Success Quote by Marvin Bower

Bower is smuggling a moral argument into the language of management, and he does it with the quiet confidence of someone trying to make a profession out of commerce. “Convinced” signals doctrine, not preference: he’s not proposing a nice-to-have culture perk, he’s asserting a first principle. The pairing of “behavior and conduct” with “skills and expertise” is deliberate symmetry, meant to puncture the default corporate belief that results excuse everything. In Bower’s framing, competence without character is not merely risky; it’s incomplete.

The phrase “sought to build” matters because it casts values as infrastructure, not rhetoric. This isn’t a leader bragging about personal virtue; it’s a claim about design. He’s pointing to systems that reward certain choices and punish others, the unglamorous mechanics that turn “we value integrity” from a poster into a constraint. That’s why the destination is “an enduring, values-based institution,” not a high-performing firm. Endurance implies succession, institutional memory, and reputation that outlives any one rainmaker.

The context is mid-century American corporate expansion, when management consulting was professionalizing and selling trust as much as analysis. McKinsey, under Bower’s influence, had to persuade CEOs that outsiders could be intimate with strategy without becoming mercenaries. Values, here, are market positioning: a way to make discretion and independence legible, to charge premium rates, and to protect the franchise from the corrosive logic of “whatever the client wants.” The subtext is a warning: expertise scales fast; conduct is what keeps the scaling from turning predatory.