05 Dec

Retired McKinsey & BCG Partner Bill Matassoni’s Memoir is an Insightful, Entertaining Read

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Finance T&T Executive Editor Loren Moss just finished the recently released  “Marketing Saves The World by Bill Matassoni, a retired executive who made partner at both McKinsey Consulting and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Matassoni’s entrance into the consulting world was somewhat unconventional; he had been working in marketing and at nonprofits before McKinsey tapped him to handle messaging and internal communications.

On the set of the Bill Matassoni show. All photos courtesy of Firms Consulting.

The book is published by strategy training organization Firms Consulting. At less than 100 pages, Matassoni takes the reader from his time as a recent graduate from western Pennsylvania through his first stints before even considering consulting, when he was working on United Way campaigns in conjunction with the NFL.

He then progresses to touch on how the consulting firms changed from the 1970s through the 1990s, diverging from time to time to tell personal stories, about his wife and how he met her, about his house and trips to Anguilla. Most of these diversions were interesting, a few funny. Matassoni shares a lot of praise for past colleagues, but saves specific ire for former McKinsey managing partner Rajat Gupta—who ended up in prison after Matassoni was gone.

The book doesn’t go very much into the nuts and bolts of consulting, and is not a “how to get hired” text, but is probably useful for either the young professional who is considering a career (or stint) in consulting and wonders what the feel or “personality” of the industry is like. The only real error I noticed in the book was that Matassoni talks about Clayton M. Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and cites the author’s research on “floppy disks” when it was actually on the hard disk manufacturing market. We reviewed an advance copy of the book, so this may have been corrected in the final edition.

In the end, the book is a short, fun read for anyone interested in, or probably even more so, has been involved in the management consulting industry, especially in the US. Firms Consulting is offering the book via Amazon, available on Kindle.McKinsey & BCG Partner Bill Matassoni’s Memoir is a Quick, Enlightening Read

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