As a McKinsey consultant gets off a late evening flight at Sydney and begins to get worked up about an early morning presentation for which he still lacks some critical data, he calls up an McKC (McKinsey Knowledge Center) staff and asks him for it. By the time he’s ready to begin work on his pack-McKinsey’s internal word for presentation slides-the next morning, he has the processed information in his mail. If he had asked, he would have even got some preliminary number crunching done.

This was not the case almost a decade ago, when the consultant would have to either do the research himself or pull up an R&I-Research and Information-staffer from his late evening pubbing and request him for the information. This was because of the way research was structured within McKinsey. McKinsey had about 800 researchers at its R&I centers spread across its 80 offices and several Practices. No one office-not even the larger New York and London offices-had sufficient specialist researchers for each Practice group, while the smaller offices didn’t even have enough critical mass even amongst the non-specialists. This, combined with the fact that the demand from consultants had its peaks and troughs, meant that researchers often found themselves overworked. 

This is what R&I managers lamented about at an Asia-Pacific meeting for McKinsey R&I managers in Kuala Lumpur in February 1997. The antidote came in the form of a suggestion to set up an R&I regional support center in India, much like a back office, to be staffed with specialist researchers. The argument was that by creating a mass of support staff in a low-cost location, such a model would allow R&I to give consultants information faster, and at lower cost than happened traditionally. Consultants from anywhere in the A-Pac region could send in a request for generalist or specialist information or analysis via email or phone, and staff in India would turn it around within 24 hours. The center was to work five days a week, round the clock.

This idea had been fomenting for a while in the mind of Anil Kumar, a senior partner at McKinsey, who had spent time working on the remote-services area. It was proposed at Kuala Lumpur by another enthusiast of remote services-Amit Bhatia, the newly appointed R&I manager for McKinsey’s India office. Bhatia had come to McKinsey from American Express where he had watched Chairman and CEO Harvey Golub’s initiative to build three financial resource centers, one each at Brighton (UK), Salt Lake City (US) and Delhi (India). So, it was easy for him to extend his learning from American Express to the McKinsey situation. 

Need for a parent

As expected, managers at the meeting reacted to the proposal, citing problems of language differences, database incompatibilities, and absence of rapport with consultants. 

But, the center got the support that any radical project can’t see the light of day without-the support of a big wig. In this case, it was Roger Ferguson, the Firm’s R&I Director worldwide, and now Vice-Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, US. So began the laborious process of writing and rewriting business plans and approaching senior directors and Office Managers for approvals and buy-ins (the local head of each McKinsey office is called an Office Manager). The original team wrote many different plans during 1997, before Ferguson left to join the Federal Reserve System.   

The limbo of the absence of a leadership abated soon, with Ferguson being succeeded by an equally determined Jane Kirkland. During this time, the plan got modified, and suggested two separate centers-the Quick Information Center, which would service the global McKinsey community, and the Pan Asian Desk, which would service the region. Later the Pan Asian Desk was dropped and the Quick Information Center got christened the McKinsey Knowledge Center. 

As the remote-services idea gained momentum, effort began to be put in to finding guardian angels for the project, and soon a set of owners was in place. Kirkland, Kumar, and Neeraj Bhargava, a partner from the Mumbai office, became members of an Advisory Council to drive the McKC idea, while Bhatia continued to be in charge of operations. Kumar took upon himself the task of getting the buy-in of senior firm members worldwide, while Kirkland lobbied with R&I managers in various countries, and Bhargava worked with Bhatia to get the details of the plan in place.  

With buy-in came constructive suggestions to make the plan workable. One of them was to lower the bar of the services that McKC was proposing-it was proposing to support McKinsey’s high-end Practices. This was lowered and a new plan suggested that the center would first cater to quick information needs, and once that gained momentum would it move to provide information support to Practices. And, to McKC’s credit, within a year of its setting up, it began supporting a few Practices by providing them customized data and analysis.  

With a sound plan in place, only the matter of getting the go-ahead remained. In March 1998, armed with a proposal that had passed many hands, and backed by a team of partners and directors, the McKC board went straight to the big boss-Rajat Gupta, the Managing Director of the firm. Gupta approved, and the center was incorporated in February 1999.