The image of Bower receiving the news of McKinsey's death while sitting in a office surrounded by accountants is probably not a stretch, given the breadth of the merged firm's accounting resources. In the months ahead, McKinsey, Wellington would fall on hard times after the loss of a major client, and the escalation of a dissension between the firm's New York and Chicago offices.
The Feast of the Epiphany
In the fall of 1939, McKinsey, Wellington's New York office would be renamed McKinsey & Company, the Chicago office would become McKinsey Kearney & Company (the predecessor of A.T. Kearney & Co.), and Oliver Wellington would withdraw to return to Scovell, Wellington & Co. The splitting off of Scovell, Wellington and the renaming of the Chicago and New York practices were all part of a reorganization plan McKinsey consultants credit Bower with having authored. Just how Bower — within less than two years of McKinsey's death — managed to reformulate the firm amidst high-spirited sparring among the firm's partners is a testament to his political savvy. Such a role also allowed him to better position the firm with his own unique ambitions.
In an as-yet-unpublished autobiography*, Bower talks about how, as a young attorney at Jones Day in Cleveland, the issue of independence as it relates to serving clients came to make a sizable impression on him.
At the time, the law firm's managing director, Frank Ginn, declined to take on a sizable piece of business related to the merger of two steel companies because he was convinced that the merger would violate antitrust laws. Despite the fact that the client suggested it was prepared to lose the case, Ginn had turned them away. Later, the firm that took the case fought and lost.
On this particular occurrence, Bower writes: "If the independence and professional stature of Jones Day had not been established up to this point, Mr. Ginn's one brilliant and courageous professional decision established it then."
The fact that Bower effectively broke off from a profession to pursue consulting made him perhaps more driven than others to raise the stature of his new line of work. For his part, McKinsey continued to maintain a connection to both the accounting and academics professions, and alternately appears to have enjoyed the ego-massaging perks of both. For Bower there no longer were such perks. Having cast his lot with a fledgling profession, he found that any perks would now reside exclusively in the future.
Be that as it may, Bower's new firm would be headed by Guy Crockett. Having from the start backed Bower's reorganization plan, the 57-year-old accountant-turned-consultant made a sizable capital investment in the firm, an act his deputy, Bower, would some time later label as heroic.
"Crockett was the head, but Bower was the drive and the idea person," says Ron Daniel, who served as the firm's managing director from 1976 to 1988 — a span longer than any other McKinseyite except for Bower, who would ultimately take over from Crockett and lead the firm for 17 years (1950 to 1967).
Another former McKinseyite, who worked closely with both Bower and Crockett during both their tenures as managing director, put it another way: "There was no comparison between them. Crockett was an accountant."
Within the years that followed McKinsey's death, the "accountant" label became internal code for someone not well-suited for consulting work, the idea being that accountants lacked certain people skills and were not "broad-gauged" enough to address complex problem-solving.
Colleagues say Bower himself frequently expressed the view that with the exception of his esteemed mentor, those people who made good accountants would not likely make good consultants, given the different "success factors."
"There's a whole emotional side to a human being that's very important to the consultant, and great consultants are seldom dependent on the mechanics of problem-solving," says Jon Katzenbach, managing partner of Katzenbach Partners and former McKinsey director. "Consultants are better at really relating to the individual situation and making things happen, and I don't know of anyone who did this better than Marvin."

The Last Lion: Marvin Bower and his Quest for Professional Independence

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