Healthcare Consulting - McKinsey vs Bain vs BCG
Calling all consultants,
Could you please rank McKinsey vs Bain vs BCG in healthcare consulting (1, 2, and 3) and provide reasons for your rankings?
Thanks in advance!
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McKinsey is ranked first for health care consulting by Vault, just as it is for most industries. All three likely have plenty of healthcare work, but Bain and BCG have much more regional staffing models so I'd focus on staffing availability at your office of interest as well (unless you get an offer from McKinsey, which is much more flexible in this regard).
Thanks for your response!
McK being #1 in so many industries should be a clue that Vault rankings aren't very accurate, if anything
Vault surveys (along with others like Gartner) are pretty jank -- it's hard to get to a good survey methodology in an industry in which information is so restricted, so overall brand name ends up being disproportionately impactful
Vault; ha!
As far as I know, and things might have changed since I last took a look at this, but while it may not really be worth your time to really split hairs on whether McKinsey or BCG is stronger in the life sciences, the general consensus within industry is that Bain does not particularly compete well in MBB regarding life sciences work for a few reasons.
The first is that Bain heavily emphasizes their generalist model in their practices, which limits some of their ability to tackle the central, more technically dense issues that are prevalent within certain innovation and product driven industries like pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Not having PhDs or MDs being funneled or specially staffed on these kinds of projects is detrimental when trying to wrap a team's collective heads around concepts or issues fast enough to generate proper insight on as compressed a timescale as a consulting engagement is.
The second is that said expertise is ostensibly sometimes viewed at Bain as a commodity that can be accessed via means like expert calls, a knowledge team, or just researching at the desk. This is perfectly fine for things like CPG, retail, or PE (as seen by Bain's absolute dominance in PE and strong, competitive showings in these other fields) but runs into issues like the ones mentioned above.
However, this does not mean that Bain doesn't compete within any life sciences, pharma, or medicine as a whole. They do a lot of work within the payor space (think insurance providers) and apparently have a decent amount of work when it comes to merger integration and general & administrative work for healthcare organizations, just the competition kind of falls off a lot when talking about these core business issues in the life sciences field.
This was based off of some research I had done previously so a bit (or a lot) may be wrong, so I stand open to being corrected, but these were just the general things that I had gathered.
McKinsey is much better than BCG in healthcare and it’s certainly not splitting hairs
yeh just look at the great job they did with purdue and oxycontin
They are the reference name in the industry and have by far the most knowledge. That’s separate from highly morally questionable and even criminal engagements
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