important issue, but it isn’t a fourth point alongside the others. It falls under “Reducing the unit cost,” along with other subissues such as “Leveraging our distribution system” and “Improving our inventory management.” Why? Because all these are ways to reduce the unit cost of widgets. Putting any (or all) of them with the other three issues on the list would cause an overlap. The items in the list would no longer be mutually exclusive. Overlap represents muddled thinking by the writer and leads to confusion for the reader. Once you

There is a solution to this dilemma—the magical category “Other Issues.” If you can’t figure out where to put those two or three brilliant ideas, there is always Other Issues. There is a caveat, however. Avoid using Other Issues in your top-line list—it looks out of place. It’s fine lumped in among a bunch of subissues, but on the first slide of a big presentation, it sticks out. So try a little harder to fit those brilliant ideas into your top-line issues. Chances are you can. Still, if all else fails, Other Issues will help you stay MECE.

The secret to getting the most from Big Data isn’t found in huge server farms or massive parallel computing or in-memory algorithms. Instead, it’s in the almighty pencil.

Whatever you’re doing, chances are someone, somewhere has done something similar. Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Leverage your valuable time and don’t reinvent the wheel!

key is to focus on the big decisions for which if you had better data, if you had better predictive ability, if you had a better ability to optimize, you’d make more money.

data, models, transformation. Data is the creative use of internal and external data to give you a broader view on what is happening to your operations or your customer. Modeling is all about using that data to get workable models that can either help you predict better or allow you to optimize better in terms of your business.

It’s not enough to analyze “Big Data” or even extract insights from them. The best sales leaders mask all that complexity and keep it simple for the front lines so sales staff like Maria can get on with what they do best — sales, not statistics.

Research shows that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10% or more.