Good morning,
The consulting giant McKinsey is known for producing C-suite leaders, including CEOs. It’s one of the many reasons that roughly 1 million people apply for the company’s 10,000 annual job openings every year.
In fact, the ranks of Fortune 500 CEOs are filled with people who have consulting experience—47 Fortune 500 CEOs have also spent time at top-tier management consulting firms including McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, Bain & Company, Accenture, EY, and KPMG.
But in a new story, senior writer Phil Wahba—my colleague with a knack for analyzing how people make it to the top—notes an important caveat to this trend: Not one of those 47 CEOs has moved directly into the coveted corner office role following their consulting career. They all had jobs at other companies first.
Joel Bines, a retired managing director at AlixPartners, a consulting firm, shared a blunt explanation for why this may be: “There is nothing about management consulting that prepares anyone to be a CEO of anything.”
Bines, who spent 19 years at AlixPartners, wasn’t trying to knock the members of his own professional tribe. Companies often hire former consultants because they’re pre-selected to be strong candidates that come with “rigorous training,” according to Jason Baumgarten, head of Spencer Stuart’s global CEO and boards practice. But the so-called “PowerPoint Picassos”—consultants who have learned how to craft a masterful presentation for their clients—are often unprepared for the actual experience of running a company.
Wahba uses Elizabeth Spaulding’s history as the former CEO of Stitch Fix to illustrate this phenomenon. He writes that in 2020, when Spaulding was named president of the fashion retailer, the company’s shares “soared on the belief that Spaulding, a well-regarded management consultant with pedigree from the elite firm Bain & Company and unimpeachable tech cred, would be the leader to reignite the onetime e-commerce darling.” She didn’t last two years. Spaulding was ousted after sales fell and the company had to conduct mass layoffs.
But Stitch Fix is an exception among large firms. Boards “seem to share Bines’s view that by and large, CEO candidates who have only worked at consultancies, even the elite ones, are not sufficiently equipped with the broad set of skills and breadth of experience needed to lead big, complex companies,” Wahba writes. “And in the process, such boards seem to have saved themselves from a lot of wasted time.”
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
@lilamaclellan
