The shadow of a giant: His 'way we do things' set leadership standards for multiple generations.

• Author: Horton, Thomas R.
• Position: Endnote

RALPH WALDO EMERSON once described an institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. How long one shadow can become, how long it can last, and how many institutions it can affect were dramatically illustrated by a modest, understated friend we recently lost in his hundredth year, Marvin Bower.

Much more than the founder of management consulting, which he almost single-handedly created, applying lessons from the field of industrial engineering and shop-floor efficiency studies to executive management and the boardroom, he was responsible for setting professional standards that still prevail today.

Bower was born before the Ford Motor Co. sold its first car, before the Wright Brothers became airborne. He graduated from Brown University in 1926, the year I was born -- also a very long time ago. Lindbergh had not yet crossed the Atlantic nor Gertrude Ederle the Channel, nor Al Jolson the silver screen. Calvin Coolidge was explaining that "when great numbers of people are out of work, unemployment will ensue." Rather than joining that group, Bower went to Harvard, earning both a J.D. and an MBA.

A few years later he was interviewed by former University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey, who had started a firm of accountants and engineers and very much liked Bower's belief that the standards for such a firm should rival those of the law or medicine. Bower, who had worked briefly for a Cleveland law firm with bondholders of troubled companies, soon joined this fledgling organization. Sadly, McKinsey died of pneumonia four years later, at only 48. A.T. Kearney, one of the two remaining partners, kept the Chicago office, naming it for himself, while Bower characteristically named the New York-based practice for his departed partner.

McKinsey became the model for its industry and today advises 100 of the world's 150 largest companies. When Bower turned 60, he sold his shares back to the firm at book value, far less than he would have received on the open market. ("Would the Vatican go public?" asked Bower. "The First Marine Division?") Bower's teachings were in his actions, not just in his words.

Still, earlier in his career, in 1966, he wrote a book, The Will to Manage. To my knowledge it recognized for the first time the power, or even the existence, of...