Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Because these scammers have hit on an M.O. to which writers are particularly susceptible, that’s why. And there are a lot of hopeful writers out there, so the scammers can ask for small amounts of money (making it look low-risk to the targets), and make bank on volume. - The Dial
Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have
Dead Parrot BBS: “There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. That may sound like faint praise. A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet, preserve elaborate page layouts, run a presentation, or provide many of the conveniences we expect from modern applications. What it does instead is store text in one of the simplest and most widely understood forms in computing, and that simplicity is a large part of why it has lasted.
Almost Nothing to Go Wrong – The Unicode Standard defines plain text essentially as a sequence of character codes, without the additional formatting information associated with rich text. Fonts, colors, layout, and similar presentation details belong somewhere else. From a user’s point of view, the important part is simpler: the file contains the text itself without requiring a particular application to make sense of it.
I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web server, open it in a terminal, search it with command-line tools, edit it with any number of programs, or send it to somebody using an entirely different system. Very little about the file depends on how it was created. That is different from many document formats, where the information is closely tied to the application or family of applications that understands the format.
Sometimes that is harmless. Sometimes the format is well documented and broadly supported. In other cases, opening an old file means hoping that suitable software still exists. Plain text has very little of that baggage…”
The vast resorts and luxury hotels of France’s Tarentaise Valley are renowned in the ski world — but just to the south, the less-visited Haute Maurienne offers quieter delights
It was 4pm on a sunny afternoon in the Easter holidays, a couple of days after the last snowfall. From high on the mountainside, I looked across the valley to the upper slopes of Val d’Isère, the ski lifts clearly visible and yet belonging to a different world.
In that celebrated resort, the race for powder means the slopes can get skied out within hours; by now attention would be turning to the terrace of the Folie Douce, where the champagne corks would be popping and DJs ramping up the volume. Here, above the little village of Bonneval-sur-Arc, we were alone, enveloped in silence, standing at the top of a slope of deep, unskied snow that dropped for 700 vertical metres. It was the kind of prospect you might expect on a heliski trip, or as the climax of a long back-country tour, but we’d come straight off a chairlift. We dropped in, relishing the knee-deep powder that sparkled in the sun as it was thrown up around us, and the seeming miracle of having it all to ourselves.
Seen on the map, Bonneval and Val d’Isère are neighbours — just 10km apart as the Alpine chough flies — but they sit at the top of different valleys: Bonneval the highest village in the Maurienne valley, Val d’Isère the highest in the Tarentaise. In summer, they are linked by a narrow road that snakes up and over the Col d’Iseran, the Alps’ highest paved pass. But from November to May, when the road is submerged by snow, they become the dead-ends of their respective valleys, which is where any similarities end.
The Tarentaise, which zigzags west to Albertville, is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ski resorts. As well as Val d’Isère, there are big hitters including Tignes, Les Arcs, La Plagne, Courchevel and Méribel. Together they offer about 475 lifts (more than the total mustered by every resort in Colorado), at least 50 five-star hotels, 17 Michelin stars and a decent chance of rubbing shoulders with a Beckham, a Clooney or a royal.
Meanwhile, the Maurienne curves like a giant U through an altogether less glamorous, less-celebrated realm, also dotted with ski areas but places you’re much less likely to have heard of: Bessans, Val Cenis, Aussois, La Norma, Valfrejus. There are no five-star hotels — in fact, the most famous buildings are five early-19th-century forts, built to cut off the upper valley (then owned by the king of Sardinia) from the rest of France. The closest thing to a celebrity is probably local son Joseph Opinel, the late inventor of the wooden-handled pocket-knife (who even has his own museum). But what it lacks in luxury and gastronomy, the Maurienne more than makes up for in other ways.
I drove with my family from London, via the Eurotunnel and a night spent just outside Cambrai. Entering the Maurienne, we followed the motorway south until, at the bottom of the U, it disappears into the Fréjus tunnel (then pops out in Italy). Instead, we turned north on a local road into the Haute Maurienne, the upper valley getting wilder all the time. Through a forest of spruce and larch we got glimpses of the monumental limestone walls of the forts, the white peak of the Dent Parrachée behind, then finally some skiers, slaloming across snow-covered pastures to the village of Termignon.
You could easily come by train — direct services from Paris to Modane, near the entrance to the Fréjus tunnel, take as little as four hours — but it’s useful to have a car. For rather than a conventional ski holiday, based in one resort, the unique thing about a trip here is that you have the whole of the upper valley to explore. Since 2018, the six laidback Haute Maurienne ski areas have offered a deal whereby any six-day lift pass includes a free day at each of the other resorts. Together they claim 350km of pistes (actually more than Val d’Isère/Tignes, though the lift pass is half the price).
It makes sense to base yourself in the biggest, Val Cenis, itself an amalgamation of three villages, Termignon, Lanslebourg and Lanslevillard (joined by lifts and pistes since 2007). For a first-time visitor or idle website scroller, such a blizzard of unfamiliar names can be off-putting but in practice it couldn’t have been simpler. We were staying at Les Chalets de Flambeau, a collection of self-catering apartments with balconies overlooking the pistes, an indoor swimming pool and sauna — not chic but very comfortable, welcoming and good value, much like the valley as a whole. We arrived in time to pick up our rental skis from the little parade of shops next door — a restaurant, a bar, a pizzeria and a tiny Sherpa mini-market where we sent the kids to buy bread in the mornings.
The next day, we stepped out straight on to the slopes. Val Cenis is a decent “mid-size” area, with 125km of pistes rising from 1,300 to 2,800 metres, so a good mix of above and below the tree line. It’s also north-facing — though it was the end of March, the snow was still in excellent condition and we shot about exploring, from the forests of Lanslevillard up to the Lac du Mont Cenis, a half-frozen high-altitude reservoir beside the Col du Mont Cenis and the Italian border. We only stopped for lunch when we caught the smell of hot cheese coming from La Ferme du XXIII, a cosy restaurant next to the piste serving Savoyard classics, where kids can finish the meal with a trip to feed the goats in the barn downstairs.
For anyone used to slopeside restaurants of the Tarentaise, the prices were a welcome surprise — €7 for a plate of cheeses from the local co-operative, €3.50 for a crepe, €8 for a half-bottle of local red. A nice surprise too to be able to walk in without a reservation, on a Sunday lunchtime, and have a choice of tables.
In fact, the biggest surprise of the day was the lack of other people. Not only did we not have to queue for the lifts, but at the top, we’d often find we had the entire piste to ourselves — a mystery, when just to the north, the Tarentaise would be packed.
In the coming days I tried to unravel that mystery, in which geography, history and state interventions all played a role. Partly though, it was simply a quirk of the calendar: this was the first week of British schools’ Easter holidays but French pupils would be stuck at their desks for at least another week. So Brit-favourites in the Tarentaise would be flooded with families, while the more francophone Maurienne stayed quiet. (In Val d’Isère, for example, UK tourists make up 40 per cent of the market, outnumbering even the French, at 34 per cent; in Val Cenis, 78 per cent of overnight visitors are French, only 4 per cent British.)
All of which would be of little interest to those outside the industry, except the school calendars are the same at Easter next year: for British families in search of silent pistes, opportunity knocks.
But why did the two valleys develop such different clienteles and personalities? Ironically, the Maurienne was once the better connected and more international of the two. Lanslebourg was a busy staging post for travellers heading to and from Italy over the Col du Mont Cenis, a route used by Charlemagne, Napoleon and JMW Turner. In winter, local guides or porters known as “marrons” would bring them back down to the valley on a “ramasse”, a chair set on two wooden skis. A 1643 account describes a group of diplomats from Tuscany climbing back up to the pass on mules in order to make the thrilling descent a second time — possibly the earliest recorded example of alpine wintersports.
In 1868, a British company opened a steam railway up and over the pass, designed to offer a direct connection to the Italian rail network and thus cut two days from the time taken to send mail between London and colonial Calcutta. Edward Whymper devoted a chapter of Scrambles Amongst the Alpsin the Years 1860-69 to this “marvel . . . an important portion of the high road to India”. His enthusiasm was unsurprising. After all, this was 20 years before a railway reached Zermatt, and Courchevel was nothing but a patch of rough grass known only for its tendency to scratch cows’ tongues.
The ingredients were there for tourism to take off, but when the Fréjus rail tunnel — then the longest in the world — opened in 1871, the Mont Cenis mountain railway was abandoned and Lanslebourg found itself bypassed, its innkeepers and porters suddenly without work. The population collapsed — by a third within a decade, and 50 per cent by the 1920s — leaving the upper Maurienne an obscure backwater. Worse was to come in the second world war: most of the residents evacuated when the area was occupied by Italian soldiers, then shelled and set on fire by retreating Germans.
The mountain railway was completely dismantled — most of it sent to Brazil — but, at the end of our first day, we skied down its route, now the 11km-long Escargot, which the resort claims as Europe’s longest green (beginner) run, the kind of modest superlative that sets the tone for the place.
Another morning, we drove the 25 minutes across to Aussois on the southern flank of the Dent Parrachée. Ordinarily, there’s enough hassle involved with skiing to make the idea of moving between resorts deeply unattractive but this was easy: we parked at the side of the road (for free), put on our boots and walked five metres to the piste. Aussois is home to fewer than 700 people and felt even more peaceful than Val Cenis, a fresh blanket of overnight snow muffling any sounds. With no one around we didn’t even bother going into the back-country, instead simply skiing the powder that lay deep on the pistes. When the weather closed in and we retreated into the Montana restaurant, at the top of the main chairlift, we found it empty — beaming staff ushering us in like long-lost friends.
While the residents of Lanslebourg were returning at the end of the war to find their town destroyed, in the Tarentaise grand plans were afoot. Courchevel was founded in 1946 as France’s first purpose-built resort, backed by the national and local governments, designed to stimulate the postwar economy of a depopulating rural area, to compete with the resorts of Switzerland and Austria, and (ironically) to make skiing accessible to people from all walks of life. The topography of the Tarentaise was ideally suited to big, interconnected resorts, with high plateaus and multiple side valleys — rather than the mainly much steeper-sided Maurienne.
Courchevel was a success and prompted the launch of successive state “snow plans”, using subsidies, cheap loans and planning support to encourage rapid ski resort development. There were projects across the Alps and Pyrenees but the Tarentaise was the centre of activity. Gradually the new resorts’ webs of lifts and pistes grew so big they intermeshed to create vast linked domains: Les 3 Valleys, Paradiski and the Espace Killy. When the Olympics came to the Tarentaise in 1992, it supercharged their international appeal.
And all the while,the Haute Maurienne was snoozing, or at least developing far more slowly. We spent the week alternating between Val Cenis and the other resorts of the valley. Up above the 19th-century forts, La Norma was a revelation — purpose-built, pedestrianised, billing itself as somewhere family-focused, but with a cult following among freeriders. As we skied empty, easy runs under blue skies, we looked across at tracks dropping from the ridge above us, steep, sinuous and like something from an Alaskan ski movie.
But the jewel is Bonneval, hidden from view, 20km up the valley from Lanslebourg. The drive there started with steep switchbacks up and over an ancient rockfall, then dropped down across the wide Bessans plateau (a centre for cross-country skiing, with 120km of groomed trails). Afterwards the valley narrowed again, the road running alongside the river Arc through groves of alder and ash. We saw a group of chamois on a high flank, then drove through the remains of an old avalanche, a gap cut for the road between white walls towering above the car, like a portal to an upper world.
Arriving in harsh sunlight, Bonneval felt positively Himalayan — in fact prayer flags flew from more than one balcony. While the villages of Val Cenis, rebuilt after the war, are not going to win beauty contests, secluded Bonneval was spared from destruction. Clustered around a 17th-century church, its old stone houses have larch rafters topped by lauze slabs; the whole village has been protected as a listed natural monument since 1971.
Above rise nine ageing lifts and 32km of pistes but though small, it is exquisite — high, north-facing, with abundant off-piste opportunities. There’s one restaurant on the mountain, Le Criou, a cosy spot with thick stone walls, a wood-burning stove and a sunny terrace hemmed in by snowbanks.
The stone bell tower of the church in Bonneval-sur-ArcLater, Jérémie Silva, the director of the valley’s tourist office told me that when a journalist had previously named Bonneval as their favourite resort, he’d had complaints: “People just don’t want to see it change.” So far, there’s little evidence of that. Bonneval is too small to tempt mainstream tour operators, while the rest of the Haute Maurienne stays happily hidden in the shadow of its illustrious neighbour.
Handing back my skis in the rental shop, I got chatting to one of the staff, a keen young ski mountaineer about to set off to ski the east face of the Dent Parrachée. It’s a beautiful route — the kind you might see on posters and in ski movies, feted on pro skiers’ bucket lists — why wasn’t it more famous, I wondered? The reply was simple: “Ah well, this is the Maurienne . . . ”
Details
Tom Robbins was a guest of Peak Retreats, a UK-based operator specialising in the French Alps, and the Haute Maurienne tourist board. Peak Retreats offers a week in a two-bedroom apartment at Les Chalets de Flambeau from £396 per person, based on four sharing, including a return “FlexiPlus” Channel crossing on Eurotunnel LeShuttle, or from £426 during the 2027 Easter holidays. Dalcin Shophas a week’s ski rental from €84. Lift passes are dynamically priced; a six-day Haute Maurienne pass, with unlimited skiing at one ski area and a day at each of the other five, currently ranges from €158 to €237
Why are you reading this? Do you believe in chance, probability, conspiracy, serendipity or synchronicity? Theories on coincidence range from “Show me the numbers!” to blind faith in “God’s wink.” As the world gets smaller, the questions around coincidence are getter bigger. And there’s advantage in answering them. As Steve Jobs says “creativity is just connecting things.” Here’s some current context:
1. The Butterfly Effect: Can the beating of a butterfly’s wings in New York cause an earthquake in China? So say chaos theorists. Ashton Kutcher, star of the movie “the Butterfly Effect”, learnt the hard vertical way. Screw with the past small time, alter the present big time. Introduce your grandparents to technology, and you get the idea.
2. Shuffle: In the iPod Shuffle, the shuffle option is top of the menu where it belongs. “Life is random,” says the serendipity-selling slogan. Or is it? Does the Shuffle “give chance a chance?” Is the buzz about it playing its favourites true? “Random is random” assure the iPod engineers – the algorithm works. But why do I hear Born to Run every day?
3. Smart cows: Apart from being gay nymphomaniacs, British research now says cows bare grudges, nurture friendships, and are excited by solving intellectual challenges. So what’s happening down on the farm when we’re not watching? A rolling-eye conspiracy against humans or an emotional coincidence with them? And who is farming whom?
4. Right over Left: Acting on Intuition is hot. Jobs reducible to rules or machines – from conveyancing and programming to TurboTax and accounting, are being off-shored. The premiums are in ideas, stories emotion – and love; in fine arts and film degrees, not MBAs. A sign in Einstein’s office read: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Bring it on Albert!
5. Six degrees and falling: The idea that we are each part of a synchronous design is heating up. Stanley Milgram’s 1967 “six degrees of separation” theory has spread through popular culture, from John Guare’s 1990 play and the Kevin Bacon game to Duncan Watts’ research and Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Now search engine technology is pumping gas into social network theory. “Smart tags” will create the semantic web.. A web not for browsing, but for answering questions in a digital flash.
6. Pattern Recognition: Semantic webbing is part of a bigger pattern. William Gibson’s book about Cayce Pollard – with her pathological sensitivity to logos – had its finger on the random pulse. New security biometrics are part of the picture. So is “Biomimicry”, as championed by Janine Benyus, where nature’s ruthlessly-efficient designs are applied to solve human problems. Example? Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell.
7. Blink: Malcolm Gladwell is the rock star of post-modern analysis, and he’s got the hair to back it up. In his New York Times #1 bestseller, the little battler marries random instincts and pattern recognition, using style not ceremony. The connection between instinct and narrow slices of experience is on the money for smart decision-making. Emotion over information, with sanity checks as a fail-safe? Buy Blink now.
8. The Bio-economy: If the 19th century was the age of chemistry, and the 20th of physics, the 21st is the age of biology. Hard, predictive science with linear growth is behind us. Ahead is soft science with non-predictive quantum outcomes. From hydrogen to computers, soft is the new order. Quizzed on why Apple is in vogue, Jobs made a cognitive leap: “Software is the key… In fact, software is the user experience.”
Now some coincidence at everyday level:
9. Serendipity: How many times have you thought of someone, and a second later the phone rings, and it’s them? More than you can shake a stick at.
10. Scale: In probability theory, the birthday problem is famous. You need to get together 367 people to ensure 2 of them share a birthday. But for a 50-50 chance of this happening, you only need 23 people gathered.
11. Inverted History: Lincoln made Congress in 1846, Kennedy in 1946. Lincoln made President in 1860. Kennedy in 1960. Both were shot on a Friday in the head. Before Lincoln was shot he was in Monroe, Maryland. Before Kennedy was shot he was into Marilyn Monroe. (Oops).
12. Between ‘f’ and ‘h’: What is it with “G” and the latest science geniuses and gurus? First James Gleick on the speed of modern life. Next Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Now Gladwell’s Blink. Looking for the next bestseller? Look under G!!
13. The other side: My close friend John Kirwan scored the greatest solo try in rugby history against Italy in the 1987 World Cup. Now he coaches Italy’s national side.
What to say about coincidence? First, improbable events are a certainty on the numbers. Foresight with accuracy is rare, but remarkable coincidences in hindsight are a sure thing. Events with million-to-one odds occur 295 times a day in America. But is destiny just random chance? I say no (which screws the theory of quantum mechanics). Recent research on mind and heart agrees, showing we are synaptically and emotionally primed to find coincidences (“the neurons that fire together wire together”), and quite possibly, human thought changes the future.
95 percent of human thought is not fully conscious. Conscious understanding was never a reliable guide, as Psychologist George Millar demonstrates with a conversation on a ship. Says one: “There sure is alot of water in the ocean.”Says another: “Yea, and we’ve only seen the top of it.”
The thin-sliced sub-conscious, fed by emotional tributaries, is a better bet. Rigorous research now indicates the brain acts as an early warning system and the heart receives and responds to intuitive information. It turns out we can be aware of an event 5-7 seconds before it occurs. The bottom line is that when stuff has an underlying cause, we tend to notice it.
So maybe the metaphysicists are right. We are each a walking point of time, mysteriously interlocked, interconnected and synchronized to work together. Who can say for sure? What we can do is make coincidence work for not against us. As Heraclitus wrote: “the unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.” So here are some thin slices of synchronicity:
14. Pursue the story: Believe in the power of mystery. If we know everything, there is nothing left to discover. Assume: 5% you know, 15% you know you don’t know and 80% you don’t know you don’t know. Be open to coincidence. It will lead you to a life of fun and surprises.
15. The fish tale: Good coincidence, serendipity, is like fishing. To land a whopper you need a line in the water. For a beautiful life, expose yourself! Global interconnectedness is a huge opportunity. Proactively seed your presence in multiple spaces. Follow up on every coincidence. As Woody Hayes said, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”.
16. How we learn: Malcolm Gladwell says you have to accept the risk of failure to hit a home run. Failure is the ultimate reality check! Be in over your head. Don’t be afraid to lose because then and only then will you know what you’re made of. Just remember, a genius is a person who makes the same mistake. Once.
17. Links: Don’t confuse coincidence with certainty. We are all connected. Confront bad coincidence. Where we are born in the world should not determine whether we live or die as a child. There are huge problems like AIDs and poverty to sort out. Africa needs to be solved not saved. As Rock legend Bono said last month: “Idealism detached from action is just a dream.”
18. Sources: Listen to collective intelligence, what James Surowiecki called the “Wisdom of Crowds.” It’s a fantastic way to cut through expert crap. A Google search is collective coincidence working together. Why are smart companies now asking consumers to design and create their products? So the market doesn’t dump their offering.
19. Actions: Make the small decisions with your head; the big ones with your heart. People who change the world sure do. For the New Year, online magazine Edge asked 120 luminaries “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it.” A fantastic question with incredible responses. I’m a radical optimist. I love radical optimism. The words that sum up my life? Nothing Is Impossible.
Any Human Ever randomly picks an average person from some point in human history and tells you about what their life was like. Mine was a woman born in 1547: “Of all the sounds of her life, the loudest were thunder and the church bells.”
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”
Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes:
“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”
That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:
“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”
The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:
“And soon
All that I love will leave me, as I go
First into silence, then the fire, and then
The harbour water, in which there will be
At last no room to breathe, no time to think:
No time to think even of you, Marcel.”
If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.
North America boss Eric Kutcher is the candidate to beat in the consultancy’s byzantine election, but his past performance as CFO turns some voters off.
At a 2024 gathering of senior McKinsey partners in Copenhagen, then chief financial officer Eric Kutcher put on a baseball catcher’s mask and invited hundreds of colleagues to hurl stress balls at him.
By his own admission Kutcher had “failed miserably” at explaining his actions during the post-COVID period of weak financial performance and divisive lay-offs. He hoped the stunt would ease tensions and act as a reset – both for the firm and himself.
“I think I went into that role as well liked as anyone and I came out of that role really in a bad spot. For the first time in my 28 years, I felt pretty unwelcomed,” he said this year on the How Leaders Lead podcast. But as the balls bounced at his feet, “everything started to heal itself again”.
Having switched in mid-2024 to heading the firm’s business in North America, where a much-improved financial performance has eclipsed some other regions, he is now the frontrunner to succeed Bob Sternfels as global managing partner, according to current and former McKinsey figures.
Yet the unhappy four-year tenure as CFO looms large in conversations among voters, the people said, as does the perception that Kutcher represents continuity with Sternfels’ approach to running McKinsey – centralised decision-making that has not been universally lauded by the firm’s fiercely independent-minded partners.
“Eric is the presumptive leading candidate. He is managing the largest region. Roughly half of McKinsey is North America. It would be hard for someone else to step forward from a region that is not growing as fast,” said one former executive familiar with the internal dynamics. “But it’s not like a presidential election where you have polling done.”
‘Not-Eric’ candidates
The closest election metaphor is not presidential but papal. McKinsey’s roughly 760 senior partners can select anyone from among their number when the voting begins in January. The top seven candidates will go forward to a second ballot that will whittle the field to three.
If Kutcher or a rival has not passed the 50 per cent threshold by that stage, the partnership will pick the winner in person, conclave-style, at their next meeting in Sydney in February. Some partners could support “not-Eric” candidates in early rounds to ensure a vigorous contest.
McKinsey’s previous two elections for managing partner were fractious. Kevin Sneader lost his re-election bid in 2021 after a scandal over the firm’s work for opioid manufacturers that cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements. The 2024 race was also close, with several rounds of voting before Sternfels claimed victory.
“Is there campaigning? There’s certainly politicking,” said John Seaman, a business historian who has written about McKinsey.
“Often the process will start out with a favourite from a particular region but it’s not a popularity contest. Partners vote on substance, in response to the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the previous global managing partner and to express their hopes for where the firm will go from here.”
Election-weary partners agreed last year that managing partners should now serve four years, not three, with a two-year extension subject to an up-or-down confidence vote.
‘Project Magnolia’ lingers
Kutcher told the podcast host David Novak that he had not wanted to be CFO but took the job when offered it, “because I’ve always been a good soldier”.
The appointment in 2020 coincided with the pandemic and the ensuing consulting boom. Like other professional services firms, McKinsey hired thousands of new staff to keep up with demand, only to find itself bloated when activity reverted to normal.
At the same time, the firm embarked on two ponderous reviews of partners’ remuneration – projects codenamed Oak and Acorn – to deal with the fact that clients were tying fees more closely to the results of McKinsey’s work, delaying performance-related payments and complicating cash flows.
“Eric had to institute a series of measures to make sure the books started to improve,” the former executive said.
As leader for North America, Kutcher is taking a gentler approach to remaking the back office, but adoption of AI means it could be no less dramatic over time.
The ratio of support staff to frontline consultants will drop, he told reporters last week. Hiring of executive assistants and “professional development” staff who organise which consultants are placed on which jobs will rise this year by “low single-digit” percentages and remain flat in other administrative roles, compared with 12 per cent growth for consultants.
McKinsey’s optimistic pitch to American business is that the firm now has the AI tools as well as the knowhow to help chief executives plot their companies’ transformations.
Close to Sternfels
Kutcher has arguably the fullest résumé of the plausible contenders for global managing partner – as well as running a major region and the stint in the finance role, he was previously head of a practice area, technology, media and telecoms.
Based in the same San Francisco office as Sternfels, the two formed a close working relationship. Partners took note when Sternfels gave Kutcher the North America job despite his rocky tenure as CFO.
Kutcher took a prominent role in celebrations for the firm’s 100th anniversary this year. Hundreds of retired partners descended in May on New York’s Lincoln Centre for several days of panel discussions involving current executives and guests including JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon, while their spouses went on trips to Central Park or city museums. Several of those in attendance said at the time that Kutcher looked every bit the heir apparent.
Other potential contenders include Tunde Olanrewaju, who was promoted last year from running McKinsey in the UK to leading the firm’s business Europe-wide, and Asutosh Padhi, Kutcher’s predecessor running North America.
People familiar with internal conversations said partners would also consider other members of the 17-strong global executive team, such as client capabilities head Becca Coggins or industry practices leader Alex Panas, and the 13-strong shareholders’ council that acts as McKinsey’s governing board, as well as other regional leaders.
“It’s papal – in that you cannot be seen to want the job,” said one senior partner. Kutcher declined to comment.
In his podcast appearance, Kutcher reflected on a period earlier in his career. “One of the things I often got criticised for is maybe having too much ambition,” he said, but added that it was always ambition for his team or for McKinsey as a whole.
The firm sometimes puts people in leadership roles before they are comfortable in their own skin, he added, but wisdom comes with age. “You have to have lived through failure.”
