“We want to make ourselves better.” – that line from Bob Sternfels (McKinsey CEO) is not marketing polish. It’s a signal.
Defensive. Reflective. Quietly radical for a 100-year-old partnership.
In a recent Harvard Business Review interview, Adi Ignatius draws out how McKinsey & Company is repositioning itself for an AI-first, outcomes-driven future.
If you lead a consulting firm, hire partners, or advise senior candidates, the implications for management consulting recruitment and partner hiring are significant.
Below are the signals that matter — and what they mean for firms competing for top consulting talent.
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Advisory is being priced out
McKinsey is migrating away from fee-for-service advisory toward outcomes-based underwriting. Roughly one-third of revenue already sits there.
This is not a pilot. It’s a structural shift.
For consulting firms, this changes the economics of senior hiring. Partners are no longer valued for slide output or intellectual range alone. They are valued for:
• Commercial ownership
• Delivery credibility
• Willingness to underwrite outcomes
• Comfort with accountability
For a management consulting headhunter, this alters the brief. Firms increasingly ask for leaders who can carry P&L risk, not just client trust.
This mirrors what we highlighted in AI Disruption in Consulting: Messy Now, Predictable Later (Dec 2025) — pricing follows productivity, not reputation.
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The pyramid is already broken
Sternfels now describes McKinsey as roughly 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents.
That framing matters. AI is no longer a tool. It is labour.
The classic consulting pyramid relied on junior leverage. AI compresses that layer. Value moves up the organisation, faster than most firms planned for.
What we see in senior search:
• Fewer junior-heavy team builds
• More demand for principals, directors, and operators
• Faster promotion pressure without the old apprenticeship time
For consulting recruitment agencies, this explains why demand for mid-to-senior hires feels structurally different, not cyclical.
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Organisation design is the real AI bottleneck
The technology works. The data works.
Structure does not.
Flatter organisations. Fewer approval layers. Faster decision rights. That is where AI programmes stall or scale.
Sternfels is explicit that organisational redesign is what aligns CFOs and CIOs — not model performance.
This has a direct hiring implication. Firms now look for leaders who can redesign organisations, remove layers, and absorb internal resistance. That skill set is rare and expensive.
We explored the same structural pressure across several posts in mid-2025, most clearly in Germany’s consulting market is splitting and PE is in the driving seat (June 2025), where mid-tier firms are squeezed by scale and specialisation rather than talent quality.
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Hiring criteria are shifting quietly
McKinsey is deprioritising perfect academic records. Instead, they are screening for:
• Resilience
• Learning speed
• Ability to work with others under pressure
They are also reopening the door to non-traditional and liberal arts backgrounds for non-linear thinking.
For candidates, this matters. The CV arms race is cooling. Pattern recognition is being engineered out of assessments.
For firms, this complicates hiring. Pedigree alone no longer predicts partner success. This increases the value of a specialist consulting headhunter who understands trajectory, not just logos.
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Reputation and governance are now strategic
After opioids, South Africa, and conflict-of-interest failures, Sternfels frames tighter governance as existential.
Autonomy is being traded for integrity.
In an outcomes-based world, reputational risk is commercial risk. Firms that cannot enforce compliance will struggle to underwrite outcomes credibly.
From a recruitment perspective, this shifts what boards ask for in senior hires:
• Judgment under scrutiny
• Comfort operating within tighter controls
• Ability to lead without informal autonomy
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What this means for consulting firms and hiring leaders
McKinsey is not “dying,” despite how often that narrative appears.
But the old consulting operating model is being dismantled from the inside.
The next phase of consulting will not reward noise about AI.
It will reward firms that reset talent models, pricing logic, and accountability early.
For hiring leaders, the question is blunt:
If analysis is free and execution is priced to impact, what kind of partners do you actually need?
That question sits behind “we want to make ourselves better.”
It should also sit behind every senior search brief in consulting right now.
This post comments on:
Harvard Business Review: “We Want to Make Ourselves Better” – The HBR Interview with Bob Sternfels.
🔗 Read the original article
Authors: Adi Ignatius · Date of publication: From the Magazine (January–February 2026)
Ben Appleton is the founder of Strat-Bridge, a specialist executive search partner to the strategy consulting industry. He works with global consulting firms and senior leaders across the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and beyond — helping them build capability at the Partner and Director level.
