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Sponsored Longreads: Read the First Chapters of 'Challenger: An American Tragedy'

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The following is an excerpt from Open Road Media’s Challenger: An American Tragedy, the new book by Hugh Harris, NASA’s “voice of launch control,” who recounts the shuttle tragedy that occurred nearly 30 years ago. Buy the book now.

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Chapter One: A Look Back Twenty-Eight Years

Challenger was a spacecraft designed to transport, protect, and nurture its seven-member crew as it transported them beyond the limits of our home planet’s life-support system. There, they would conduct experiments to improve lives on Earth. Among its passengers was the first civilian crewmember, the “Teacher in Space” Sharon Christa McAuliffe (known as Christa), who was already inspiring a generation of school children.

I had watched from the firing room as the twenty-four previous shuttles rocketed upward and successfully returned to Earth. But on January 28, 1986, Challenger was engulfed in a fiery inferno in full view of thousands of people at the center and millions of others viewing the launch on television.

The tragedy produced a myriad of human emotions. For Todd Halvorson of Florida Today, it was an unforgettable introduction to space reporting. Hired the day before, but not yet on the job, he stepped out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn to watch. Burned into his psyche are the pitchfork contrails and the memory of a weeping young girl, pointing upward and crying over and over, “The teacher is up there! The teacher is up there!”

For some young astronauts, it was a “loss of innocence” that took some time to accept. Franklin Chang-Díaz flew on STS-61C, the shuttle mission just a few weeks before Challenger. He and his crew experienced the tragedy from a viewing room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think we were all unprepared to deal with this kind of event,” he says. “From my first flight before the Challenger disaster, to my second flight, after, it felt as if we had lost our innocence. When I went into my second flight—well, it was probably the same way a soldier goes into battle with a few scars. You don’t look at that battlefield the same way you did on the first day. I mean, it was still exciting, it was still wonderful, but we realized it was not child’s play anymore.”

Lisa Malone, then a young public information specialist who would become director of public affairs for the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) twenty years later, recalled, “At the time, I was angry. I was angry at the engineers. I didn’t yet realize how hard space flight was. Later, as I started to go to more technical meetings, I learned the difficulty of managing risk posed by a highly complex vehicle.”

The accident triggered in-depth investigations and denied the nation of human access to space for almost three years. Unmanned launches continued, but our astronauts stayed on the ground.

It brought into question the way management and technical experts worked together. It highlighted the role played by political decisions and uncertain year-to-year funding. It exposed the roadblocks to communication imposed by managers and organizational culture.

It was a chilling reminder that it is safer to sit on the ground than fly into space. But that’s not an option for the human race.

Ultimately, it helped enable 110 more space-shuttle flights and the construction of the International Space Station, which ranks near the top of human achievement.

Dozens of people gave the “go” to launch on that morning twenty-eight years ago, and tens of thousands more had worked on the hardware. Yet, despite all of the investigative probing and some rancorous finger-pointing in the months to follow, no one ever alleged less than a strong desire to do his or her job to the best of his or her ability.

It demonstrated, once again, how much there is to learn as humankind continues to advance the boundaries of science, technology, and human interaction.

On that day, I was the chief of public information for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the launch commentator. This piece will take you on the same journey I experienced in the hours before launch and then along the bumpy road to find the cause of the accident and heal the system.

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Chapter Two: A Cold, Cold Night

The night of January 28, 1986, was the coldest I can remember in Florida. But when I left my house in Cocoa Beach at two a.m., I wasn’t thinking of the cold. I was worrying about getting to the Kennedy Space Center on time.

Every time I served as “the voice of launch control” for a space shuttle launch—a responsibility I had held beginning with STS-1 in 1981—I worried that my car would be delayed by the hundreds of thousands of people who came to watch. If I didn’t get to the firing room on time, the launch would have happened anyway, but I would have felt like I’d let down the team.

But this morning, as I drove toward KSC, I did not find the usual congregation of cars. Very few were parked along the causeway over the Banana River. Normally, even at that early hour in the morning, and eight or more hours before a launch, the causeways were crowded. Families would leave their cars to make new friends or gather around radios to keep track of the progress of launch preparations. Cars would sport license plates from dozens of states—California, Washington, even Alaska. The space program was a source of national pride, and we who were privileged to work in it could not help but be inspired.

But this night was different. The few who had come were huddled inside their vehicles.

In the distance, Pad 39 B and Challenger were sparkling in the pure white light of the xenon searchlights. The thick shafts of light illuminated the rocket vehicle and slanted skyward for many miles.

As I drove toward the center along State Route 3 on Merritt Island, some of the orange groves huddled under blankets of smoke from large bonfires created to help protect the fruit from freezing. Most of the large groves had been flooded or sprayed with water. The temperature of fruit encased with ice does not drop below freezing. Smudge pots were no longer used due to pollution.

The air temperature was in the low thirties and dropping rapidly into the twenties. The smaller grove owners could not afford to protect their groves, and a week later their oranges would be thudding to the ground at the rate of a dozen per minute.

The officers at the first guard gate wore heavy jackets. “Do you think it will go, Mr. Harris?” one asked.

I told them the launch had already been postponed an hour and might be delayed further because of concern due to the cold. I said, “They’re supposed to start tanking around three a.m. If they tank, they’ll try to launch. They have about a two-hour window.”

In capitulation to the freezing cold, the press site looked pretty deserted when I arrived. Normally, the photographers and reporters would be walking between buildings or gathered in little groups for a smoke. This morning they were all indoors.

There were fewer press representatives than normal, as well. The shuttle launches had become routine through the years. About five hundred media had been accredited for Challenger—as opposed to five times that number for STS-1. As I recall, only one of the major networks was covering the launch live.

The science writers typically on hand for launch had a conflict this time. Press briefings were taking place at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where many of the most knowledgeable space reporters were learning what scientists were discovering as Voyager flew past Uranus. Laurie Garrett of National Public Radio described the experience by saying, “Every single minute Uranus was blowing our minds more than the minute before. The moons of Uranus were absolutely the most stupendously puzzling things any of us had ever covered.”

The twelve-acre press site is located at the Banana River Turn Basin, slightly more than three miles from the launch pads. During the Apollo program, barges bringing the rocket stages from Michoud Assembly Facility, just outside of New Orleans, unloaded at the turn basin; now it was the shuttles’ external tanks that were unloaded there. It is just across the road from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB), external tanks, and orbiters were bolted together on a mobile launch platform before being taken to one of the two launch pads, designated Pads 39 A and 39 B. The Challenger launch was taking place from 39 B.

A three- to four-acre, six-foot-high mound had been built along the back of the press site with material dredged up to deepen the turn basin. On top was a 350-seat grandstand fitted with long counters, telephone hookups, and folding chairs, as well as several permanent structures put up by NASA, the major television networks, and the wire services. Another half-dozen office trailers had been brought in by Florida Today, the Orlando Sentinel, the Nikon camera company, and others were split between the mound and the lower level.

The public information office, my home away from home, was located at the press site in a geodesic dome originally bought for the United States Bicentennial Exposition. It also provided working space for media who didn’t have their own facilities. KSC office spaces lined one inner wall of the dome; along the other were several rows of long, counter-like desks for the press with assigned spaces where they could order temporary phone hookups. There were bins for fact sheets and news releases and a bank of pay phones.

A waist-high counter separated the press from the information people and provided space for the press to ask questions. Members of the press were not allowed behind the counter unless they were invited in for an interview or other business.

The flags of the sixteen countries that were partners with the United States for the Spacelab missions and for the future International Space Station flew over the press area.

Down below the mound were several acres of grass and the large, iconic countdown clock at the water’s edge. Many news photographers had used the countdown clock in the foreground of pictures of previous launches. Thousands more posed with it as proof that they had covered history.

For each launch, temporary grandstands were trucked in to accommodate about a thousand VIP visitors. These included the extended families of the astronauts who were flying and guests invited by NASA headquarters or other centers. The immediate families of the astronauts and special guests, such as members of Congress, would watch from the roof of the Launch Control Center.

Approximately twenty thousand other invited guests would be taken by bus or given car passes to park on the causeway across the Banana River connecting KSC and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station about seven miles from the pads. Loudspeakers set up in each location allowed my commentary to keep them informed about what was happening. Public affairs representatives and car parkers at each location helped direct them and answer questions.

I reached the press site about eight hours before the then-scheduled launch time of 10:38 a.m. and went into my office after checking with the staff and saying hello to the press who had come in early. Almost everyone commented on the cold and speculated that we would postpone the launch for a third time.

The launch scheduled for two days earlier had been canceled because of the weather forecast. It turned out to be a perfect day. The attempt of the previous day, January 27, had been scrubbed because sensors showed that the crew ingress door on the Challenger was not securely closed. Once that was corrected, the handle used to latch the door could not be removed without drilling out the bolts. Time ran out, and crosswinds at the shuttle landing facility became unacceptable.

Finally we were at January 28. The day had everything going for it in terms of weather, except the bitter cold.

The first person I called was information specialist Andrea Shea King, who was in the firing room, keeping the press informed on the progress of loading liquid hydrogen and oxygen. “What are you hearing on the OIS?” I asked, referring to the Operational Intercom System, which tied all elements of the launch team together on more than thirty voice circuits.

“It’s been pretty smooth, except for concern about ice on the pad,” she reported. “The temperature is below thirty-two degrees. All the valves on the water lines on the pad have been open slightly all night so that they don’t freeze. Can you see the icicles?”

***

From Challenger: An American Tragedy, copyright 2014, Open Road Media

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Longreads Best of 2013: 22 Outstanding Book Chapters We Featured This Year

This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…

Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

-Duff McDonald on the birth of modern management consulting. Read more from our latest Member Pick, “The Making of McKinsey,” from his new book, The Firm

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The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America

Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words)

 

The American Century

In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life magazine editorial. He was describing the country’s global economic and political dominance leading up to World War II. But Luce was also correct in the literal sense: The American Century had actually started several decades before.

The building of the railroads and coincident spread of the telegraph in the United States in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century helped create the world’s first truly “mass” markets. If an executive had ambition, his company didn’t have to serve just local customers. It could serve an entire continent and beyond, if it had the wherewithal to get the organization and logistics right.

The economic historian Alfred Chandler documented the momentous changes in what came to be known as the Second Industrial Revolution in his seminal book Scale and Scope—the title of which referred to the simultaneous revolutions in both scale (in manufacture) and scope (in distribution) in American enterprise. Those twin revolutions transformed the United States from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse in the span of a single generation. In 1870 the nation accounted for 23 percent of the world’s industrial production. By 1913 that proportion had jumped to 36 percent, exceeding that of Great Britain.

By 1920, when only a third of homes in the country had electricity and only one in five had a flush toilet, the country’s business establishment was embarking on a course of radical, unprecedented expansion. This brought with it a dilemma that has preoccupied business leaders ever since: how to grow big while maintaining control over the enterprise. Moving from a single-product, owner-run enterprise into a complex and large-scale national one is a difficult task. First, you have to build production facilities massive enough to achieve the desired economies of scale. Second, you have to invest in a national marketing and distribution effort to ensure that sales have a chance of matching that scaled-up production. And third, you have to hire, train, and trust people to administer your business. Those people are called managers, and in the first half of the American Century, they were in very short supply.

The benefits to successful first-movers were gigantic. In industries where only one or two companies took the plunge early, they dominated their field for a very long time to come; this group includes well-known names like Heinz, Campbell Soup, and Westinghouse. A ten-year merger mania, from 1895 through 1904, also brought the creation of a number of corporate entities the likes of which the world had never seen—1,800 companies were crunched into 157 megacorporations, including stalwarts like U.S. Steel, American Cotton, National Biscuit, American Tobacco, General Electric, and AT&T.

The key business problem identified during this transition—and one that underwrote McKinsey’s success for several decades—was that a single, central office could no longer adequately administer such far-flung empires. Power had to be ceded to the extremities. The question was how. It was a quandary that beguiled some of the great thinkers of the time, including political scientist Max Weber, who argued that a systematic approach to marshaling resources through bureaucracy was a necessary and profound improvement over pure charismatic leadership.

In his book American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked, Harvard professor Thomas McCraw pinpointed the issue: “In the running of a company of whatever size, the hardest thing to manage is usually this: the delicate balance between the necessity for centralized control and the equally strong need for employees to have enough autonomy to make maximum contributions to the company and derive satisfaction from their work. To put it another way, the problem is exactly where within the company to lodge the power to make different kinds of decisions.”

Companies such as DuPont, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck were the first to address this problem systematically. According to Chandler, DuPont sent an emissary to four other companies experiencing similar issues—the meatpackers Armour and Wilson and Company, International Harvester, and Westinghouse Electric—to ask what they were doing. And the answers were remarkably similar: The innovators moved from the centralized system to a multidivisional structure with product and geographic breakdowns. The concept left operating division chiefs with total control over everything except funding resources. Top managers took a more universal view of the business, monitoring the divisions and allocating capital accordingly.

The most successful companies of the era, such as General Electric, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel, all employed some variant of this model. But by and large, they had developed these ideas on their own, a process of trial and error that was costly and time consuming. They would have much preferred hiring outside experts to help them with it, if only such experts existed. This was a huge commercial opportunity that called for an entirely new kind of service.

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Stepping into the Breach

Unwittingly, the federal government did its part to create the modern consulting business. Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

Regulatory efforts paid another rich benefit to the likes of McKinsey: Restricted from cutting backroom deals with each other, firms were thus obliged to actually compete, which meant they needed to make their operations more efficient. Here again, consultants were the answer.

But perhaps the circumstance that most aided the creation of the consulting industry was the entry of a new, key player into business itself. Empire builders with names like Carnegie, Duke, Ford, and Rockefeller had built huge, vertically integrated companies, but they had neither the time, the talent, nor the inclination to create and carry out management systems for those entities. These were the conquerors of capitalism, not its administrators. And yet, as Chandler pointed out, “their strategies of expansion, consolidation, and integration demanded structural changes and innovations at all levels of administration.”

Into the breach stepped a new economic actor who was neither capital nor labor: the professional manager. Gradually, he replaced the robber baron as the steward of American business. Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary president of General Motors, was the first nonowner to become truly famous for his managing skills. His decentralized, multidivisional management structure gave GM the agility to outmaneuver the more plodding Ford Motor Company and snatch the industry lead. Ford may have revolutionized manufacturing, but Sloan realized that the car-buying market had become big enough to be segmented into people who bought Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs. By the late 1920s, the car market was maturing, and people wanted choice. Sloan also gave them the ability to buy a car on credit—a groundbreaking idea at the time. Before the decade was over, GM had surpassed Ford as the market share leader, a position it didn’t relinquish until the 1980s.

Sloan and his ilk were perfect customers for McKinsey: Lacking the legitimization of actual ownership, professional managers felt great pressure to show they were using cutting-edge practices. And who better to bring those practices to their attention than consultants who were talking to everyone else? This was the beginning of a decades-long separation of ownership from control in corporate America, and the consultant was an able ally to the professional manager in this tug-of-war—an ally who wasn’t gunning for the manager’s job. Thus began the era of managerial capitalism.

For more than two centuries, economists had argued that companies operated in some sense at the mercy of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. But the revolution in management thinking in the United States offered up an alternative idea: the “visible hand” of management, which made things happen, as opposed to merely responding to external market forces.

The academy helped move this ideology along. Before 1900, there was only one undergraduate business school in the country, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Economy, founded in 1881 with a $100,000 donation from financier Joseph Wharton. The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth followed in 1900. Over the next decade, pretty much every major institution started explicitly preparing its students for careers in management.

Although the rise of today’s industrial-farm-style MBA programs is really a postwar phenomenon, Harvard founded its Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908, with a second-year business policy course designed to give the student an integrative approach to addressing business problems, including accounting, operations, and finance. The purpose of the course, according to the school, was to give the student an ability to see those problems from the top management point of view. Much of James McKinsey’s academic writing centered on this very issue and later informed the practice of his firm.

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McKinsey’s Oeuvre

As a young academic, McKinsey was a prolific writer, if not an especially engaging one. His first four books were dry tomes on the nitty-gritty of accounting and taxes: Federal Incomes and Excess Profits Tax Laws (1918), Principles of Accounting (cowritten with A. C. Hodges, 1920), Bookkeeping and Accounting (1921), and Financial Management (1922). But with his fifth effort, he broadened his horizons significantly. Budgetary Control (1922)—the first definitive work on budgeting—turned accounting on its head, promoting it as an essential tool of managerial decision making. “Budgetary control involves the following,” McKinsey wrote. “1. The statement of the plans of all the departments of the business for a certain period of time in the form of estimates. 2. The coordination of these estimates into a well-balanced program for the business as a whole. 3. The preparation of reports showing a comparison between the actual and the estimated performance, and the revision of the original plans when these reports show that such a revision is necessary.”

It seems commonsensical, but McKinsey’s new way of looking at the use of the budgeting process sparked nothing short of a revolution. “No other mechanism of management of similar scope and complexity has ever been introduced so rapidly,” wrote one commentator just ten years later. “It is estimated that 80 percent of budgets installed in industry have been put in since 1922.”

Up to that point, budgeting was a one-way exercise: Accountants added up all of a firm’s expenses and then tossed in a sales projection almost as an afterthought. In McKinsey’s view, companies should start by developing their business plan, figure out how to achieve it, and then estimate the costs of doing so. In this new context, budgeting wasn’t just a ledger activity; it could also be used to identify excellence in performance (i.e., those who outperform their budget), to spot weaknesses (those who underperform), and to take corrective action. “[While] there are many who do not yet plan scientifically … ,” he wrote, “there are few who will deny the merits of the system.”

Two subsequent books fleshed out McKinsey’s ideas: 1924’s Managerial Accounting and Business Administration. The former taught students how accounting data could be used to solve business problems. Using the data of traditional recordkeeping, he suggested the possibility for much greater control over a company’s destiny, including the establishment of standard procedures (how things should be done and to whom information should be reported), financial standards (ways to judge operating efficiency), and operating standards (including nonfinancial measures, such as quality). To today’s business student, this kind of comprehensiveness seems obvious. But at the time, the idea of planning, directing, controlling, and improving decision making by means of regular and rigorous reporting of company results was novel. The latter book contained the seeds of McKinsey’s General Survey Outline—a thirty-page system for understanding a company in its entirety, from finances to organization to competitive positioning. It became part of his consultants’ toolkit sometime in the early 1930s.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the General Survey Outline (GSO). It served as the foundation of his approach to understanding a company and provided novice consultants with a clear road map to do so themselves. The survey also shaped consultants’ thinking: The emphasis in the GSO was more on whymanagers did things, as opposed to how they did them. Using the GSO, consultants started every engagement by thinking of the outlook for the industry of their client, the place of the client in the industry, the effectiveness of management, the state of its finances, and favorable or unfavorable factors that might affect the future of the firm. No detail was too small to take note of, whether it was a study of all firm policies—including sales,production, purchasing, financial, and personnel—or an analysis of whether the layout of equipment in a company’s plant provided for the most efficient flow of the production operations. By the time the young consultant had completed the survey for his client, he knew the company and its business cold.

“You can see McKinsey’s intellectual development,” says John Neukom, who worked at McKinsey from 1934 to the early 1970s and wrote a brief memoir of his time at the firm. “He had lost interest in the details of accounting. By the time I arrived, he had lost interest in the budgetary procedure and was now excited and interested in analyzing companies and seeing how companies worked. He was clearly diagnosing the total problems of the company.” In a 1925 speech at a conference for financial executives in New York, McKinsey offered the kind of pointed insight for which he is remembered: “Usually, I find that the executive who says he does not believe in an organization chart does not want to prepare one because he does not wish other people to know that he had not yet thought through his organization properly. For the same reason many men are opposed to budgets. They are unwilling for anyone to see how little they have thought about what they are going to do in future periods.”

Armed with that insight—and the general philosophy that management can shape a company’s destiny—he decided to set up shop and sell it.

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Bastards Require No Diplomacy

In the mid-1920s, McKinsey began doing business under the banner of James O. McKinsey and Company, Accountants and Management Engineers, the progenitor of the modern-day McKinsey & Company. Strangely for a company that prides itself on getting the details right, the actual date of its founding is unknown—a firm training manual from 1937 suggests 1924, while John Neukom’s memoir says 1925. Whichever it was, McKinsey’s timing was excellent. The economy was booming, and the need for consulting services was seemingly endless.

It is worth noting that the word “consultant” was not in the name of his firm. Rather, the term “management engineers” reflected the prevailing ethos of the time: that science held the answers to most serious questions, and even human commerce could profit from the rigors of this kind of data-driven analysis. McKinsey’s standard working pads have always been crosshatched graph paper, another nod to engineering. The fact that McKinsey himself employed no actual engineers was beside the point.

Intellectual underpinnings aside, the firm’s real-world roots were in red meat. McKinsey’s first client was Armour & Company, one of the country’s largest meatpackers. The treasurer of Armour had read Budgetary Control and wanted McKinsey to help rethink the meatpacker’s approach to budgeting and planning.

The first partner McKinsey brought on board was A. Tom Kearney, who had been director of research at Swift & Company, another Chicago meatpacker. Kearney was a warmer, more congenial complement to McKinsey’s formal and pointed demeanor. Another early partner was William Hemphill, the same treasurer of Armour who had hired McKinsey in the first place.

McKinsey continued to teach at the University of Chicago for a time, but he eventually switched full-time to the firm. One reason he seems to have juggled so many responsibilities is that he didn’t waste time with niceties at the office. In Hal Higdon’s 1970 history of consulting, The Business Healers, one associate recalled him saying: “I have to be diplomatic with our clients. But I don’t have to be diplomatic with you bastards.”(Marvin Bower later modeled his own approach to constructive criticism after McKinsey’s tough love approach.)

McKinsey was blunt, but he was also a quick and agile thinker. He once diagnosed a client’s problems just by looking at the company’s letterhead. A Midwestern maker of air conditioners had stationery that announced “Industrial Air Conditioning Installations—Coast to Coast from Canada to Mexico.” In an era before salespeople traveled by airline, McKinsey observed that travel expenses were probably eating up the majority of the company’s profits and that employees should confine themselves to a radius of five hundred miles around Chicago. He was right.

Even the Depression couldn’t stop the growth of the firm. By 1930, McKinsey’s professional staff totaled fifteen. In 1931 he drafted the General Survey Outline, and the next year he opened a New York outpost in the offices of a defunct investment house at 52 Wall Street—six offices with a reception area. The New York–based consultants busied themselves working not only for local industrial companies but also for investment banks like Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1934, the Chicago office moved to the forty-first floor of the new Field Building on 135 South LaSalle. By the mid-1930s, McKinsey’s partners were charging $100 a day for their services—a giant figure, though nothing compared with the founder himself, who was billing five times that, the highest rate for a consultant in the country.

From The Firm by Duff McDonald. Copyright © 2013 by Duff McDonald. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine

Photo by Jimmy Hahn

Jason Zengerle | Might magazine | 1997 | 19 minutes (4,685 words)

 

Introduction

Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a correspondent for GQ and contributing editor for New York magazine who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past. Read more…

The Woman Who Counted Fish

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jon Mooallem | Wild Ones, Penguin Press | May 2013 | 11 minutes (2,605 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova. Read more…

The Unspeakable Gift

Longreads Pick

A woman with Turner syndrome decides to participate in a study at the National Institutes of Health:

“I arrived at the NIH Clinical Center alone, early, and unprepared. The nurse responsible for checking me in wasn’t even on duty yet. I had packed my suitcase as if for a four-day business conference, not a hospital stay—slacks, blouses, and pumps rather than T-shirts, sweats, and tennis shoes. That was probably a function of my denial as well as my ‘don’t leave home without lipstick’ impulse. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an MRI or CT scan.

“People generally don’t go to NIH when they have a garden-variety illness. NIH takes the sickest of the sick and offers hope. Old and young gather there. The common denominator is illness—the kind so serious that it generates platitudes and whispers. To be a patient at NIH feels like being a contestant on a reality show in which all the cameras are turned on you—or being a lottery winner when the prize is assuming a large debt at a huge interest rate.”

•••

As a bonus, read Steedly’s blog post about how her essay, which she worked on in a writing class in 2007, ended up being published in the Washingtonian.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Aug 20, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,062 words)

Lap Dogs of the Press

Longreads Pick

A 2006 essay by White House reporter Helen Thomas, who died Saturday at 92, on how the press failed to do its job in the run-up to the Iraq war. She recalls one exchange with former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan:

“‘Did we invade those countries?’

“At that point McClellan called on another reporter.

“Those were the days when I longed for ABC-TV’s great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did, and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not around anymore.”

Source: The Nation
Published: Mar 27, 2006
Length: 6 minutes (1,515 words)

Have You Heard the One About President Joe Biden?

Longreads Pick

An in-depth look into the life of the Vice President—and the question of 2016:

“‘He wants to be the best vice president ever,’ staffers told me, months ago, when I first started spending time with Joe Biden. That was all the talk last winter. Hillary would almost certainly be the nominee, not Biden, they said, whenever the 2016 issue came up, which wasn’t often. But then, abruptly, Biden’s stock started steeply rising, at least in the eyes of the public. Washington had been hyperventilating about the fiscal cliff, and Obama sent Biden in to broker a deal. Then came the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Obama sent Biden out to rally the public, Biden in to reason with Congress, Biden over to talk to the NRA. In 2013, Biden has emerged increasingly more visibly potent than his boss. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL VICE PRESIDENT IN HISTORY? one headline proffered.

“‘Well, he would be crazy not to keep his options open,’ staffers started saying then, whenever the 2016 issue came up. Which still wasn’t often. The parlor game was not my reason for being there. I wanted to get to know Biden. I wanted to understand why ‘President Joe Biden’ has such a preposterous ring to it, and I wanted to know if he knew it did.”

Source: GQ
Published: Jul 20, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,089 words)