Politics & Power Quote by Marvin Bower

In the mouth of a 20th-century management apostle, this is less a friendly plea for fairness than a blueprint for corporate power: strip away the messy human story, keep the measurable output. Marvin Bower, the McKinsey architect who helped professionalize consulting, is arguing for a regime where legitimacy comes from results. It’s meritocracy as operating system.

The line works because it pretends to be expansive - rejecting nationality, personality, education - while quietly narrowing the definition of worth to whatever an institution chooses to call “performance.” That’s the subtext: performance is never just a neutral score. It’s a metric designed by someone, in a culture, with incentives. The quote’s clean moral posture (“should be judged”) masks a hard managerial move: make evaluation portable, comparable, and defensible. If you can’t be judged by pedigree or charm, you can be sorted, promoted, fired.

Context matters. Bower built his worldview during decades when American corporations were scaling fast, globalizing, and trying to look scientific rather than clubby. Postwar faith in professionalism and systems made “objective” assessment feel not only efficient but ethically superior. Yet the exclusions are telling. “Personal traits and skills” gets tossed out with nationality and education, as if character, creativity, empathy, or judgment were irrelevant unless they show up on the scoreboard.

It’s an ideal that can puncture discrimination and nepotism, and it’s also the rhetoric that lets companies ignore structural barriers while congratulating themselves for being “performance-based.” The sentence is a corporate creed with a halo: righteous on the surface, quietly ruthless underneath.