I worked at McKinsey for just over two years. ‘The Firm’ can be exhilarating and stressful and painful and fun. There are deep lows, but the highs can be extraordinary as well.

I was a ‘non-traditional’ candidate - from a non-target university, and with work experience entirely in startups and small companies. McKinsey never stopped feeling slightly foreign to me; I always felt like I was part-employee, part-observer. What follows are my observations – on the culture, the environment, and the day-to-day work.

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The first thing that struck me was the people. It wasn’t so much that they were smart (though they were), but that they were from such a prestigious pedigree. At McKinsey your colleagues are nearly always from the likes of Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Yale. Or if they’re older: Insead, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, or P&G.

You come across Olympic gold medallists working at McKinsey. People who’ve worked at the top echelons of government. Actual rocket scientists. It’s a melting pot for those who’ve been conventionally successful, and you begin to take this background for granted among almost everyone you meet.

Regardless of background, ‘the Firm’ moulds its consultants into part of a tightly-knit, highly-cohesive culture – one of the strongest I’ve seen for a company its size. Over time, a consultant will begin to talk and even act in a distinct, McKinsey style. You can assemble a team of colleagues from offices all around the world, and they’ll immediately snap together and work as a common unit with this affinity.

So what’s the culture like?

It’s a culture that values intellect over experience; influence over compulsion; logic over emotion; facts over gut feel. It’s left-brained, with a hyper-rational, almost Cartesian view of how business and the world works.

It’s outwardly positive and upbeat. The McKinsey intranet site reaches near-Soviet levels of positivity in talking about the work and achievements of the Firm. Surveys tend to be inflated (below 4 out of 5 is considered shockingly bad score at McKinsey). People are optimists, and very little is seen as impossible.

This upbeat, can-do spirit probably helps the Firm crack the problems others shy away from. But it can also make the place feel occasionally naïve, and frequently unreflective.

It’s also a singular and quirky place, with an abundance of cultural oddities to it that won't be obvious from the outside. For example:

• The Myers-Briggs personality framework is widely used and discussed. You’ll frequently hear people making comments about MBTI types in everyday conversation (e.g. “She’s quite ‘F’, so be careful she doesn’t take it personally”). The classic McKinsey consultant is ENTJ – outgoing, big-picture, hyper-rational, and highly organized. The least common trait is ‘S’ – a focus on the details is not the consultant’s strength
• Acronyms abound for all sorts of internal roles and frameworks. A consultant might say: “Fill out your EPR after you’re done with BAT, but make sure your EM talks to the AP before it’s passed on to your DGL or PD.” McKinsey folks will be able to translate this, but almost nobody else will
• Feedback is frequent and expected. It’s one of the things I liked most about McKinsey – you receive frequent ideas and suggestions to improve how you work. It probably also helps create such a cohesive culture; if you’re acting in a way that’s not “how things are done here”, you’ll quickly be steered away from it

McKinsey teaches its consultants to think in a highly structured way, but the organization itself is rather loose and fluid. I could mostly choose the projects I worked on, and sometimes travelled to work in another office at just a couple of days’ notice. Projects have managers and leading partners, but you never have a set ‘boss’ as you would in other types of organization.

Rules are rarely codified, and seldom enforced to the letter. Exceptions can always be made, and the strength and breadth of your internal network will often determine which way something goes. It’s a norms-, values-, and network-based organization, not a regulation- and-process-based one.

As for the day-to-day, your job as a consultant is to solve problems. You might be developing a marketing strategy, a new organizational design, or simply cutting costs. But regardless of the problem, the vast majority of McKinsey projects will share a common approach.

This approach involves gathering information, analyzing and interpreting that information, crafting your findings into actionable suggestions, filing off the complexities, and presenting it all for client consumption.

That means you’ll be interviewing junior clients, persuading them to give you information, building Excel models, preparing presentation ‘decks’, and sitting in meetings to discuss them.

The work is frequently punctuated by ‘problem-solving’ sessions, where the McKinsey team sits down together to intellectually ‘crack’ a challenge, unblock a project’s most stubborn roadblocks, and figure out how best to proceed.

It sounds sequential, but in practice it’s much more iterative. You tend to start out early with a hypothesis, and even a “week 1 answer”. You then loop through a process of finding information, filling out the gaps in your knowledge, and adjusting the hypothesis and recommendations as you go.

This hypothesis-driven approach is fast, but it can be vulnerable to misjudgement and inefficiency. If your hypothesis turns out to be wrong, you’ll have some horrible re-work further down the line.

Projects are very much “in the weeds” with clients. The classic McKinsey approach isn’t to sit behind a desk for a month and come back with a recommendation. You’re with the clients every step of the way – sitting in their offices, testing and refining ideas with them, delivering interim recommendations. There’s rarely a single “big bang” presentation. You are co-creating the solution with clients, and so the final presentation meeting should contain very few surprises.

McKinsey has something of an obsession with PowerPoint. To convey a thought at McKinsey, you’re generally expected to make a presentation page. Junior consultants spend hours doing this, and there’s even a full-time offshore graphics team to design slides while you sleep.

I was never quite sure why PowerPoint was such an obsession, but I think it stems from a certain insecurity among consultants. They don’t feel sure they've mastered the problem until they can see it substantiated on a page. Perhaps some of them fear their recommendations won’t be seen as credible - or the detail won’t be appreciated – unless they make a detailed ‘pack’ to back them up. The process makes the recommendations feel less about the individual consultant - less about her ideas and credibility - and more about “the deck”.

Ironically the result is often the opposite, and the very abundance of PowerPoint slides makes many clients take recommendations less seriously. I found much of the PowerPoint to be busy-work, and chose to do projects in one of McKinsey niches that generally avoids it (the Firm's turnaround practice).

The Firm has something of an academic feel to it. This is partly because of its history in the detached, hands-off world of corporate strategy rather than the grubby business of execution. Often McKinsey felt like academia meets business to me, and academic terms infect the McKinsey vernacular: a project is a ‘study’; temporary postings are ‘fellowships’; colleagues who’ve been at the Firm longer are ‘higher-tenured’.

In keeping with its academic feel, McKinsey is still a culture that values the business school education, although increasingly the junior-tenured colleagues are electing not to go. Some of the girls choose to opt out of b-school because attending might mean they have to delay starting a family. Some of the guys probably choose to go to b-school for the same reason.

It’s an affluent and rarefied place. Your lunches and dinners are usually paid for, taxis and rental cars are readily available, and you know if there’s a problem the Firm will be able to get you out of it. It’s not a culture of excess so much as one of comfort: whatever happens, you always know everything will be taken care of.

The Firm felt technologically very old-fashioned to me. Microsoft Office is relied upon at the expense of sometimes better tools, and email is still conducted via Lotus Notes. This legacy infrastructure partly reflects the Firm’s obsession with security and confidentiality (cloud-based services are out). Partly, though, I think it’s cultural – technological-savviness is simply not fostered or selected for. A couple of us would write basic scripts as part of projects, but you never got the sense that these skills were highly valued. And while the Firm is making some attempts to improve its digital literacy, it mainly does so by hiring and acquiring – by ‘bolting on’ service offerings rather than trying to change the skills and composition of its core work force. In a world where data and analytics will become increasingly important to consulting, this technological backwardness could be where McKinsey falls behind.

It can be a high-stress environment. McKinsey consultants are frequently performance reviewed, and work under high expectations. Everyone has seen other consultants give in to the stress. People freak out, burn out, sometimes get sick. Yet however bad it gets, most of the stress is internally generated – or at least internally exaggerated – by the McKinsey team itself. When things do go wrong, it’s usually trivial in the grand scheme of things, sometimes even tragi-comic. Maybe you spent a week searching for data that can’t be found, or trying to convince a stubborn client who won’t change their mind. Nobody was hurt, nothing bad really happened; it’s stress mostly fostered by a group of highly-ambitious, highly-strung minds, anxious to avoid perceived failure in an insecure environment.

It almost goes without saying that people work very hard. Hours are long, and travel is frequent. There is a sincere attempt to preserve work-life balance, but it often buckles and breaks against the Firm’s mission to over-deliver for its clients. The work usually far exceeds the resource to conduct the work, and so it often feels like you never really finish a project - you just run out of time.

Despite all of that, it’s not fundamentally a harsh place. McKinsey consultants generally aren’t nasty people, and they’re selected in part because they’re supposed to be likeable. Their nature is to influence rather than demand. The classic McKinsey partner will try and convince you to do a project, and perhaps weave a web of soft incentives and disincentives to get you onboard. But they’ll rarely bark at you and outright force you onto it.

The best thing about the experience is that you learn a lot. This was what made it all worth it for me, at least for a couple of years. You learn heaps of general business skills, from reading and interpreting financial statements, to assessing a business’s cost structure for where to reduce expenditure. You learn ‘softer’ skills too - from networking, to problem-solving, to communication. You also get to see and understand all sorts of industries in a short space of time; I worked in mines, smelters, pharma companies, on consumer products, in the public sector, and elsewhere.

In the end, though, the place has a temporary feel to it. You switch in and out of projects every couple of months, and say goodbye to people you know you’ll never see again. Old faces leave, and others begin to change. Turnover is high, and after a while you no longer even recognize most of the people in the cafeteria. Some do stay to make a career of it, but for most consultants McKinsey is a stepping-stone, not a final destination.

I left at the end of the analyst programme to do other things, but I don’t for a second regret the choice I made in working there. It was a great couple of years.