Category:Former McKinsey Employees
McKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm whose graduates run other people's companies, and this roster is a compact demonstration of it. Almost everyone here left consulting for a chief executive's office, and the destinations cluster hard in one industry: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, American Express, Credit Suisse and Prudential are all represented by the person who ran them. Around that financial core sit a Federal Reserve bank president, a United States cabinet secretary, a pharmaceutical chief executive and a small group of recent departures who went to startups instead.
Background
McKinsey was founded in Chicago in 1926 and operates as a partnership advising corporations, governments and institutions. The firm is structured around a promotion model that pushes most consultants out within a few years, which is why alumni networks of this kind exist at all. What distinguishes the McKinsey membership from an employer roster like Google's is that the people here are not remembered for what they did at the firm. They are recorded for the institution they went on to lead.
The bank and insurer chief executives
Jane Fraser rose through Citigroup after earlier stints in management consulting and became its chief executive in February 2021, the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank. James P. Gorman moved from law practice in Melbourne through consulting into Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 2006 and led as chairman and chief executive from 2010 to 2023. Harvey Golub came out of consulting to run American Express through the 1990s, retiring in 2001.
Tidjane Thiam was born into a political family in Abidjan and moved through consulting, Ivorian government service and insurance before becoming chief financial officer and then chief executive of Prudential, and afterwards chief executive of Credit Suisse. Thomas Barkin took the other route out of the same firm: he spent close to three decades at McKinsey and has been President and Chief Executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond since 2018, sitting on the Federal Open Market Committee.
Beyond finance
Lou Gerstner ran RJR Nabisco and held senior positions at American Express before taking over IBM in 1993 and turning a company facing breakup into a services business. Bob van Dijk led Naspers and its subsidiary Prosus from 2014 to 2023, overseeing the creation of Prosus as a separately listed European vehicle for the group's Tencent stake. Vas Narasimhan trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School, worked briefly at McKinsey, joined Novartis in 2005 and became its chief executive.
Pete Buttigieg is the political entry. He worked at the firm before serving as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020 and as United States Secretary of Transportation from 2021 to 2025.
The recent departures
A newer and much smaller group left McKinsey for early-stage companies rather than large ones. Alix Maurin spent roughly three years as a consultant specializing in fintech strategy and business banking before co-founding RentFlow. Vivek Rao founded Tesora, which builds tools for insurance underwriting and actuarial teams, and Kyle Reagan founded Chrt, a transportation management platform for time-critical logistics. All three went through Y Combinator. The contrast with the rest of the roster is the most useful thing in it: the older members left consulting to run institutions, and the newer ones left to build software for the industries they had been advising.
See also
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