600. Jeff Sinclair, The History of the Operations Practice at McKinsey

Jeff Sinclair, a senior global leader at McKinsey, discusses the history of operations at the firm. The firm was initially known as a strategy firm and did some organization and marketing work. However, in the 1980s, clients began to draw more attention to operations, particularly in the automotive industry in Europe and North America. Operations became a strategic function for automotive OEMs and part suppliers, as they needed to serve their customers with high quality, cost-effective, and operationally effective services.

Operations Practice at McKinsey

When Jeff joined the firm in 1981, there were about 500 people in the firm. Today, it is estimated that there are 40,000 people worldwide. The firm started building its operations capability in the 80s by recruiting people with specific functional expertise, particularly in manufacturing. They started hiring people from Toyota Supplier Support Center, and creating a well-defined career path within the firm, which is the specialist path or expert path. The operations practice was at the leading edge of other functional practices, such as marketing, market research, and organization. However, the firm had to create new career paths, which led to many iterations of the expert path. The firm had to continuously improve how it recognized and understood their contributions beyond the traditional generalist path.

Bureaucratic Maneuvering in Creating a Career Path

Jeff discusses the transition from a strong culture to multiple career paths within McKinsey. He explains that this change took about 18 years and was driven by the firm's strong culture and the willingness of senior partners in positions of power to help navigate the new path. As employees advanced in the firm, they had to develop relationships with senior executives, which led to ongoing opportunities to serve them. This made it difficult for experts to fit in and develop new service lines and ways of thinking about problem-solving. The firm struggled to recognize the contribution of subject matter expertise to their ability to serve clients and give them credit for developing new service lines and ways of helping clients execute more effectively. Experts were used on projects in a mixture of subject matter expertise, consulting  director roles, and full-time execution people. 

The Evolution of Consultants at McKinsey 

The firm gave some of the personnel role responsibility to the functional practices themselves, hiring lean manufacturing or supply chain experts into the practice. They would take over the personnel development role, evaluation of performance, counseling, and coaching on how to evolve these new career paths. Over time, the firm recognized the high value added contribution of functional practices and expanded its service to clients. While there is still a tension between generalist and specialist paths within McKinsey today, it has improved significantly. Bob Sternfels, the managing director of the firm, was a functional practice leader who recognized the level of contribution of functional practices and grew the career path within the firm.

McKinsey’s Expansion into other Industries

The firm's operations practice evolved from a dominant career path of the generalist partner to a more diverse range of ways of delivering value for clients. The firm initially faced resistance from some office leaders who believed that the new approach would lead to professional suicide. However, over time, the firm embraced the idea of having multiple functional practices, including the operations practice. In the 90s, McKinsey expanded its service to healthcare providers, which led to the growth of the operations practice. This led to the development of Lean principles, such as the Toyota Production System, which were applied in various industries, such as healthcare, consumer goods, and banking. These principles allowed the firm to create real value in areas where people didn't expect it. One example of this transformation is the expansion of the healthcare practice into other industries, such as consumer goods and banking. This allowed the firm to draw in functional expertise from other industries, such as manufacturing and supply chain management, which allowed them to create real value in these areas.

The McKinsey Impact 

Jeff talks about the impact of McKinsey's operations practice on various industries in America. McKinsey has contributed to changes in healthcare operating theaters and hospitals, and even hospitals that didn't work with McKinsey may have learned from their projects. Jeff emphasizes the importance of a partnership within the firm, as it takes many people to make things happen. He believes that McKinsey's strengths lie in its ability to nurture the capability to grow and work with industry practices to deliver functional capabilities to clients. 

The McKinsey Framework

The firm organized itself to develop partnerships with industry practices and work in the wholesale fashion, and working in the retail side of the firm for example. They continuously invested in new knowledge, both bringing in established knowledge and developing their own. They also worked on career paths and managed practices and enterprise, creating a four-part framework of client knowledge, people, and infrastructure to build a practice. This framework was explicitly managed through the 90s and 2000s to create functional practices as legitimate entities in parallel with offices and industry practices, ensuring co-equalization between industry practice and functional practice.

Building Manufacturing Capability

Jeff shares his experiences with building manufacturing capability in a company. He partnered with Felix Brooke to understand and codify the technical, management, and people leadership systems that drive performance transformation. This expanded to include processes in healthcare and banking. Jeff also discusses the importance of understanding the current state of operational capability in an organization and applying Lean thinking at the overall organizational culture and capability building level. Jeff also emphasizes the need to invest in understanding how to design the operating and management systems, train people, build capability, and use pilot projects to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Investment in Knowledge Project Work

The conversation turns to the firm's investment in knowledge project work, which includes research and application engineering. McKinsey excels at translating various theories into service delivery capability service lines for clients. The firm invests a significant amount every year, spending more than the top five business schools combined on research and development of new service lines. They sponsor projects across multiple functional practices, including operations practice, to take their current knowledge to the next level and serve clients more effectively.

Capability Building and Transformation

McKinsey has developed a network of model factories around the world for capability building and transformation in manufacturing operations. The model factories are physical locations where McKinsey teams can bring client people in and train them in a simulated environment. The firm recognized that training for capability building in many organizations was weak. They formed teams around the world to identify the modules that people need to learn, such as lean principles, rapid change over stamping operations, pull scheduling, and the Kanban methodology. They codified and made tangible the processes. Over time, they accumulated multiple projects and started building knowledge outside of the manufacturing operation. To provide client training, the firm built multiple factories around the world. The first model factory was started in Germany. These small model factories were 15 to 20,000 square feet with real operations within them. These models helped with client training. The model factories were designed to provide a realistic experience for clients and to help clients learn and adapt to the changing needs of their operations.

On Building a Practice

Jeff helped launch a practice that focused on understanding customer value and defining functional specifications. This practice, which involves working with companies to define customer value, translates these requirements into functional specifications, which then translates into technical specifications that translates into the work that is being done. The practice evolved from helping clients drive growth in a market with potential opportunities. Jeff learned how to do this by working with people who knew how to do things like functional discovery and functional specification development. This led to the development of various product development programs, including consumer products, high tech, and healthcare. The practice began in traditional industries like automotive, industrial, and electronics but expanded to areas like consumer products, high tech, and healthcare. 

Product Development Practice

In the product development practice, some classic project types include product platforming, product development roadmaps, and product teardown projects. These projects help identify market applicability, customer needs, and the platform that needs to be put in place to have a range of product capability. By understanding how to think about the platform from both a hardware and software point of view, the product development roadmap can be managed to get products to market faster, with each product being cheaper to produce and having a competitive price point. Jeff shares one example of a project that was involved in a major acquisition included doing a product platforming strategy and a product development roadmap. This helped identify the range of market applicability, customer needs, and the platform that needs to be put in place to maximize the amount of commonality across the product line. By understanding how to think about the platform from both a hardware and software point of view, the product development roadmap could be managed in a way that got the product to market faster. Jeff also talks about reverse engineering. 

Current Positions and Interests

Jeff has been teaching at the University of Michigan, focusing on business and customer discovery. He teaches engineers that their designs need to be able to meet customer needs and be willing to pay for them. He also works with undergraduates in a consulting class at the business school, helping them develop turnaround strategies for companies in the avionics business. Jeff is an adjunct faculty member and has been doing this for about a dozen years. He is also involved in a startup consulting effort with his son, who worked for a small boutique firm called Magnet, which focuses on serving smaller companies, and he is an investor in various small, private equity owned and startup companies.

Timestamps:

03:39: Building Operations Capability in the 1980s 

07:45: Challenges in Creating Career Paths for Experts 

09:55: Role of Experts in Projects 

12:10: Evolution of Career Paths in the 1990s 

17:10: Impact of Operations Practice on Industry Practices 

31:36: Knowledge Initiatives and Model Factories 

36:31: Product Development Practice 

43:34: Reverse Engineering Projects 

Links:

Company website: https://shorewaypartners.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-sinclair-87a7392b/

Michigan Ross: https://michiganross.umich.edu/faculty-research/faculty/jeff-sinclair

 

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