The Speech that Defined McKinsey

The Speech that Defined McKinsey Annual McKinsey & Company Partners’ Conference Tarrytown, New York October 16 and 17,1964 MR.MARVIN BOWER: Since our last conference, since we last met together in this conference, we have lost by death two directors. Howard Smith, in the sunset of his career, died of cancer and Bob Hall, in the high noon of his career, was snatched out of the sky. These two men have made great contributions to the good things that we have here, and I’d like to pay tribute to them by simply saying that; but more specifically, to illustrate in some of the remarks that I make the contributions that they made so that they would be more real than just words. In these discussions that I’ve carried on over the years I’ve tried to pull together these meetings in terms of a single theme, and that theme is the role of the firm and the individual and what the firm’s program means to the individual. As I did that a good many years ago, I used to prepare very thoroughly for it: I would write it out and get it thoroughly in mind, and then I found that as the…