PROGRAM : MMS Comment Form for Assignments

Section One: Data on the Course and Assignment

BATCH : 2012 - 13

Subject : Title of Assignment : Date of Submission : Student Details : Group No : Div. Roll No. Name Semester Div. Roll No. Name

Section Two: Evaluation

Please note below the comments on the assignment in accordance with your objectives and evaluation criteria.

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Q2) Certain learning strategies are being used by McKinsey in this case. Outline the merits/benefits and demerits of the same. Ans. Learning strategies at Mckinsey & company: The following are the learning strategies used by Mckinsey & company: Training: Mckinsey appointed Ron Daniel as Managing director. The objective was to appoint one of the firms most respected and productive senior partners as Mckinseys first full time director of training to develop the consultants skills and expertise. He also encouraged the development of the firms functional expertise in areas like strategy, organisation and operations, where knowledge and experience were widely diffused and minimally codified. As the approach was product driven, the concern was that, it would damage Mckinseys distinctive advantage of its local office presence which gave partners strong connections with the business community. Mckinsey staff paper series: Fred Gluck has introduced Mckinsey staff paper series in 1978, encouraging their consultants to publish their key findings. The two publications i.e. In search of excellence and the mind of strategists got major boost. Generalized consultants to T-Shaped consultants: In April 1971 the Commission on Firm Aims and Goals reported that that the firm was growing too fast and not placing much importance in training and development of consultants. The consultants were more generalists than specialists. The commission proposed the development of T-Shaped consultants, who supplemented broad generalist perspective with an in-depth industry of functional speciality. Practice bulletins: to avoid the barrier to internal knowledge communication, Gluck introduced Practice bulletins i.e. two page summary of important new ideas that identified the experts who could provide more detail. It is basically an internal advertisement for ideas. However the demerit of this approach is that it is more into capturing internal knowledge, rather than focusing on acquiring knowledge from external sources. Clientele and professional development committee (CPDC): The Company moved from, developing knowledge to build individual and team capability. They converted the group of 11 sectors and 15 centres into the diverse groups of seven sectors and seven functional capabilities groups, which were led by team of 5-7 partners, with the objective to replace the leader driven knowledge creation to stewardship model i.e. careful and responsible management of self governing practices focusing on building competence. Mckinsey global institute by Rajat Gupta It is a research center, which was established in 1991 to study implications of changes in the global economy on business. The idea behind this was to create other pools of dedicated resources, protected from daily pressures and client demands, and focused on long term research agendas. This center helps the organisation to adapt to the change. Practice Olympics: Another strategy is that Rajat Gupta wanted to proceed from firms long term investment so for this he wanted to create some new channels, forums, and mechanisms for

knowledge, development and organisational learning. Mr.Gupta embraced grass roots knowledge development approach called Practice Olympics where, two to six peoples teams from offices around the world were encouraged to develop ideas that grew out of recent client engagements and formalize them for presentation at a regional competition with senior partners and client as judges. Another advantage of learning strategies is that the group in the organisation had initiated a practice specific intranet link designed to allow members direct access to the practices knowledge base (PD documents, conference proceedings, CVs etc.). With the help of this it was expected to accelerate the engage-explore-apply-share knowledge cycle. Demerits: The concern was that the functional capability groups would be less able to transfer their knowledge into increasingly strong and self-contained industry-based practices. One of the most important initiatives of the new committee was to convince the partners to redefine the firms key consulting unit from the engagement team (ET) to the client service team (CST). The CST concept was that the firm could add long-term value and increases the effectiveness of individual engagements if it could unite a core of individuals (particularly at the partner level) who were linked across multiple ETs, and commit them to working with the client over an extended period. Difficulties in development of functional specialists or the I-Shaped consultants: McKinsey was uncomfortable about how to evaluate the new class of I-Shaped consultants the specialists. These consultants found it hard to assimilate into the mainstream. Many of them became isolated or dissatisfied. The partnership continued to support the specialist promotion track and struggled with how to make it work.