His profession was one that he virtually invented: top management consulting. As the person who transformed McKinsey & Co. from a nearly defunct accounting and engineering firm into a preeminent adviser to senior executives throughout business and, on occasion, government, his term of service was a remarkable 59 years, from 1933 to formal retirement in 1992 at the age of 89.

What distinguished Marvin Bower was his dedication to values and his personal integrity. As John Byrne noted in an article in Business Week after Marvin’s death in January 2003:

Bower’s ethical sense and values can be traced directly to his early years. The firstborn child of Carlotta and William Bower, Marvin Bower grew up in a family of modest means in Cleveland, Ohio. While the Bowers were not poor, they valued integrity and respect over money. Two years after Marvin’s birth, his brother, Bill, was born.

The Bower family’s emphasis on learning was a major element of Marvin’s childhood. Required reading included stories and poetry, with William Bower keeping track of the books Marvin and his brother read. Marvin read every Mark Twain story twice; as he completed one, he would initial it.

His father was the ideal role model because his work on complex matters of land title transfers had both intellectual and practical hands-on aspects. It involved both technology and law, and required business acumen and very high ethical standards. William achieved national recognition in his field, just as his son would in later years. William Bower regularly took Marvin and his brother on tours of different kinds of industrial plants in Cleveland so they could experience firsthand what each plant was like. Marvin remembered these plant tours as fun and absolutely special because his father sometimes even took off a day from work to tour a plant with Marvin and Bill.³ It is a fair guess that Marvin’s desire to learn something useful and important from any and every experience was inspired by his father. As they would leave each plant, his father would ask, “What did you learn?”

While ostensibly a conservative midwestern family, the Bowers did not emulate the patriarchal structure typical of the time. More democratic in his approach, William Bower sought the opinion of all family members when it came to important decisions. Marvin clearly remembered being included in the discussion when his family was considering a move to the other side of Cleveland. In fact, the discussion itself overshadowed Marvin’s memories of the actual move. As Marvin recalled, “[It was] remarkable [that my father] continued to involve his sons in family decisions. Of course, my input did not necessarily influence the family decision—I can’t even remember what I said—but I did speak up on that and other occasions when I was invited to participate.”⁴ Such events would have been Marvin’s first introduction to a non-hierarchical management structure.

Marvin demonstrated his independent way of thinking early on. In high school he met Helen McLaughlin, the woman who would become his wife. He recalled that his father did not approve of his going steady with Helen: “Dad and I had a real struggle until he learned that I would not give in about going steady.”⁵ His memories of that time also included an influential English teacher, editing a school newspaper, and holding down a wide variety of summer jobs.

Laura Edwards was Marvin Bower’s English teacher in high school. Even at the age of 99, Marvin continued to retain strong memories of her and the effect she had on him and Helen:

Marvin adopted this practice of dealing with people on a first-name basis and made it an integral part of his relationships with others, colleagues and clients alike. He was known to everybody simply as Marvin, and if someone called him Mr. Bower he would correct him or her.

His ability to communicate clearly and effectively was evident in his high school years, when he launched a school newspaper entitled Home Brew.⁷ The school administration did not like the title (this was during Prohibition), but the first-rate quality of the reporting convinced them to allow the name chosen by Marvin, providing him with an early lesson in how powerful good communication skills could be.

Each summer Marvin would work at jobs obtained with his father’s help. He worked as a surveyor’s helper, an ice deliverer, a factory worker, and a Boy Scout camp counselor during World War I when there was a shortage of help. As Marvin recalled, “It was a good experience. I had some real responsibility and I had excellent teachers, so I learned a great deal [despite being only 15 years old]. I collected a tidy sum of money and Father taught me how to save.”⁸ In years to come, Marvin Bower would prove to be frugal not only with his own money but with the money of clients as well.

An industrious young man, he was also adventurous. One summer, he and a friend, John Hamilton, set out to take a bike trip to Buffalo and back.⁹ They thought it would be good training for football. They rapidly found the trip boring—more hills and mosquitoes than expected. After about three days of boredom, they grabbed onto a slow-moving truck. The truck driver did not know they had hitched on and began going faster and faster. Marvin and John let go and smashed into the pavement, fortunately without injuring themselves. A few days later, they reached Erie, Pennsylvania and turned around. The next summer the tenacious Marvin and John again set out for Buffalo, this time using William Bower’s outboard motor on a rowboat they had built. A storm set in over Lake Erie, the motor died, and Marvin and John were washed up on an island. They managed to swim to the mainland, call home, and alert the Coast Guard. That ended the boating adventure for the two high school students. The following year, still set on visiting Buffalo, Marvin came up with a more practical approach: He asked his father if they could go to Buffalo for their summer vacation.

After high school, Marvin Bower attended Brown from 1921 through 1925 at his grandfather’s suggestion. When Marvin reflected on his time at Brown, he mentioned one of the few regrets in his life: “I isolated myself in my fraternity too much. I didn’t take advantage and get to know the full campus of people.”¹⁰ At Brown he met Malcolm Smith, who became a close friend for life, and studied philosophy and economics, the latter being a relatively new academic field at the time.

Two of Marvin’s college professors made a lasting impression on him: One was an economics professor named Patton who used the outstanding text by Marshall to teach principles of economics so they could be remembered. The other was the psychology professor who was very good in dealing with people, and from whom he learned a lot about listening and people.¹¹

Following Brown, on the advice of his father, Marvin went to Harvard Law School, while his friend Malcolm Smith went on to Harvard Business School. Marvin recalled:

Marvin was able to self-fund his law school education—he had saved earnings from his many summer jobs, and by 1925 he had made enough successful investments in the stock market to pay for his schooling.¹³ Almost everyone made money in the stock market in the 1920s, but it was very unusual for a 22-year-old to have been such a careful investor.

For four summers, starting in 1925, Marvin worked for the Cleveland law firm of Thompson, Hine and Flory (TH&F).¹⁴ During the first summer, his assignment was to collect debts for clients of the firm, principally wholesale hardware companies in Cleveland. First the clients’ salesmen tried to get the retailers to pay up, then the wholesalers wrote letters to the retailers; if this proved unsuccessful, they turned the bad debts over to TH&F. When Marvin went to see the retailers—“dunning” them, it was called—he found he had more punch in person than through a letter: His style was so effective that he could persuade many of the retailers to pay up. TH&F continued to use him in that role for the next three summers.

In 1927, in the summer before Marvin’s last year at law school, he married his longtime sweetheart, Helen.¹⁵ Over 70 years later, Marvin still remembered the details of that day—what it cost to rent an awning for the church, the problems of renting a formal suit, the dress Helen was wearing, and of course his friends who attended. The Cleveland News coverage singled it out as the “Wedding Event of the Week.”¹⁶

Their honeymoon was by car—a “new” (secondhand) car.¹⁷ In typical Marvin fashion, this trip was going to be an adventure, and there was no detailed itinerary. The couple started out late, ending up in Erie the first night. (There were no interstate highways back then, although most of the roads in highly populated areas had some sort of paving.) They had planned to tour Nova Scotia, but instead meandered around, visited many interesting places, and met a variety of people. After two weeks, they arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just in time for Marvin to go back to school.

When he finished law school, Marvin was determined to work for a firm he knew he could be proud of. He targeted Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, a highly respected Cleveland law firm. As he told the story, he had not done well enough in law school for Jones, Day to make him an offer, so he decided to go first to the then fledgling Harvard Business School to strengthen his record. His friend Malcolm Smith had found business thoroughly absorbing and was convinced that business was more creative than law.

Once he entered business school in 1928, Marvin confirmed what he had already suspected—that he really enjoyed business. A member of The Harvard Business Review, he was particularly interested in marketing, statistics, finance, and public utility management.

While Marvin was in business school, Helen worked as a teacher (ultimately becoming a principal in Medfield, Massachusetts) to cover their living expenses, with schooling paid for by their stock market earnings. In the summer between his two business school years, Marvin worked for the law firm of Davis Polk in New York, staying in Malcolm Smith’s apartment in Bronxville while Malcolm was away. Marvin’s strategy paid off. After graduating from the business school in 1930, he joined Jones, Day in their corporate law practice.

In 1933, after three years with Jones, Day, Marvin left the firm, plunging headfirst into the business world after he consulted his friend George Dively, a Harvard Business School classmate of Malcolm Smith and a fellow Clevelander, who agreed that such a move was wise. Marvin joined what was then James O. McKinsey’s accounting and engineering firm. Six years later he bought it, and oversaw its transformation into the premier firm in a new profession—management consulting.

Marvin Bower’s foray into the business world would have far-reaching effects on business management throughout the world. He successfully built an eminent institution—and through it a profession—and simultaneously influenced thousands of leaders. His professional life was marked by his commitment to people, his caring about the success of client institutions and promulgation of important ideas, and his absolute integrity. During his almost 100-year lifetime, business went from a second-class profession (for those who even deigned to consider it as a profession) to the engine driving a global economy. Throughout this transition, Marvin was there, anticipating and envisioning the future and recognizing and serving the needs of senior business executives who were faced with huge challenges in a quickly changing world.

As he moved into consulting, Marvin had the opportunity to work with and advise many of the leaders of companies who would lead the charge into less hierarchical structures: Alfred Sloan, chairman of General Motors; Charles Mortimer, chairman of General Foods; Crawford Greenwalt, chairman of DuPont; Ralph Cordiner, CEO of General Electric; John Loudon, chairman of Royal Dutch Shell; Thomas J. Watson Jr., chairman of IBM; and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, with Marvin’s help, dramatically reduced the size of the White House staff and gave his key people an unusual degree of autonomy.¹⁸ At that time, no Republican had been in the White House for 20 years. The Republican National Committee felt that a complete examination of staff functions was necessary, so Eisenhower did something unprecedented: He called in an “outsider” from management consulting to study the problems he and his staff members would encounter as his new administration took over. Eisenhower’s decision to bring in Marvin’s McKinsey team reflected the esteem in which Marvin was held by business leaders to whom the president turned for advice. By the 1950s, Marvin had firmly established his position as a professional who represented the gold standard in consulting—someone who merited unreserved trust and respect for his dedication to the needs of McKinsey clients. (See Figure 1.1.)

Marvin never believed in making money just for the sake of making money to keep score. His commitment to his clients, his partners, and his values was exceptional. He believed that a great service institution was built not only on skills and experience, but most importantly on the behavior and conduct of its people. He was well ahead of his and our time. In 1935, as a two-year associate, he wrote a note to James O. McKinsey stating that he did not believe consulting and accounting could be performed by the same firm without posing a conflict of interest.¹⁹ In the late 1950s and 1960s, Marvin sacrificed a significant increase in personal wealth by selling his shares to his partners at book value when other service firms were going public and their partners taking a lucrative payday. He did not believe that a service firm could consistently place its clients’ interests first if it were a public firm also answering to shareholders. Marvin decided that in order for the firm to grow and survive, ownership should be broad. Because of his adherence to high standards, he was a model for four generations of leaders. In addition to his one-on-one working relationship with senior managers, he used his superb communication skills to reach out to managers throughout the world.

In 1966, Marvin wrote his first book, The Will to Manage, in which he discussed the practical application of his many revolutionary ideas for helping management exercise meaningful leadership in a changing world. In 1975, a letter from the book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill, informed him that The Will to Manage was one of the best selling business books the firm had ever published.²⁰ In 2002, the book was cited as one of the 100 most important business books ever written in the reference book Business: The Ultimate Resource.²¹

Marvin’s unwavering commitment to enhancing the welfare of business and the world in general included his involvement in a variety of business and community services. In 1955, he agreed to be president of the Joint Council on Economic Education. Marvin believed that the U.S. school system, including colleges, was woefully inadequate when it came to teaching economics, and that every citizen needed to have some understanding of economics. The council, founded six years earlier, provided state-of-the-art economic education through state councils and university-based centers. Marvin’s impact in this role was not soon forgotten: Lou Gerstner, who assumed the council’s presidency three terms later, was continually asked, “How’s Marvin doing?”²²

Marvin was also an active adviser to the Harvard Business School and was president and board chairman of the Harvard Business School alumni association. His Harvard-related services included close associations with five of the school’s deans, spanning a 50-year period. Marvin provided advice to Dean Donald K. David on setting up a joint program with the law school. For Dean Stanley F. Teele, who had been an HBS classmate, Marvin was an informal adviser. For Dean George Baker, Marvin studied the school’s organization. For Dean Lawrence Fouraker, Marvin served on the advisory board. For Dean John McArthur, Marvin was a key adviser and counselor. In addition, Marvin was quite active on the board of Case Western Reserve, and was one of the leaders in merging Case and Western Reserve into a single institution.

Marvin also felt he had an obligation to help improve education in the United States at the local level. While a member of the Bronxville school board, he decided that it was important for an outsider to challenge some long-established school practices.²³ Marvin and Helen established an organization in Bronxville with the mission of educating young people on the dangers of drugs—a pioneering version of the now widespread Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. Marvin also encouraged others to give back to their larger and smaller communities. He was active in and supportive of the Volunteer Consulting Group, an organization of consultants providing pro bono help to nonprofit organizations. Finally, in his seventies, Marvin became an elder at the Bronxville Reformed Church.²⁴

Marvin and Helen had three sons: Peter, born while they were still in Boston; Richard, born in Marvin’s first year with McKinsey & Co.; and James, born three years later. While his sons were growing up, much of Marvin Bower’s time was consumed by McKinsey & Co. Perhaps that contributed to his particular intensity when he did focus on his family. For example, when it came time to plan the family summer vacation, Marvin would ask one of his sons what he wanted to do. When Jim answered, “a trip to the Grand Canyon,” that is what they did, donkey riding through the canyon.²⁵ When Dick hot-wired the family Cadillac, Marvin recognized the yen for adventure, perhaps recalling his own youthful mishaps in his quest to reach Buffalo, and grounded his son for two weeks. And Marvin was nothing if not loyal: After Peter joined Campbell’s Soup in 1956, Marvin never touched a competitor’s soup.

Marvin had six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His grandchildren remember a wonderful grandfather who carried a dollhouse home on the train for Christmas, enjoyed watching The Munsters with them, and was an inspiration for their work and their lives, always sending them articles he thought might interest them.

Helen died in 1985 at the age of 81. As Marvin wrote to his family following her death:

Marvin continued: “Clearly you are all loved and have inherited from her, in one way or another, outstanding qualities and have high standards to live up to. It’s hard to imagine a better role model. We share a sorrow we will never get completely over. But Helen would want us all to adjust to it in the spirit she would bring to that task.”

In 1989, Marvin married Cleo Stewart, a neighbor in Bronxville and a longtime family friend. Together they moved to Delray Beach, Florida. In 2001, Cleo died on Marvin’s 98th birthday, but not before she had set him up with round-the-clock care and a project—writing his memoirs.

As Marvin’s 99th birthday was approaching, his son Dick called me to say that he felt it was important that Marvin have a quiet birthday dinner with a few family members. Two days later, Marvin’s secretary called to invite 21 people to the 99th birthday party Marvin was throwing for himself. It was quite a party. Attendees included Fran Allen, the widow of Jim Allen (from Booz•Allen & Hamilton); Juliette Dively, George Dively’s widow; Jack Bennington, the inventor of the Bennington electrical joint, and Marvin’s Sunday breakfast partner; Mac Stewart; Suzanne and Bill Bower, Marvin’s great niece and nephew; friends from McKinsey; and Marvin’s son Dick and his wife Neely. At the age of 99, Marvin continued to be in charge of his life: He was going to celebrate what turned out to be his last birthday in the manner he wanted.

Looking back on Marvin’s long life, a quote from Thomas A. Edison seems appropriate:

Marvin Bower’s vision of and passion for what he later termed management consulting began during his career as a lawyer between 1930 and 1933 at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Cleveland. In 1930, the firm found its practice had largely turned to the cleanup of Depression-ravaged companies. Having done the legal work related to the issuing of industrial bonds by its banking clients, the firm inherited the chore of untangling the obligations of defaulters. Saddled with de facto company ownership through bondholders’ and creditors’ committees, the bankers called upon Jones, Day to help reorganize these companies, or at least wring some value out of the remnants.

Having much more to do with business management than law, these assignments were outside the usual range of a law firm’s work. The 27-year-old Marvin Bower was among the first to hold both a master’s degree in business and a law degree from Harvard, so the law firm put him in charge of these cleanup assignments.

Marvin’s business degree paid off for both him and his employer. Over the next three years, he served as secretary to 11 bondholders’ committees, including those of Thompson Products, Inc. (later TRW), Midland Steel Products Company, Otis & Company, and the Studebaker Company.³ The committees took over the power of defaulting companies’ boards of directors, and Marvin’s role as secretary gave him considerable power.

In this capacity, Marvin investigated potential earning power and suggested recapitalization structures to the bankers and investment bankers. He typically began his search by interviewing the chief executive of the failed company, and then followed up by talking with any other staff members who might have insight into the causes of failure and the company’s ability to recover from disaster. As amateurish and superficial as he later considered this early work, it nevertheless produced meaningful results. The fundamental problem, Marvin learned, was not that the presidents of the failed companies were stupid; in fact, all 11 of them were very smart men. The problem was that they lacked the information necessary for informed decisions.

From his front-row view of 11 business tragedies, Marvin was convinced that the chief executives had been shielded from information that could have saved them. He firmly believed that had the right anecdotes and data flowed to the top and been properly analyzed, 10 of the 11 companies would still have been operating and healthy despite the Depression.

The culprit, Marvin believed, was deference to hierarchy. Employees simply didn’t dare tell the boss what was really going on. The isolation of the CEO, and Marvin’s anger at its disastrous results, kept Marvin and Helen up many nights talking. This experience also strengthened Marvin’s belief in the value of information from a frontline employee—the person selling in the field or building the product on the factory floor—and the value of that person’s knowledge. More often than not, the critical facts that needed to flow to the CEO could be found at the front line.

Armed with this insight, Marvin set out on a mission to help CEOs become more effective by showing them the necessity of eliminating the barriers erected by corporate hierarchy that so severely constrained locating and mining the knowledge inside a company. He recognized that CEOs of companies concerned about basic policy or strategy had no independent, objective advisers to turn to. For legal problems, they could go to a law firm; to raise capital, they could go to an investment bank; but when it came to advice on organizing and running a company, there was no professional firm of the necessary stature.

Marvin gave a name to this needed professional discipline: management consulting. (He later said he wished he had called it “consulting on managing” since he felt that was a more descriptive name.)⁴ In 1933, there were only two types of business advisers: the accounting and engineering firms and individual experts. Although the oldest firms in the field had already been founded—Edwin Booz & Company (now Booz∙Allen & Hamilton) in 1914; McKinsey in 1926; and Stevenson, Jordan and Harrison (now out of existence) in about 1918⁵—their practices were still in relative infancy, and they considered themselves accounting and management engineering firms.⁶ At that time, the only professional top management consulting was provided by individual experts (primarily academics like Frederick Taylor), not by institutions. In fact, it wasn’t until 1950 that Booz∙Allen & Hamilton modified the title on its marketing materials to management consultants, and later, in the 1950s, that Arthur D. Little began calling what they were doing consulting.⁷ And it wasn’t until the 1960s that Boston Consulting Group was founded, and the 1970s that Bain & Company, Monitor Group, and CSC Index were founded.