McKinsey

"Let’s look at a few other surprises. How many McKinseyites routinely go to flea-markets or car-boot sales? Very few, I think it’s fair to assert. And yet the employees of large consulting firms are massive users of eBay. Once again, the medium is the product."

"When I was thirty-three, and my vehicle hove into view in the shape of LEK, I asked myself whether I was ready to become co-founder of a serious global firm – that was what we intended – to rival the giants of BCG, Bain and McKinsey. I pondered the question, and eventually decided I was ready, because: •  I really understood the concepts of strategy consulting and how to sell it. •  I could see a gap in the market for our first phase of success – we could build a British-based firm able to package and sell ‘American’ concepts in user-friendly ways to British and European bosses. •  Not only was there a gap in the market, but there was also a market in the gap – a big target market which was under-served. We could see something that our top competitors couldn’t: that the decision-makers in British and European companies were often put off by American ‘power salesmanship’ and jargon, by a lack of intellectual subtlety, and a failure to understand local nuances. We aimed to capitalise on that. •  Although we were a new outfit, LEK had partners who had worked for two of our top rival firms at a senior level, and we reckoned we would be at least the peers of the consultants we would be selling against. •  We were really excited about being in business for ourselves, taking whatever risks we wanted to, choosing who would work in our venture and reaping the rewards for ourselves and our people. •  We were confident about the economics of our new business if we could sell large chunks of business. We knew that strategy consulting was highly profitable, that it required no capital investment, and that it could be cash-positive very quickly."

"By 1970, two years after joining the firm, I knew I had to move. One of my last clients at McKinsey connected me to was someone who would change my thinking forever. A company called General Instrument had started as a sleepy electronics firm in New York in 1923 and had evolved into being the owner of assorted electronics businesses. GI had just bought a Philadelphia-based company called Jerrold Electronics; it was a massive acquisition for a company that size, roughly 40 percent of its value at the time."

"I relied on creative problem-solving skills I had honed at Jerrold and in my days at Bell Labs and McKinsey. Some days I felt energized by the challenge, like a young mechanic back home piecing together parts on the garage floor and trying to get a dead engine to come sputtering back to life."

"Benko started as a start-up entrepreneur and simply remained one, even as the company branched out and grew in width and height. Other start-up entrepreneurs eventually bring in experienced managers to reorganize the company – like Google's bosses did with Eric Schmidt, who had previously led traditional IT companies, or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg with manager Sheryl Sandberg, who had stints at McKinsey and Google."