Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. not only has a reputation for rewarding its star employees with sky-high salaries—the organization is also a well-known stepping stone to the C-suite. Take a stroll through the office halls, and you’re sure to pass by a budding Fortune 500 CEO.
Just like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Doordash’s Tony Xu, Amit Walia, the CEO of $7.6 billion company Informatica, worked at McKinsey after receiving his MBA. And the experience—albiet daunting, and quite rigorous—set him up to thrive in his current role as chief executive.
“McKinsey was a dream job for me when I went to business school, partly because I was an engineer before business school,” Walia tells Fortune. “And I thought, ‘Look, what a great place to be to learn about business in the broadest way—and, of course, the most intense way.’”
Walia spent nearly five years at the consulting company as a senior engagement manager. He stepped into the role after a couple of stints in management and tech; right after receiving his undergraduate degree, the entrepreneur served as a senior officer for Indian manufacturer Tata Steel, overseeing 20,000 employees at just 22 years old.
Walia then spent two years as a senior engineer at $78 billion business Infosys Technologies before taking the leadership track. He attended Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, another training hotbed for top executives, and took the McKinsey job with an MBA in his back pocket. The experience primed him to step into Informatica’s top role in 2020, but it was no cake walk.
“You really get pushed into difficult situations [at McKinsey]…You have to always have a clear bent of mind to be very analytical, to really distill out the problem to its core. It’s a skill you learn, and that’s the hardest thing in a big job,” Walia continues. “You become a better person by being pushed around by the environment of a lot of other smart people.”
Confronting criticism and imposter syndrome—but growing as a future CEO
Most workers, regardless of title or industry, will doubt their professional chops at some point in their careers. And Walia noticed that even the sharpest business minds will second-guess themselves while working at McKinsey.
“I always joke [that] I felt everybody over there feels like they’re an imposter, because you’re next to another smart person. So you push yourself, and you learn from everybody,” the Informatica CEO says.
But McKinsey employees don’t have time to dwell on how they shape up to their peers. Walia says he was pushed into “complex environments” with 100 moving parts; the burgeoning business leaders are trained to hone in on what really matters, finding the core of the issue. And once the problem is brought into the light, he says McKinsey encourages “hypothesis-driven problem-solving” to remedy the situation—even when it’s ambiguous or something new, and there is no “right answer.” He constantly tested himself in the job, having to validate every decision he made. His McKinsey peers weren’t afraid to hold back with their critiques, and Walia soaked it all in.
“It’s a very learning-based culture. You’re constantly learning, and you get [a] tremendous amount of feedback, which helps you become better all the time,” Walia explains. “I always say, ‘Feedback is a gift.’ It’s not to tell you what you’re not doing right, it should tell you what you could do better. Those are the few things that have helped me grow over time from my McKinsey experience.”
Why McKinsey is the biggest incubator of Fortune 500 CEOs
McKinsey has a reputation as a standout employer when it comes to incubating the future mover-and-shakers of business. After all, the consulting giant has minted more Fortune 500 CEOs than any other organization in the world.
Aside from Walia, Pichai, and Xu, other notable alumni including Citigroup leader Jane Fraser and Visa chief executive Ryan McInerney have roamed the office floors of the consulting giant. The company has played a hand in catapulting 18 sitting Fortune 500 CEOs, and 28 globally, to the top job, according to a 2025 analysis from Fortune editor Ruth Umoh.
A dozen former and current McKinsey alumni told Umoh that the firm’s strategy is intentional, and echoing Amit’s experience, incredibly rigorous. The company cycles its staffers through industries, geographies, and departments, purposefully putting them out of their comfort zone. McKinsey also encourages a culture of constructive disagreement, where all employees—reguardless of seniority—have their assumptions and strategies challenged.
“You start to believe that more is possible,” Liz Hilton Segel, a senior partner at McKinsey, told Fortune last year. “You build pattern recognition that comes from helping a client do something they didn’t think was even achievable—and that builds confidence you carry forever.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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