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McKinsey's Marvin Bower: Vision, Leadership and the Creation of Management Consulting. By Elizabeth Haas Edersheim. New York: John Wiley, 2004. xiii + 305 pp. Figures, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 0-471-65285-7.
It is telling that Elizabeth Haas Edersheim's biography of Marvin Bower is entitled "McKinsey's Marvin Bower," since the management consulting firm that Bower refounded in 1939 and directed through its most important years of expansion from 1950 to 1967 remains Bower's lasting legacy. Almost everyone agrees that Bower, who inspired both awe and fear among his contemporaries, was both a formidable figure in management consulting and the self-professed architect of the modern profession. Although largely a hagiographic account, Edersheim's biography is a good starting point for business historians who wish to understand the history and institutional impact of McKinsey & Company during the twentieth century.
Edersheim describes how Bower, who was a graduate of Harvard Law School and held an MBA from Harvard Business School, engineered the rise of a small, almost bankrupt "management engineering" partnership into the formidable force that the London Sunday Times once called "the McKinsey Mafia." Bower, whose productive years straddled the "middle half" of the twentieth century-from 1925, when he graduated from Brown University and entered Harvard Law School, through 1967, when he stepped down as managing director of McKinsey & Company-continued to serve as McKinsey's symbolic leader until his death at the age of ninety-nine in 2003. For many years,...