In 1963 Barbara Minto graduated from Harvard Business School, one of “eight pioneering women,” as she later put it, permitted to attend that year. Her classmates, she recalls, could be “really unpleasant.” One line stuck: “You’re taking a space a man could have!”
McKinsey was opening an office in Cleveland, her hometown, and its recruiters let it be known they wanted a woman with an MBA. Minto applied and got the job. In her own words she became McKinsey’s first female consultant. The firm calls her its first female MBA professional hire.
She didn’t thrive at crunching numbers. She could write, though, and the office’s manager, John Tomb, began handing her the reports. In a 1986 oral history he remembered that she “was so successful” that eventually, he guessed, “every office in the Firm used her on a part-time basis to try to improve the report-writing ability of Associates.” That ability, he added, “often wasn’t exactly what it should have been for graduates of places like Harvard Business School.”
In 1966 McKinsey moved her to London. On trips to the firm’s offices in Paris and Düsseldorf she found the same problems she had seen in the US and in London: findings and conclusions jumbled together, with neither leading in any clear way to a recommendation. Different countries, different languages, the same mess.
So the fix couldn’t be better English. “The problem was the thinking, not the language,” she told McKinsey’s alumni news in 2018. “People were starting to write without working out their thinking in advance.”
She went to the library. She read Jean Piaget, the Bourbaki mathematicians and others, looking for the structure of thought. Editing all those reports, she had noticed that she kept reorganising the ideas into the same shape, a pyramid. A pyramid, she saw, meant there were only three logical rules to obey. “The point above has to be a summary of those below, because it is derived from them.” And the ideas grouped under a point have to be the same kind of idea, in a logical order. The groups also had to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. She shortened that to MECE, and pronounces it “meece,” to rhyme with niece. “I invented it,” as the alumni news headline quotes her, “so I get to say how to pronounce it.” Then: “Well, it wasn’t really I, actually, it was Aristotle.”
She turned the idea into a course and taught it in McKinsey offices around the world. Her first manual, Skillful Writing through Structured Thinking, was soon in demand in every office.
Then came the oil crisis of 1973 and cuts in the London office, and Minto was among those who left. She set up her own business teaching what she had taught the firm. By McKinsey’s account, other big consulting firms, Accenture and Bain among them, later hired her to teach their own people, and in the 1980s and 1990s she sometimes ran four courses a month.
Her course, as her website describes it, still starts the same way. Each participant sends her a long piece of their own writing in advance. She reads it and draws a picture of its structure. Then she draws the one it should have had.