From the Interview with Jonathan Day
McKinsey & Company
London, July 14, 1999
Claus Otto Scharmer

[I was born] in Cleveland. My mother’s family came over from Russia, my father’s from Germany… I got interested in two things: One was computers and IT. … The other was cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. ..

This actually happened… a few years later, in ’74 or ’75. I’ll never forget it. I was at Johns Hopkins at the time. We had put one of the first installations of Unix, the operating system from Bell Labs, onto a minicomputer. I had printed out the source code for the operations system within a binder. A friend and I drove from Baltimore down to Gulfport, Mississippi. He liked to drive, and he drove this old car all through the night as I read page after page of this binder. It was right about dawn and we were coming into Mississippi, the sun was coming up and I suddenly realized how the whole thing fit together. … I do remember that moment very clearly, as the sun was coming up, and suddenly realizing, ah, now I see how all these bits fit together.

I think I got a bit disillusioned with it for three reasons. …

When I first moved to Palo Alto, my neighbor’s greeting was "What are you into?" I thought, "What am I into?!" Are you into macrobiotic? Are you into this? Are you into that? … It was a rootless place, and I suppose I had this image of England as a place where people had roots sunk deeper into the ground. I didn’t even make a decision at that point, or think, "oh, I’m going to end up in London." But I suspect that I was anticipating that later experience...

I was in the divinity school for three years. I did a master’s, had a good time, but at the same time realized that an academic career was probably not who I was or what I needed to do. I fell in with a group of four people who were leaving or had left academe. We started a little consulting firm in 1982, which I ran until 1990 when I came here…

In 1990 I had an offer to come to McKinsey. I had been running Amethyst for just over seven years. I had a new partner, who is still running the firm. It was finally making pretty good money, but it was time to go...

I think in many ways the heart of our aspiration for this practice is to fundamentally change the way that consulting is done and to build a model of consulting that is about quite deep dialogue that sometimes turns into projects... not to sell studies of change management or transformation, not to sell anything, actually. But it is fundamentally a different model than most of McKinsey is operating under at the moment. The dominant model is you store up some knowledge, and knowledge is an asset that you package, codify, and then teams take the knowledge and they deliver it….

I think the consulting process is much more like a therapeutic process than it is a science or engineering… It means someone is helping the clients, individuals or groups, confront the outside world.

Now on the one hand, it is absolutely not the case that these are solo acts. I mean the notion that GE is Jack Welch -- You could almost argue that GE created Jack Welch, rather than Jack Welch created GE. On the other hand, these top people are really important and there is something special about them. And there’s even something special about the formal authority that they are given, that I think often brings out changes in these individuals. I don’t think we understand this…

The technical aspects of the cost reduction program are absolutely worthless, because you’re not coming along and telling your client how to cut costs. Nor is there any particular value in a structured process in a computer if it tells you how to cut costs… [Instead] we are taking a team, a McKinsey team that is usually a sort of idealistic, young, highly motivated, flexible, energetic group, and putting them in to the client in a way that they interact and they live together. And they go off, usually to the client’s factory and they have these experiences together, they work all night, you know, go driving to Mississippi. And what happens is that certain aspects of the depths of the team are mirrored by the client…. What’s actually connecting, heart speaking to heart, is not at this level… it’s at that deeper place.

It’s a bit like the line in The Little Prince, where the little prince says to the guy, "I’ll make you a present of a secret." And the secret, as I recall, is what is important is invisible to the eye. I think that’s true here. What is important is invisible to the eye. And yes, we can observe, observe, observe, and measure, measure, measure, but at some level the things that are extremely important to observe are more hidden from view….

Three themes and insights emerged from the conversation with Jonathan Day. The first one deals with the tacit dimension of client relationships. Considering the most successful client interventions, Day suggests that at the heart of these episodes is not the transfer of technical knowledge but a deeper collective experience in the context of the mixed client/consultant team. These deeper experiences arise when project teams go through periods of very intense work that ultimately leads to breakthroughs and a deeper heart-to-heart bonding among the participants. Says Day: "They could be going off and building a wall together, or cooking a meal together, but it just happens that we’ve created an encounter [of this type]around cost-cutting. What’s actually connecting, heart speaking to heart, it’s not at this level, it’s at a deeper place."

The second major theme of this conversation concerns accessing organizational experience. How does one acquire rich and deep descriptions, rather that superficial ones, of what is actually happening in a company? That is, "What does it feel like to be part of McKinsey or Intel or Microsoft?" Day suggests that without tapping into the experiential and aesthetic groundings of a company we cannot really understand high-performing organizations and systems. "I think a sense of aesthetic shock or discovery has come many times when I have encountered a company, or a group within a company, where that kind of alignment was really present."

The third theme concerns the relationship between CEOs and the organizational whole, about which, according to Day, we understand only very little. This relationship works both ways. Says Day: "You could almost argue that GE created Jack Welch, rather than that Jack Welch created GE. On the other hand, these top people are really important and there is something special about them. And there’s even something special about the formal authority that they are given, that I think often brings out changes in these individuals. I don’t think we understand this…"