Million dollar advice: Pamela Thomas-Graham guides client business strategy at McKinsey & Co

Black Enterprise, Oct, 1996 by Tonia L. Shakespeare

If it ain't broke, don't fix it is a motto many companies live by. But for Pamela Thomas-Graham, the challenge is to create a need before there's a crisis. As the 33-year-oft states, "Sometimes it isn't broken, but the seam may be split or there's a crack."

Named partner at McKinsey & Co., the nation's largest strategic management consulting company, in December 1995, Thomas-Graham knows what it's like to break town barriers. She's the first African American female principal at the 40-year-old privately held firm, and one of only three black partners in a company with some 3,000 consultants in 35 countries.

She broke down door number one when she became both the first person in her family and the first student at Lutheran High School West in Detroit to attend Harvard. Kicking even harder, she gained admittance to Harvard's rigorous, four-year J.D./M.B.A. program.

In 1989, after three summers working as an associate at Goldman Sachs in Manhattan (the corporate finance division), Sullivan & Worchester (a Boston law firm), and Bain & Co. (a management consulting firm), Thomas-Graham found her calling at McKinsey. "I found the things I liked about law I could do in consulting," says Thomas-Graham. She felt the business challenges, the intellectually stimulating environment and the structure of McKinsey's corporate culture mirrored the law firm environment.

"Consulting is not an industry many people understand. As a result, most do not look at it as a career opportunity. Some don't even know it exists," says Thomas-Graham. With the downsizing and streamlining of corporate America, however, consulting can be a lucrative option for black men and women who have business expertise and the right connections. "We give people business advice in the same way lawyers give legal advice. For example, it may be to help the client develop a strategy to help them respond to a change going on within an industry. Companies bring us very broad issues. We try to narrow them down and get to the heart of the problem," she explains.

As leader of McKinsey's New York retail practice group and a member of leadership groups for media practice and global marketing, Thomas-Graham juggles anywhere from four to five clients at a given time. Working in a team consisting of four to five people, including a director (akin to a senior partner at a law firm) and an engagement manager (who handles day-to-day affairs for a client), Thomas-Graham and her teammates prepare for what can be a three-to-12 month stay with a client.

Fifty-five percent of her clients are Fortune 500 companies. Her approach is highly analytical. The first few months-or weeks, if the project is short-term-is spent on a fact-finding mission. "A lot of our value is trying to get at the true picture. Often, data will be partially collected or partially analyzed. It's our duty to try to ferret out the true facts," says Thomas-Graham.

That's exactly what she and her colleagues did for a $5 billion global media company (due to a confidentiality agreement, the name cannot be releaset). The client's senior management team had ideas for what was ailing its publishing arm, but they lacked the objectivity to stand back and quantify why things were going wrong. Enter Thomas-Graham.

With her team in tow, she spearheaded extensive market research, analyzed pricing demand, implemented a marketing thrust and changed pricing structure. The model that Thomas-Graham developed resulted in a $7 million profit for the company last year, a 15% increase over the year before.

Once the recommendations were enacted, several pilot tests were made. Thomas-Graham maintained ongoing contact to see how the pilot tests played out. Describing her clients as friends, Thomas-Graham states simply, "I just want them to be successful."