10 Years in the Blink of An Eye-My McKinsey Farewell

This article is the santized version of my farewell email sent to colleagues at McKinsey in April 2015. The article was also posted on my wechat public account "nulishehui". (文章也发布在我的微信公众号”奴隶社会”上)

When I joined the firm in 2005 in Los Angeles as a fresh Ph.D., I did not think I would stay for 10 years. I thought it would be a 2 year gig (if I wasn't fired sooner than that), and I would then move on to a “real job”. 

Well I did not.

I did get bored after 2 years, and after trying very hard to prove to R that I'm a sane person (though he is probably not convinced till this day)and my Chinese is functional, he took me on a 4 week study with much skepticism. Indeed, what value does a Chinese speaking associate present in China, when you have 1.3Bn native speakers?

After surviving the 4 weeks and many shocks, I wasn't fired and earned the opportunity to receive more shocks… hence the following 6 years in China. I'm constantly surprised at how tolerant the firm has been - as EM (Engagement Manager) I've engineered team events to ensure no leadership could show up; as AP (Associate Principal) I've scared clients away by using their office for pumping without locking the door (okay this really wasn't intentional). Even worse, I yelled at a client and slammed the door behind me just to learn on the same day that I was elected Principal! No wonder when my husband learned the news he said this was the biggest mistake your firm had ever made.

Well, the mistake was made, and I drank my orange juice to celebrate (Our office manager's advice when calling me with the news, as I was pregnant with baby #2 then). That was in 2011.

As a partner you found the firm's “tolerance” is beyond your imagination. I had teams working on HIV infected gay population in China, conducting interviews squatting on the curb of a rural road, or in an hourly hotel room (feel free to guess what people use hourly rooms for). I have brought teams to work on China's healthcare reform by piloting in 3 rural hospitals in western China, where the most luxurious hotel room costs $30 per night and no meal would go by without many rounds of hard liquor. I also went after a big SOE client, getting several partners across the globe to invest weekends to prepare the best proposal in my McKinsey career, just to fail miserably (though in the hindsight it was a good thing we didn't win that proposal). Okay to not put my mentors and evaluators in trouble - I did have “normal” clients too and had reasonable reviews.

To end this stretch of craziness, after my third child was born in 2014, I moved back to California. I have been on a “ramp on” program coming back from maternity leave, and in a way ended the program prematurely by taking the role in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as Director for China program, starting this May.

When I write this note, so many people, so many things and so many experiences flash back in my mind like a movie, and there is no way I could capture them all.

If I distill 3 things from this movie as a good McKinsey partner, they are :

1) Idealism

McKinsey is full of idealistic people. We are driven by passion, a sense of mission and the desire to make the world a better place because we came and we lived. So we take on seemingly impossible missions, invest big in meaningful topics, we go all in.

This idealism also goes on individual level- we see the best in our clients and in our colleagues, we embrace diversity, we inspire and invest in people at all cost. Internally we use values to govern, not rules; therefore we meet the best colleagues, and form the deepest friendship.

2) Perfectionism

I came from an academic background, and when I explain McKinsey to people, sometimes I say McKinsey is like the ivory tower in the business world. This is not because it's secluded, but because it tasks itself to seek the best possible answer, independent of any self-interest.

We put in many long nights because we do not take anything short of perfection as an answer, this becomes a habit in every professional's day-to-day behavior and it is what sustains our value to clients.

3) Meritocracy

Being able to work on both sides of the Pacific Ocean at different tenure, I was amazed at how identical the firm is when it comes to our culture and people process.

Meritocracy and apprenticeship allowed me to grow from a clueless foreign student in the US to an effective business leader at a rapid pace. Looking back I can only be grateful, and wonder what I did in previous life to deserve such an opportunity. Meritocracy and apprenticeship will continue to make our firm uniquely us, and I'm sure it will continue to grow and groom the many generations of leaders to come.

The reason I took this role is the promise to solve some of the hardest and most complex problems facing the world hands on. 2015 marks the last year for achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals and I think the next 15 years will be even more exciting. As a Chinese, being able to do this in China when the country itself is undergoing massive transformation makes this even more intriguing and exciting.

When I joined the firm I was 28. Now at the age of 38, I felt I spent the best 10 years of my life so far in McKinsey, saw the world, solved many problems, made some closest friends in life, and became a mother of 3.

The children will grow, the world will change, our paths will cross and I believe our best times are yet ahead.

Till we meet again.

Yinuo