In a world starving for leadership, the world’s most powerful consulting firm stays oddly silent.
But perhaps silence is the message.
I. The Age of Leadership—And Its Absence
We live in an era of paradox.
Never has the language of leadership been more omnipresent—plastered across LinkedIn profiles, TED stages, political manifestos—yet never has actual leadership felt so profoundly absent.
Every institution seems to be fraying at the edges. Democratic fatigue, corporate crises, a planetary emergency. And just behind the smoke: a vacuum.
The question repeats itself like a drumbeat—Where are the leaders?
Surely, if anyone knows, it must be McKinsey.
The revered consulting firm is a perennial confidant to power. Its alumni populate cabinets and C-suites. Its reports guide national policy.
And yet—strangely, perhaps tellingly—it does not teach.
II. The Great Whisper
McKinsey doesn’t run a school.
It doesn’t offer global leadership diplomas or open-access seminars. While institutions like Harvard or INSEAD have branded themselves as fountains of managerial knowledge, McKinsey remains a cathedral of discretion.
Inside the firm, leadership is taken seriously—ferociously. Its internal development programs are more rigorous than many MBAs. But externally, the knowledge is sealed.
No Masterclass. No Coursera. No doctrine. No gospel. Just a whisper.
Why?
Because McKinsey has always positioned itself not as an educator—but as an oracle.
And oracles do not hold lectures. They speak when summoned.
III. Education Doesn’t Scale Like Power Does
At one level, the decision is financial. Teaching is low-margin. Consulting is not.
A leadership program might earn £5,000 per participant. A strategic transformation project can bill £5 million.
For a firm that trades in scarcity, education is risky business—it democratizes what McKinsey’s brand relies on keeping rare.
Knowledge shared too freely dilutes mystique. McKinsey thrives not just on what it knows, but on the sense that what it knows is too complex, too valuable, too confidential to teach.
IV. Power Resists Diffusion
At another level, it’s philosophical.
McKinsey’s brand is built not on mass enlightenment but on selective access. Its knowledge is not disseminated—it is dispensed, precisely, and only to those who qualify.
To teach leadership to the public would require believing that leadership can be mass-taught. That belief, it seems, McKinsey does not share.
V. The Exceptions That Prove the Rule
Yes, there are gestures toward education.
McKinsey Academy exists, quietly, for selected clients. Generation, a McKinsey spin-off, teaches job skills to underserved youth.
But these are exceptions—and their very architecture signals limits. They are designed not to elevate society at large, but to serve specific ecosystems: clients, donors, partners.
The broader public is left to self-help books and LinkedIn sermons.
VI. Leadership as Inheritance
And maybe that is the point.
Leadership, in McKinsey’s universe, is less a curriculum than an inheritance.
It is cultivated in elite echo chambers, sharpened behind closed doors, transferred discreetly among the chosen.
To open it to the masses—to teach it as a public good—would be to rewrite the very logic of elite advisory capitalism. And no firm, no matter how intellectually generous, lightly rewrites its own code.
VII. The Silence Is the Strategy
So perhaps the silence isn’t an oversight.
It’s the message.
McKinsey won’t teach you to lead not because it can’t—but because it believes you’re not supposed to learn that way.
Leadership, in this view, is not something taught—but something recognized, groomed, and ultimately, admitted.
It’s a closed loop.
A knowing glance.
A whisper.
VIII. And Yet…
And yet the world grows louder in its hunger for direction.
As institutions falter and voices rise, the idea that leadership should remain elite, enclosed, encrypted feels… brittle. Even dangerous. The future may not be built by those who wait for the whisper—but by those who refuse to.
In that sense, the absence of McKinsey from the educational stage is both a critique and a provocation.
If the great minds won’t teach us to lead—then perhaps the time has come to teach ourselves.◾️