To help our clients make distinctive, lasting and substantial improvements in their performance and to build a great firm that is able to attract, develop, excite, and retain exceptional people.
 

Enduring values

Our firm is based on professional values and designed for superior performance. McKinsey's aspiration is to provide counsel to senior management on their most important challenges and opportunities, and do so to the highest professional standards. These standards have always meant – and continue to mean – putting our clients' interests ahead of our own commercial interests. We will turn down work unless the value it will create for our client is likely to far exceed the costs of engaging us.

Two fundamental principles have defined our mission since our earliest days as a firm. One is the desire to achieve substantial, lasting improvements for our clients. The other is to build a great firm that will attract, develop, excite, and retain exceptional people. At a practical level our values mean this: wherever our teams are at work around the world, a commitment to professional client service unites them and serves as a compass to guide their conduct, judgments, and actions.

We govern our firm as a private global partnership because doing so ensures our independence and objectivity. It allows us to remain answerable only to our clients and to ourselves – not to outside shareholders. We believe that this approach also delivers unique dividends to our clients in the form of superior knowledge, insight, and performance.