You’re working with a wide range of clients, industries, and regions. You’re tackling issues ranging from organizational transformation to AI implementation. If you work in the MBB, you could collect a starting base over $175K to start and clear over $500K in a decade. If you take the off-ramp, you can enter the c-suite without ever paying your dues beating projections.
Exposure. Versatility. Networking. On top of that, consulting gives you daily access to top leaders – a front row seat to how they think, prioritize, and communicate. Not surprisingly, many top leaders started in consulting. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon spent two years at the Boston Consulting Group. Bain & Company’s alumni roll boasts former CEOs at Hewlett Packard, eBay, Dell, and Burger King. And the CEO of Alphabet, Sunder Pichai, is a McKinsey alum.
THE BEST PLACES TO LEARN LEADERSHIP
Sure, many lawyers, CFOs, and engineers have carved out their own paths to power. If you want to learn how to influence how things get done and run far-flung enterprises, there is no better place to learn than McKinsey & Company according to Time Magazine.
Before Thanksgiving, Time released its latest “Best Companies for Future Leaders” ranking. As a whole, consulting firms rank among the very best spots for aspiring leaders. Near McKinsey, you’ll find Accenture holding the 4th spot, along with PwC (6th), Deloitte (8th), and Ernst & Young (10th). That’s five consulting-driven firms among the Top 10 companies. And KPMG just missed the cut at 12th (with Booz Allen Hamilton landing at 24th).
The big surprise? Think the Boston Consulting Group, which finished 23rd, and Bain & Company, which held the 59th spot. In fact, McKinsey scores way ahead of its MBB counterparts, with McKinsey’s perfect 100-point leadership index score besting BCG and Bain by 15.51 and 17.42 points respectively. That may come as a surprise after McKinsey has seemingly fallen behind Bain and BCG in the Vault Consulting 50, which surveys consultants on quality of work and life satisfaction measures. Beyond the top half of the ranking, however, consulting’s impact was minimal. Aside from the Top 25 (and Bain), there are no other consulting firms that make Time’s Top 100 for leadership.
With exposure to new challenges within different industries, McKinsey accelerates its colleagues’ pace of learning and growth
WHY MCKINSEY IS #1
What sets McKinsey apart in developing leaders? For starters, there is sheer size, with McKinsey stretching across 130 cities and employing over 45,000 people – not counting another 34,000 highly-engaged alumni members across 150 countries. Add than that, there is McKinsey know-how, backed by a hundred years of experience working with the majority of leading companies and public institutions. Even more, McKinsey has invested heavily in both the breadth and depth of its expertise, explains Usama Arshad, who joined the firm in 2023.
“The sheer volume of knowledge and resources the firm has left me astounded. You can think of any topic under the sun, and McKinsey can connect you to internal experts, external experts, knowledge documents—this place has everything.”
Another 2023 McKinsey hire, Eddie Shih, points to intensive mentoring and feedback, describing the latter as frequent”, “straightforward”, and “honest”. In fact, the firm reported last year that it invests $3,200 per employee per year in training and development. Benno Rosenwald, a third McKinsey hire from the 2023 class, also emphasizes how the firm places new hires right in the room with their client’s decision-makers. This gives them daily exposure to varying strategic approaches, communication styles, and political alignments – all while giving them a platform to make an impact.
“During my internship, I appreciated the significant level of access to leadership I was granted, including weekly meetings with the chief strategy officer and the CEO,” Rosenwald adds. “This exposure not only highlighted the human aspects of high-level executives, but also aligned with my future aspirations to become a C-suite executive myself. It reinforced my belief that McKinsey could provide opportunities to interact with and learn from individuals in roles I aspire to hold.”
TECH AND HEALTHCARE LAG BEHIND
IBM snapped up the #2 spot in Time’s 2025 Best Companies for Future Leaders ranking, knocking out General Electric – which tumbled completely out of the Top 100 after being last year’s runner-up. Despite critiques that big banks have lost their appeal, Goldman Sachs climbed four spots to 3rd. In fact, along with consulting, banking was another prime developer of banking talent, as Bank of America (8th), JPMorgan Chase (14th), Citigroup (20th), and Morgan Stanley (22nd) also performed well according to Time’s metrics. Accenture and Procter & Gamble round out the Top 5 respectively.
Big Tech’s influence also swelled once you get past the Top 10 firms. Beyond IBM – which some might classify as a consulting firm – Microsoft and Alphabet can lay claim as the top tech firms for developing leaders. The firms ranked 11h and 13th respectively, ahead of HP (16th) and Honeywell (21st). In a surprise, Apple ranks just 44th – but still ahead of Amazon at 50th. NVIDIA, the world’s leading developer of AI hardware and software, didn’t even crack Time’s Top 100 – despite maintaining the world’s second-largest market cap. Another big name – Meta – only finished 48th. NASA, technically a public institution, held the 17th spot in the tech sector.
Looking for head-scratchers? Neither Berkshire Hathaway nor Tesla made Time’s list, despite posting Top 10 market caps. Disney may excel at creative, but trails in leadership, finishing at 58th. Starbucks just missed the Top 50 by hitting 51st. However, it is a far better fate than McDonald’s – historically a leadership incubator for American teenagers – which didn’t even crack the Top 100 (Try 164th). The same could be said for Target, which ranked 89th – a full 63 spots below Walmart. And let’s just say you shouldn’t feel too optimistic about leadership in healthcare. Among American companies in the Fortune 500, there are four healthcare firms: UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health, McKesson, and Cencora. Only CVS Health ranked in the Top 100 (60th), while the UnitedHealth Group managed to finish just 174th in Time.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
AN AMERICA FIRST LIST
Iron sharpens iron, as the saying goes. In certain regions, there are several leadership-heavy organizations clustered together. That starts with New York City, where 15 of the 38 highest-ranked firms are located. Overall, 24 of the 100 highest-ranked are found in New York – and that doesn’t count another six collectively headquartered in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut. California is home to another 17 Top 100 firm in Time (18 if you count 101st-ranked Salesforce). Illinois – namely Chicago – hosts another 10 firms, followed by Massachusetts with 6 firms dotting the Top 100 for Time’s Best Companies for Future Leaders. While everything is bigger in Texas, that saying doesn’t play out for leadership. Just four Texas companies reached the Top 100 – the same number as Michigan, Washington, and the District of Columbia (with the latter also able to draw from four Top 100 firms in Maryland and Virginia).
According to Time, the 2025 Best Companies for Future Leaders ranking is designed to “identify organizations in the U.S. that excel in nurturing highly influential leaders.” Hence, it excludes top firms that are based or primarily do business outside the United States, such as BP and Volkswagen. To compile the ranking, Time partnered with Statista, identifying and analyzing materials from “4,000 of the most influential leaders from various areas of US society” across various industries and fields.
“The CVs of all of the leaders were meticulously compiled, documenting all publicly available information about their educational and professional experiences” Time explains in its methodology. “Research sources included personal websites, CV/resume documents, corporate bios, social media pages, and news media articles. The selection criteria for leaders in the sample focused on their current roles, emphasizing the paths they took to reach these highly influential positions. For this reason, current positions were removed from consideration, meaning that the data focused exclusively on the roles that brought leaders to their current positions.”
WHAT THE BEST COMPANIES DO RIGHT
The methodology, while ambitious, certainly invites criticism. For one, by excluding current positions and emphasizing past achievements, the ranking serves as a lagging indicator that doesn’t account for the current achievements of selected leaders in an already fast-paced business environment. By favoring the long-term, The ranking also fails to supply underlying data and weights to the variables it evaluated, making it less transparent than it should be. In addition, Time gives an advantage to older and larger firms – a gap it acknowledges during its story in relation to tech firms.
“Strikingly, none of the country’s big five tech firms—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft—are in the list’s top 10,” explains Scott Anthony, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, who was quoted by Time in the story. “This probably relates to the relative youth of these companies, says Anthony says. “People are still making careers in these companies,” versus purposefully developing for a few years and then heading for the door. An exception is Microsoft, which is the oldest of the cohort, founded in 1975; it clocked in at #11, up from 21 last year. Meta, Alphabet, and Apple also rose higher, signs that more alums of these companies are now spreading their wings in leadership.”
What does Anthony see as the top qualities that enable some companies to produce better leaders than others? Anthony says it starts early in employees’ tenures and boils it down to three dimensions: leadership opportunities, regular feedback, and ongoing investment in employes.
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