McKinsey continues reign as top CEO factory
Once again, a number of studies have emerged proclaiming McKinsey & Company as the world’s leading CEO factory. But while the firm’s reputation for expertise and business acumen holds firm, there are also risks related to a C-suite monoculture emerging around prestigious consulting firms.
Speaking on the Big Take podcast in May 2025, Matt Boyle, of Bloomberg News, was invited to explore the concept of the CEO factory, and how it was changing. For decades, General Electric was known as the pre-eminent CEO factory. But in recent times, the picture has shifted – particularly when its conveyorbelt misfired, and delivered a troubled tenure of Jeff Immelt as its own CEO. The firm later turned to another growing factory, Danaher, to appoint his replacement Larry Culp.
But if GE isn’t the top CEO factory anymore, who is? Working with Live Data Technologys, Boyle built up a changing list of top CEO factories. And as the years ticked by on the model, something quickly became clear.
Boyle explained, “When we looked at where every public company CEO from the past 20 years has come from, or worked, we generated three data sets over five-year periods, which showed how the factories have risen and fallen... As soon as I saw the chronological breakdown... professional services firms and consulting firms slowly and steadily occupied nearly the entire top ten of the list. McKinsey, Accenture, the Adecco Group, EY, Deloitte and PwC. You start to think ‘Where’s IBM? Where’s GE?’ Well, they’re still there, but much further down.”
This confirmed something earlier research had already hinted at. In 2023, a study from OnDeck examining the LinkedIn profiles of CEOs, it found that consultancies – in particular strategy brands – had risen to the top of the pile. But why?
Elite finishing school
The prestige around strategy firms – particularly the three largest, known as the MBB – suggests that the high-level work that the firms undertake for top companies and governments quickly gives their staff an expert overview of the markets they are dealing with. At the same time, it gives them insight and experience in having to make crunch-decisions geared towards pleasing shareholders.
Leading all the other factories on that occasion was McKinsey & Company – often cited as the world’s leading strategy brand. OnDeck used LinkedIn’s company search tool to calculate that 7.1% of McKinsey’s former employees had graduated into the role of CEO, while there is also a growing list of government leaders that have the firm somewhere on their CV.
Despite a series of public scandals implicating the company – most notably involving its alleged role in the US opioids crisis – a further report from Fortune has suggested that McKinsey’s status as a CEO factory has only grown since then. Among McKinsey’s current 65,000 active alumni, 52% of those who left as senior partners later became CEOs – while even among those who left as entry-level analysts, 13% later held CEO roles.
McKinsey does actively look to cultivate its status as a CEO factory, of course. The firm actively tracks its alumni, keeping detailed records of their trajectories and broadcasting their promotions and accolades – with an estimated 90% of its ex-consultants engaging in at least some alumni gatherings each year. But while it might be worth noting that these figures are only available because of that tracking, and many other potential factories might not, a one-in-two chance that your ex-partners become a CEO somewhere else is generally accepted as being well above average.
So what is it that makes these people so utterly irresistible to corporate entities looking for new leadership? Fortune spoke to some of the 28 CEOs from McKinsey currently helming Fortune 500 or Global 500 firms – and they noted four key lessons they learned with the strategy giant.
Perhaps most obviously, problem-solving and judgment were at the core of McKinsey’s training – supplying its strategists with the tools to break down complex problems into solvable parts, and sharpen their judgment through pattern recognition. Meanwhile, these transferable skills were supplemented by the opportunity to bolster their exposure and confidence on the job; as from day one, new starters are given complex tasks, and rare access to senior decision-makers.
Third on the list, Fortune said, were communication and influence skills. No plan is worth anything if it can’t be clearly communicated to the people who need it, so learning to challenge assumptions and align diverse stakeholders around a shared course of action was as important as problem solving. Finally, the bosses pointed to honing their sense of initiative constantly at McKinsey, and the ability to be self-authored, and inventive across a range of industries, functions and roles is a great skill for life as a CEO.
Commenting on the experience gained from time at the firm, Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels explained, “I don’t care how long you stay, what matters is whether you have unrivalled development while you’re here.”
Safe pair of hands?
What may also help is that ultimately, businesses – and their shareholders – crave stability. For all the talk of wanting to disrupt or corner new market segments, they clearly favour a degree of certainty, or if that is unavailable, then familiarity. Centralising the CEO factory around several consulting firms – with McKinsey at the centre – has the potential to deliver that. After all, as Senior Partner Shelley Stewart told Fortune, while there might be “who were 15 years apart at McKinsey” now heading up different firms, if “they get in a room… there’s that common bond – a shared vocabulary.”
That “common bond” is undoubtedly a positive for shareholders; the “shared vocabulary” is a signifier of the economic booms during which McKinsey saw its prominence reach stratospheric heights in the 1980s and 90s. But whether more of the same is necessarily a good thing this often is up for debate.
The world’s largest consulting firms find themselves in a difficult market at present, with growth having slowed dramatically in many of its largest segments. In part, this is attributed to a feeling among clients that they have been receiving ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions for problems which have evolved in complexity. Laying off half the workforce, or cutting pay and conditions, to steady the bottom-line in the short term may still please partners and shareholders when the annual dividend arrives – but it is not sustainable when a firm needs fresh talent to address a new set of unforeseen challenges in another month’s time.
At the same time, were a bubble to emerge around a certain hypothetical form of technology, and one business either fail to acknowledge that, or push ahead out of the short-term potential, C-suite homogeneity built around that firm could prove disastrous to both their employers, and the wider economy. Hypothetically, for example, if the trillions of dollars in investment having been sunk into AI, and the only actual economic growth it yields derives from construction of the data centres it runs upon, a firm insisting the world should upend every mode of business it has to incorporate that technology could be extremely dangerous – especially if its alumni were taking that message into hundreds of the world’s largest companies.
Elsewhere in the Fortune profile, McKinsey was revealed to be rebuilding its intake and training around AI fluency. Historically, McKinsey’s recruitment requirements emphasised IQ and RQ – intelligence and relationship quotients – as key to consultant success, while in the 2010s it added “capability quotient,” signalling the need for deep expertise in some fields. Now, however, AI fluency is non-negotiable described by Senior Partner Liz Hilton Segel as a “core capability of the next chapter”. Meanwhile, 40% of McKinsey’s global portfolio now involves helping clients adopt and scale AI and its related technologies.
Sternfels added that looking ahead, the firm would be seeking to augment its human consultants – something which critics might say is reducing the opportunity for genuine learning and expertise. In a reimagined junior level analyst role, there will be “no more PowerPoint production. No more data aggregation. No more basic synthesis”. In that vision, McKinsey hopes it will leave time for “creative, discontinuous problem-solving and human-to-human interaction.” But the sweeping overhaul may also strip away the other talents that made McKinsey such a CEO factory in the first place.
