For most of my career I was the person who said yes or no. As CTO or Chief Product and Technology Officer, I owned a budget, signed off on architecture decisions, hired and fired, and answered to a CEO. The work had a particular shape. You gather information, you decide, you communicate, you live with the consequences.
In the last year I have been doing different work. Senior advisor engagements with McKinsey & Company, plus advisory work with a handful of other companies. The shape of this work is different in ways I did not fully anticipate before I started doing it. I want to write down what I have learned, both for my own benefit and because friends keep asking me what the transition is actually like.
The authority you give up
The first thing that hits you, and it hits in the first week, is that authority no longer flows from your title. Nobody on the client side has to do what you say. If you walk into a client meeting and recommend that they restructure their product organization, the executive across the table is free to nod politely and ignore you. There is no chain of command between the two of you. You are not their boss. You are not on their org chart.
This sounds obvious when I write it down. In practice it required a real adjustment. As an executive, I had grown used to a certain kind of conversational shorthand. You make a recommendation, the team understands it as a decision, and the meeting moves on. As an advisor, you make a recommendation and then the actual work begins. You earn the recommendation’s adoption through clarity, evidence, and credibility. The argument has to be tight enough that a busy executive, surrounded by competing voices, decides on their own that yours is the one worth following.
I have come to see this as a discipline rather than a constraint. When you cannot fall back on positional authority, you have to think harder. The recommendation has to be right, and it has to be communicated in a way that survives translation. That is a useful skill regardless of what role you are in next.
What I learned at McKinsey
Working with McKinsey has been one of the most useful professional experiences of my career, and I want to be specific about what makes it that.
The first thing is the craft of an engagement. The way you scope a problem with a client, the way you organize a small team, the way you build a hypothesis early and then test it against data, the way you communicate findings in language a busy executive can act on, all of it is real craft. The frameworks that get joked about in business school, the pyramid principle, issue trees, MECE breakdowns, are tools the firm uses to keep complicated analytical work coherent when several people are working on it in parallel under time pressure. They look schematic from the outside; from the inside, they are how you avoid losing the thread.
The second thing is the standard of preparation. McKinsey teams come into a meeting having read everything, having stress-tested their slides against three internal critiques before the client ever sees them, and having anticipated the executive’s likely objections. That standard rubs off. After a year of working alongside it, I prepare for my own client meetings differently than I did before, and the work is better for it.
The third thing is the quality of the people. The colleagues I have worked with at McKinsey are smart, curious, intellectually honest about what they do not know, and unusually generous with their time on hard problems. The senior partners I have learned from have decades of pattern recognition across industries that I could not have built any other way. The associates and engagement managers carry the analytical load with discipline I have rarely seen elsewhere.
I am grateful for the experience and for the people. The firm has earned its reputation through actual work that I can now describe from the inside.
What the advisor sees that the executive cannot
Here is the thing that has stayed with me most. There is a kind of seeing that becomes possible when you are not embedded inside an organization. As a CTO, I could tell you everything about the team I led, the systems we ran, and the political dynamics of the company I was inside. I could not, in any reliable way, tell you what was obvious to anyone watching from across the street. The internal narrative consumes you. You take on the assumptions of the room.
A good advisor holds the outside view. They are not absorbed in internal politics. They have not adopted the company’s habitual flinches. They can ask a question that everyone inside the company has stopped asking because asking it stopped being safe a long time ago.
This is genuinely valuable, and it is also genuinely fragile. It only works as long as the advisor stays outside enough to keep the perspective. The longer you are around a single client, the more you start to think like them. Part of the discipline of advisory work is knowing when to leave a topic before you become indistinguishable from the people who hired you.
The pandemic year
A note about timing. I made this transition in a year when nobody could meet in person. Advisory work is supposed to be a relationship business, and most of the relationship-building rituals collapsed in March. No client dinners, no whiteboard sessions, no walking the floor of a client’s office to feel the temperature of the place.
What replaced those rituals, in my experience, was a much higher tolerance for video calls and a much higher premium on writing things down clearly. Video flattens a lot of the social texture that consultants traditionally rely on. The compensation is that you can move faster, you can pull more people into a conversation than you ever could in a conference room, and the work has to stand on its substance.
The pandemic also made executives more receptive to outside help, because everyone was making consequential decisions on incomplete information and shorter timelines. Some of the most useful conversations I had this year were short ones. A founder needed a sounding board for a decision they had to make by Friday. A CEO needed someone outside the company to look at a restructuring plan and say whether it held together. The work was less about long deliverables and more about being available, prepared, and direct in the moment.
What I am taking forward
When I go back to operating roles, and I expect I will, I will be a different kind of executive. Less reliant on positional authority. More deliberate about explaining the why. More willing to invite outside perspective into rooms that previously would have stayed internal. The advisor’s habits are useful inside a company too, especially in the parts of the company where the internal narrative has gotten too comfortable.
The transition has been worth it. Not because advisory work is better than executive work, but because the two roles teach different muscles, and the year I have spent working with McKinsey and other clients has developed muscles I had not used. I am better at the operating job because of this stretch, and I expect to keep doing some advisory work alongside whatever I do next.