In the burgeoning 1980s, business leaders in the United States, and later in Europe, made value creation and cross-border competitiveness a priority, which intensified merger and acquisition activity. And technology raced ahead, demanding new investment.

As the business leaders of the 1980s were challenged to meet these new priorities, we felt the need to ramp up our ability to support them. We expanded the scope of our recruiting to increase our breadth and depth of experience as well as the diversity of our consulting staff. We also invested heavily in codifying our knowledge and making it accessible across the firm, laying the foundation for the true global network that McKinsey is today.

This commitment to building knowledge spurred an increase in books authored by McKinsey consultants. Tom Peters' and Bob Waterman's In Search of Excellence, a runaway success, sold more than 5 million copies and occupied the top spot on the New York Times best seller list for more than 2 years. Richard Foster's Innovation and Kenichi Ohmae's Beyond National Borders were heralded as major works. And the McKinsey Quarterly won a place among the world's top business and academic publications.