Success Quote by Marvin Bower

In the blandest possible phrasing, Marvin Bower smuggles in a radical demand: grow up. "Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered" reads like corporate wallpaper, but it’s really an attempt to launder power through procedure. Bower, the longtime leader of McKinsey, helped define modern management consulting as a secular priesthood of metrics, memos, and dispassionate judgment. The line is a creed for that world: if you can make choice look like inevitability, you can make authority look like neutrality.

The specific intent is discipline. Bower is arguing against the executive’s two favorite vices: intuition elevated to genius and politics disguised as strategy. "Facts" signals rigor and repeatability; "objectively considered" is the crucial modifier, because it implies facts are plentiful and malleable unless filtered by trained minds. It’s also a quiet pitch for expertise. Someone has to decide what counts as a fact, which facts matter, and what "objective" means inside a company with incentives, egos, and careers on the line. That someone, in Bower’s ecosystem, is often the consultant.

The subtext is both moral and tactical. Moral, because it frames decision-making as character: rationality as virtue. Tactical, because it offers a defensible shield. When a layoff, merger, or reorg is justified as "objective", dissent can be recoded as emotional or uninformed. Bower’s maxim still resonates because it describes an aspiration we need - and a rhetorical technology we should question.