> In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions
This is certainly not my experience. Sure, we might not be talking to every entry-level employee (we'll interview some of them if need be), but we definitely talk to all levels of managers. The normal meeting cadence is 2-3x "touchpoints" with working teams and one "steerco" (C-suite) meeting every 2 weeks to update them on progress. We usually get a team room on client site, so pretty much everybody is aware that we are there, and we are more than happy to have a coffee with you anytime. (If you ask and they say no, that is kind of a red flag IMO.)
It sounds like the projects you have seen would be CEO-level secrets regardless of McKinsey's involvement. But I personally never had a project on e.g., digitalization or AI that doesn't pull in the relevant non-C-suite stakeholders of the client.
> Why is the "tier" of your university important here?
I made the point just to provide a counterexample to the notion that consultants don't have technical depth. Of course this is not always true - we all operate outside of our expertise area at some point; I had to learn the steel industry from scratch in 2 weeks for a client - but I just wanted to show that some of us do bring considerable technical expertise, not an MBA.
This is certainly not my experience. Sure, we might not be talking to every entry-level employee (we'll interview some of them if need be), but we definitely talk to all levels of managers. The normal meeting cadence is 2-3x "touchpoints" with working teams and one "steerco" (C-suite) meeting every 2 weeks to update them on progress. We usually get a team room on client site, so pretty much everybody is aware that we are there, and we are more than happy to have a coffee with you anytime. (If you ask and they say no, that is kind of a red flag IMO.)
It sounds like the projects you have seen would be CEO-level secrets regardless of McKinsey's involvement. But I personally never had a project on e.g., digitalization or AI that doesn't pull in the relevant non-C-suite stakeholders of the client.
> Why is the "tier" of your university important here?
I made the point just to provide a counterexample to the notion that consultants don't have technical depth. Of course this is not always true - we all operate outside of our expertise area at some point; I had to learn the steel industry from scratch in 2 weeks for a client - but I just wanted to show that some of us do bring considerable technical expertise, not an MBA.