Bob Sternfels is the new McKinsey boss

DThat management consultancy McKinsey will be led by American Bob Sternfels over the summer. The 51-year-old California prevailed in a runoff election for the global top post against Dutchman Sven Smit on Wednesday from Amsterdam. The personnel decision was made in a secret ballot by 650 or so senior partners of the company.

Sternfals has worked for McKinsey for 26 years, and he will take up the position on 1 July. The amateur pilot is selected for an initial term of three years. After the company was founded in 1926, Sternfels became McKinsey’s thirteenth chief. The 51-year-old father of three children is based in San Francisco. There he began his career at McKinsey in 1994. Americans grew up in Lodi, a small rural town in northern California. He later studied economics, politics and philosophy at Stanford, where he also played water polo and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a member of the McKinsey Board of Directors, known as the Shareholder Council.

Sternfals succeeds Kevin Snyder. The Scotsman was surprisingly denied his second term in late February. Scott did not make it to the final selection of the last two candidates in the election process (with each senior partner scribbling multiple preferred names). It was the first time since the mid-1970s that a maize owner was denied a second term.

Since then, there has been speculation about the reasons for Snyder’s election. McKinsey had recently made negative headlines, mostly due to events that have been originated later, mostly before Snyder took office; But he was left with crisis management. In early February, McKinsey agreed to a settlement of about $ 600 million with 49 states to settle lawsuits over her role in the US opioid crisis. South Africa was involved in a major corruption scandal involving the McKinsey Gupta clan, also because of its cooperation with authoritarian governments in Saudi Arabia, China, and, more recently, Russia, which repeatedly came under fire in McKinsey. According to the company, there was a desire among senior partners for a “visible symbol of renewal”.

Snyder had certainly introduced reforms, he enforced stringent rules in customer selection, such as the need not to work with secret services and some other government agencies in non-democratic countries. How his reforms were received by senior colleagues is not entirely clear. According to a report in the “Financial Times”, his reform efforts of a group of older senior colleagues have gone too far, with some treating him as an interference with his autonomy, while at the same time many young senior peers Would like even more. improvement. Sternfels himself says this in a Interview aired by McKinseyThese reforms are “not the work of a person”. They were decided by a group of high-level partners “including me”.

But there are other reasons behind the curtain. For example because of the in-house asset management “McKinsey Investment Office” – MIO Partners for Short – which has invested a lot of money from older partners and for McKinsey retirees. Some people clearly see that the money is not being adequately managed, and the dispute has already ended in court in New York.