Your Guide to a McKinsey Evaluation: It’s A Joke
Monday’s news that Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend had announced plans to bring in McKinsey to reevaluate the publishing giant’s core business model and increase efficiencies made some serious waves in the media world. Since then, the media blogs have been atwitter with McKinsey mania!
Everyone wants to know what McKinsey will do with Conde Nast? And how will they do it? And what will it feel like?
Actually it’s fairly simple.
First they will take a number of meetings. Actually, lots and lots of meetings. They will meet with senior executives in every part of the business — HR, Production, Finance, Sales and Marketing, and yes, Editorial. They will then put together a lot of charts with square boxes and arrows and present their findings to the top brass (people whose last name is Newhouse) plus a few others. These charts will be visual representations of how they will fix their business – cutting costs.
Apart from advising the cutting of dead weight they will primarily look to cut redundancies. By grouping titles in similar spaces (Women’s Fashion, Men’s, Lifestyle, etc.) they can employ just one sales and marketing team, one production unit, even one communications unit. This is what happened at Time Inc., and what is likely to happen at 4 Times Square. It’s not rocket science.
Bringing in McKinsey is an admission by a corporate organization it can no longer effectively manage its own growth — they are a surcharge for having an inflexible corporate culture. So they hire well-heeled Ivy League MBA types to tell them the hard-truths that they don’t want to know, so they don’t have to do it themselves. For example – maybe 12 people don’t need to fly first class to Milan to represent Allure. But clothing allowances and limitless T&E expenses are legendary at Conde Nast – or, were; it’s safe to say that gravy train is over.
