McKinsey’s 100th Anniversary – An Alma Artifex of Talal Malik, Alpha1Strategy
8 September 2026 – Alpha1Strategy Founder Talal Malik shares his perspective on his alma artifex/ ‘nourishing guild’, McKinsey & Company as its commemorates its 100 Year Anniversary / Centennial in 2026. (Thought Leadership)
McKinsey & Company celebrates its 100th Anniversary in 2026. Fittingly, TIME also named the strategic management consultancy the Best Company for Future Leaders in 2026 during this Centenary.
“The Firm” – as it is known by its members and alumni, and as journalist Duff McDonald titled his 2014 book, was founded by University of Chicago Professor James McKinsey in 1926.
I am one of those alumni.
My tenure was from 2008 to 2013/14, and I regard McKinsey as an alma artifex – “nourishing guild” – in my journey as a strategic trusted adviser. It was also a direct reason for my founding of Alpha1Strategy in 2014.
In 2018, marking a decade since joining the Firm, I described McKinsey’s Global Managing Director as ‘primus inter pares’ – “first among equals”- and reflected on what I had learned:
“In terms of corporate governance, composition and culture, I further learned about the importance of having a true sense of purpose, the need to procure and retain genuine talent and the imperative to embody values as virtues, based upon integrity.”
Some may have read that as high praise. Others may have read it as a diagnosis, prognosis and prescription. Some might even have called it prescient.
In 2022, following Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s book, ‘When McKinsey Comes to Town,’ I wrote “The Art of Strategic Counsel” for Harvard Business Review’s own Centennial year.
It developed those 2018 observations, alongside the late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen’s landmark 2013 article, “Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption”, and with whom I had corresponded while at the Firm, but now from the perspective of a more seasoned practitioner.
So, at McKinsey’s Centennial, I return to four principles.
1. Primus inter pares
McKinsey remains a partnership. Its Global MD is therefore “first among equals.”
The introduction this August of Distinguished Partners, however, offers an interesting evolution: perhaps a nod to Augustus—and, with some humour, Orwell—to the proposition that some partners may become “more equal than others.”
2. A true sense of purpose
The opportunity is not simply to reinvent consulting, as is being widely touted, but to revive strategic counsel.
The strategic adviser and the management consultant all belong to a time immemorial tradition of courtiers, viziers, mandarins, counsellors and kingmakers.
Technology disrupts. Institutions transform or ossify. But the critical need of the sovereign decision-maker does not.
Someone must possess the knowledge, wisdom and judgement to provide candid counsel behind close doors to those who need it.
The strategic adviser, in my mind, should therefore ascend the value chain rather than compete with AI further down.
3. Procure and retain genuine talent
McKinsey reportedly receives around a million applications annually and hires roughly 10,000 people, which is a hiring rate of approximately 1%. Only a fraction ultimately become Partners, and a fraction of those now, Distinguished Partners.
But AI raises a more fundamental organisational question.
If the Firm currently has 40,000 people alongside 20,000 agentic AI colleagues, what is the optimal size and structure of McKinsey for its original purpose and reputation?
Could the Firm ultimately segment into elite human counsel, acquired specialist or national capabilities, and AI-delivered advisory services?
Could an outcome-based business eventually generate a private-equity-style spin-off, just as Bain Capital emerged from Bain & Company?
Could Distinguished Partners eventually become the nucleus of something resembling a management buyout?
Could an AI company such as Anthropic as reported regard a consulting institution as an acquisition target?
A centenary gives a moment to pause as to the required decisions now and the road ahead.
4. Embody virtues as values—based upon integrity
One of the McKinsey values I heard quoted most frequently during my tenure was “an obligation to dissent.” I repeat, an obligation, not prohibition, to dissent.
Genuine dissent should be encouraged and protected.
Apart from being right in principle, doing so is good long-term business: candid internal challenge can prevent extraordinarily expensive external consequences. Namely, colossal payouts.
And as for integrity: no further comment required.
McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels, in his recent Harvard Business Review interview with Adi Ignatius, offered several observations about the Firm’s future that are worth examining.
He described an operating model increasingly divided between novel co-creation with clients, including Firm-underwritten outcomes, and bringing global innovations to clients through more traditional advisory work.
That raises an intriguing structural question: what will the split between counsel, AI agentic work and the ‘private equity’ work?
He also observed that, “The kind of problems we have tackled with our clients over the last 100 years has not been static.”
Strategic advisers like McKinsey adapted when the IBM helped popularise the personal computer from 1981; when internet search with Google in 2000 transformed access to information; and now as generative and agentic AI from OpenAI and Anthropic from 2025 now transform knowledge work.
The strategic adviser survived, and prospered, through previous technological revolutions because information itself was never the ultimate service.
Knowledge, wisdom and judgment were.
Bob Sternfels also stated that AI lacks aspirational capability, judgement and truly novel thinking, pointing towards the enduring comparative advantage of the strategic adviser.
He also said McKinsey had learned that it needed higher diligence around client selection.
In relation, in 2022, I wrote, “If the client has a malevolent intent, and the management consulting firm has agreed to be of counsel, that intent can manifest as being dangerous to the society, economy and potentially, the planet.”
Bob Sternfels also remarked, “I hope we get out of PowerPoint entirely.”
Rather than the method of delivery, ultimately, the greatest impact comes not from the presentation but from the content of the counsel, the direct discussion and the relationship between adviser and decision-maker – one person to another.
His advice to leaders, to maintain a hunger and thirst for new information; determine what should be done internally versus through partnerships; and recognise that speed matters, is equally consistent with the time immemorial model.
Always learn. Build partnerships. Act efficiently.
But I would respectfully challenge one element of the proposed journey from “adviser” to “impact partner.”
The two roles are not necessarily the same.
The adviser possesses a critical role precisely because they can remain sufficiently detached to provide candid counsel behind closed doors. Once the adviser becomes financially invested in a particular outcome, the relationship changes.
At its logical extreme, “impact partnership” begins to resemble private equity rather than independent counsel.
There was also an unintentionally revealing response to the HBR interview about how McKinsey will survive AI and reinvent consulting. The most-liked YouTube comment read:
“I’ll save you 30 mins… ‘we have no idea…..’”
Over 700 users endorsed it.
That reaction identifies both the challenge and the opportunity.
A firm whose core business was strategic counsel must demonstrate thought leadership about the future, particularly when confronted by yet another technology capable of disrupting much of the analytical work on which consulting is currently built.
The answer, in my view, is not to retreat from the traditional adviser.
It is to recognise the rank of the adviser.
My recommendation for major institutions is therefore an evolution of the time immemorial of strategic counsel.
Within the C-Suite, Board, Cabinet and other established leadership bodies, institutions increasingly need something resembling a:
Chief Strategy, Disruption & Institutional Resilience Officer
The office would combine the constancy of the traditional strategic trusted adviser with responsibility for continuously anticipating disruption.
Its purpose would be simple:
To strategically direct the organisation through internal disruption – through enhancement, transformation and impact – before the organisation is disrupted by external forces, thereby building institutional resilience.
AI does not abolish the time imemorial need for counsel.
It makes knowledge, wisdom, judgement, courage and integrity more valuable.
From the courtier, vizier and mandarin to the modern strategic adviser, the technologies surrounding governance have continually changed.
The fundamental question has not.
Who is the person to give critical strategic counsel to the sovereign decision maker?
That’s the new profession that McKinsey helped create.
That helped inspire the creation of Alpha1Strategy.
And that hopefully will now revive the modern management consulting industry.
Happy Centenary Alma Artifex, McKinsey.