Reinvention

Few consulting firms are as well known as McKinsey & Company, partly because the business has been around for so long (nearly a century and counting). To get ahead of the perception that McKinsey’s historical value comes with an old and rigid worldview, the firm needed a business-to-business campaign to illustrate its unexpected flexibility.

SpecialGuest partnered with Peter Dahlstrom, head of Client and Firm Communications at McKinsey, to bring the Reinvention concept to life. Employing the same kind of applied design, engineering, and creative thinking that’s kept McKinsey relevant for so long, SpecialGuest and creative technologists Espada y Santa Cruz designed and built a kinetic, shape-shifting sculpture to represent the firm’s ability to adapt to client needs and a business landscape that’s forever in flux.

Inspired by the varied work McKinsey has done with its clients, the sculpture could be programmed to display an endless number of 3D pictograms, a metaphor for McKinsey’s core competencies and value proposition. Its moving parts were strategically deployed to take on multiple and precise shapes, from an underground mine to an airplane. For the sculpture’s components, SpecialGuest chose a simple, clear sphere to speak to the firm’s global presence and energy that enabled McKinsey to reinvent itself.

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“The way the film has been done applied design, applied engineering, applied operations to build these things. It’s both in function and in form a great illustration of how we’re helping our clients reinvent themselves and how we reinvent ourselves to help our clients,” said Dahlstrom.