View from the top
McKinsey offers a fantastic training ground for youngsters i n Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, and the consulting firm is looking for young people with a drive for excellence, Joseph Luc Ngai, director and managing partner of McKinsey & Company Hong Kong, told China Daily.
McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm that serves leading businesses, governments, non-governmental organizations, and not-for-profits. Its claimed goal is to help clients make lasting improvements to their performance and realize their most important goals.
A side from Hong Kong , Mc K i n s e y h a s o ff i c e s i n Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen on the Chinese mainland.
Ngai is in charge of McKinsey’s financial institution business in Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, which includes the banking and insurance industry, asset management, and Internet finance.
Hong Kong-born Ngai went to the US when he was 14 and finished high school there. Next came Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, as well as an MBA and a law degree. He is a member of the New York Bar Association.
“When I was at business school, I worked for McKinsey as an associate in the summer. After I graduated, I actually did not come back to McKinsey,” said Ngai, better known as “Joe” Ngai. He explained that it was the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the era of the “dot com” boom. So he teamed up with a couple of friends to launch an e-commerce incubation start-up.
“I did that for about two years, and luckily McKinsey still remembered me from my associate days. So I was able to come back to McKinsey in 2002, and I’ve been with the company ever since.”
The consulting industry has changed quite a bit over the years, Ngai said.
About 70 or 80 years ago, when the business of consulting firms had just emerged in the market, they mostly did strategy consultancy — working with large companies by helping them with strategic choices, especially when these companies wanted to expand or headhunt top management. Consulting firms at the time worked mainly with high-level management such as company chief executives.
Today, strategy consultancy is only about 20 to 30 percent of what McKinsey does, while the rest of the business is quite diverse, Ngai said.
The company does a lot of work around operational excellence, and a lot of work with companies trying to be more digitally savvy.
Many companies on the mainland are trying to transform themselves, trying different ways of making their businesses work, and this is really a broad spectrum of what McKinsey does apart from traditional strateg y work, said Ngai. The company is also embracing a diverse se t of skills to mee t client demand, he added.
Solutions at hand
“We have people who can go to power plants on the mainland to reduce costs, we have people who can go to auto factories and are able to do things around efficiency management, we have people who can go into banks, and think about what to do when interest rates are deregulated.”
Ngai believes that McKinsey can provide great opportunities for youngsters in Hong Kong and the mainland.
“I think people come to McKinsey as it is a fantastic training ground for young people; we are a ver y flat organization, which means that we don’t have many layers between a young person, who has just joined the company, and senior staff in the firm. We go to client meetings together — as a young person, you are very likely to attend meetings with CEOs and chairmen of companies, which is a great learning experience for a lot of people.”
He also pointed out that McKinsey employees travel a lot, so that young people can see a lot of the vast Chinese mainland, as well as a lot of Asia and the rest of the world.
“If you are in your 20s, and you are working at McKinsey, I would imagine that there are not that many places that
Joseph ‘Joe’ Luc Ngai,
would give you such variety of experiences and exposure to the business community.”
Going the extra mile
On the other hand, Ngai emphasized that to be successful in the consulting industry, one needs to have a drive for excellence.
The clients are demanding, the industry is demanding, and the company needs people who strive for the extraordinary.
“If you are a student, of course you can be a ‘B+’ stu- dent, you can be a ‘A-‘ student, but we do want people who want an extra bit more to get an ‘A’, we want people who run the extra bit at the end to win.”
The company also needs people who can fight during tough times, said Ngai, explaining that there are times when things are not going well, there are clients who are difficult, and research can sometimes be tough as well.
“During those more difficult periods, if I look around, I’m looking for people on my
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team, people I feel that I can go to battle with. I want people who can fight, and who can get back up easily.”
McKinsey is also looking for leaders. Ngai noted that the commercial world has too many managers and too few leaders willing to take a stand, people who do not mind being wrong sometimes, people who would rather lead than follow.
Ngai admitted that working in consulting firms can be very stressful sometimes.
“Working hard is part of our
profession, you can’t be intimidated by hard work. I don’t think that our people regularly work 100-hour weeks, but obviously there are weeks that require 100-hour work, and you have to be ready for it.”
He said the most important thing to understand for those working in consulting firms is that when there are opportunities to relax a bit — you have to seize them.
Despite being a busy executives, Ngai has a lot of diverse interests. For instance, sports
is very important to him — he plays soccer twice a week, he enjoys playing golf, and has recently also started to run with friends.
Fo r a l e a d e r a n d a r o l e model at McKinsey, having a diverse social life is also very important, he said, adding that he does some community work in Hong Kong on his own time, which gives him both energy and inspiration.