Wooing in the McKinsey Way …

My blogging frequency is taking a hit … Hope every reader is having his/her own blog reading software so that they are not checking my blog daily just to see that there is no new post.

Yesterday I was reading McKinsey Way and thought of sharing some insights with you guys.

Let’s take a simple case. I go to McKinsey and ask them how to woo a girl next door.

They first go around gathering facts. They collect details such as she leaves for work at 8 AM, sits with her colleague Sachin in the company bus, returns at 8 PM, has North Indian food at the restaurant opposite to her flat, likes North Indians than South Indians, never comes out before 8 AM / after 8 PM and goes for movie or shopping with Sachin in the weekends.

Then they structure the data.

How can Sujayath woo the girl?

- Go to her house, get introduced and somehow replace Sachin on weekends

- Get her mobile number somehow, make blank calls and gradually progress to a date

- Get her email Id / messenger Id, chat with her and gradually progress to a date

- Join her company and replace Sachin in the bus and in the weekends

- Meet her in the restaurant, get introduced and make it a habit to eat with her. Then gradually move to a date.

- Change the hair-style and dressing to look like a North Indian

- Remove moustache

- Read Kushwant Singh Joke books so that some jokes could be sprinkled while talking to her

Now this is not a rigid structure. In McKinsey language, this is not MECE (pronounced me-see), which stands for Mutually Exclusive but Collectively Exhaustive. I remember vaguely that I have heard this term during my B school days. Let make the list MECE …

- Get introduced to her by the following ways and gradually progress to date

o Go to her house

o Get her mobile number somehow and make blank calls

o Get her email Id / messenger Id and Chat with her

o Join her company

o Meet her in the restaurant

- After introduced, attract her by changing the hair-style and dressing to look like a North Indian. It is important to remove moustache.

- Read Kushwant Singh Joke books that could be sprinkled while talking to her

If someone is overaggressive and combines the third point with the second point to make it more MECE, they are breaking the McKinsey rule of magic 3. McKinsey claims that 3 is a magical number and whenever you do a MECE, you end up with a list that contains three elements. So see to that your list is with 3 elements.

After that, they formulate initial Hypothesis which is the gut feel of the result (aka the initial impression based on the facts). It’s basically a problem solving map. Our MECE list itself could act as initial hypothesis. Then they test it and see whether the hypothesis is true based on the facts gathered.

Failed cases:

- Go to her house

o She usually greets visitors after 8 AM without make-up and Sujayath is too tender to receive such a shock

- Get her mobile number somehow and make blank calls

o She has the history of complaining blank calls to police

- Get her email Id / messenger Id and Chat with her

o She is still learning to use messenger and till now all she has learned is to login and logout … Still a long way to chat …

- Join her company

o Her manager doesn’t hire anyone whom he thinks could be potentially intelligent than him

- Look like a North Indian

o Whatever Sujayath does, he cannot hide his south Indian origin, which is visible in every part of his body

So finally they come up with the solution – I meet her in the restaurant and talk with some humor (courtesy: Kushwant Singh). I pay their huge fee and wait in the restaurant just to see that she enters the restaurant with Sachin, the data deliberately omitted by the consultants.