She was married to a giant in corporate management. Their fund at The Trust supports public education in New York City.
Clothilde de Veze Bower (1907-1999)
Marvin Bower (1903-2003)
Clothilde de Veze and Marvin Bower, the “father” of the modern management consulting industry, married late in life, dividing their time together between homes in Bronxville and Delray Beach, Florida. Marvin was her third husband; Clothilde was his second wife. He honored her with a fund in The New York Community Trust.
Clothilde was born in Manhattan on February 4, 1907, to Fredericka and Henri de Veze. Her first husband, Ernest Gledhill, worked in the textile industry, first as a designer and later as a salesman and executive. He was president of Livingston Worsted Mills before joining Pacific Mills Worsted Co., a division of Burlington Industries, as senior sales executive in 1964. They had one son, E. Richard. Ernest died in 1966 at age 61.
The following year, Clothilde married Charles J. Stewart, the first chairman of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., then the nation’s fourth-largest commercial bank. Charles was president of Manufacturers Trust when it merged with Hanover Bank in 1961. After the merger, he was elected chairman, then retired two years later. Charles died of a heart attack at their home in Naples, Florida, in 1987.
Clothilde and Marvin, the former managing director of McKinsey & Co. in Manhattan, were married in 1988. They were both in their 80s, and he was still heavily involved in management consulting. In fact, he wrote the book on it—at age 89.
Marvin Bower was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 1, 1903, to William J. and Carlotta Preston Bower. His father was deputy recorder in Cuyahoga County. Marvin studied economics and psychology at Brown University, graduating in 1925.
In 1927, Marvin married Helen McLaughlin, who worked to help him through Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. They had three sons, Peter, Richard, and James.
Marvin returned to Cleveland in 1930 to join the law firm of Jones Day, where he was secretary to several committees made up of bondholders of troubled companies. The experience inspired his interest in analyzing management problems. “No one asked why these companies failed,” he said in an MBA magazine interview, “or how much earning power the new bonds could support.”
In 1933, he was hired by James O. McKinsey, a former University of Chicago professor who had a small engineering and accounting consulting firm with offices in Chicago and New York. “Mac was always sensitive to the situations and viewpoints of the people in the client organizations,” Marvin said in an interview for Brown University’s alumni magazine. “He told them the truth as he saw it, even if it risked continuance of the relationship.”
After McKinsey died of pneumonia in 1937 at age 48, Marvin took over the New York branch of James O. McKinsey and renamed it McKinsey & Co. in memory of his former boss. He managed it on the principles he’d learned.
Under Marvin’s leadership as managing director from 1950 to 1967, McKinsey grew to a global leader in the consulting industry. Marvin remained a director and partner at McKinsey until he retired, articulating the firm’s values at internal training sessions and working with clients worldwide. He insisted on impeccable professional standards in substance, ethics, and style. He believed consultants should place clients’ interests ahead of their own and only take on engagements that would lead to positive change.
Some of McKinsey’s high-profile clients included IBM, General Motors, General Electric, NASA, the Bank of England, and the Roman Catholic Church. The firm even advised the German finance ministry on how to rebuild the economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Marvin’s first wife, Helen, died in 1985. He married Clothilde de Veze three years later.
After he retired in 1992, Marvin wrote The Will to Lead: Running a Business with a Network of Leaders, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 1997. In it, Marvin encourages senior managers to abandon command-and-control structures and adopt a program to develop leaders, starting with themselves.
“My view is that authority should be replaced by leadership,” he wrote. “By that, I don’t mean that a business should be run by a single leader, but that it should be run by a network of leaders positioned right through the organization” —leaders and leadership teams working together.
For Marvin, McKinsey & Co. was a firm, never a company; jobs were engagements, not assignments; employees were colleagues. For many years, he insisted McKinsey men wear hats because their CEO clients did. In the mid-1960s, when Marvin realized fashion had changed and arrived at the office bare-headed, colleagues reacted warily. “Should we give up our hats?” one junior executive asked. “I’d wait six weeks,” a partner responded. “It may be a trap.”
Marvin Bower “believed that a great institution was built on the skills and experience of its people, but that their behavior and conduct were even more important to its success,” Jerome C. Vascellaro, a former McKinsey employee, wrote in the Brown magazine profile. “The business world knew him as a man who pioneered consulting and turned it into a highly valued profession.”
Clothilde died in 1999, and Marvin passed away January 22, 2003, at age 99.
Fortune magazine elected Marvin to its Business Hall of Fame. A professorship was established in his name at Harvard Business School. Today, McKinsey & Co. has offices in 133 cities in 67 countries and more than 35,000 “colleagues” who speak more than 135 languages and represent over 140 citizenships.
The Clothilde de Veze Bower Fund that Marvin established in The New York Community Trust helps improve public education in New York City.
Books Marvin Bower published:
“The Will to Manage: Corporate Success Through Programmed Management,” 1966
“The Will to Lead: Running a Business with a Network of Leaders,” 1997
“Perspective on McKinsey,” an internal publication
Other books and materials about Marvin Bower and McKinsey:
“The McKinsey Edge: Success Principles from the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm”
“The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business”
“The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century”
“McKinsey’s Marvin Bower: Vision, Leadership, and the Creation of Management Consulting”