The McKinsey Edge: Success Principles from the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm

CHAPTER FIVE

Become a Thinker and a Writer

I hope you were able to think about more principles as you read along. In Chinese, there is an idiom that literally translates to “raise one and infer three” and means to deduce multiple things from one core idea. The origin comes from Confucius, who told his students that he would not teach them any lessons unless they were able to infer three things from one teaching.

Thinking Sets Leaders Apart

McKinsey hires people who love to think (don’t say this if you ever go for an interview, show it!). Thinking is the proof of our existence, as French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes so eloquently said, “Je pense, donc je suis (I think, therefore I am),” in Discourse on Method, almost 400 years ...