Every operating-model redesign starts with a diagnosis. Before you accept one, ask who built the instrument doing the diagnosing.
McKinsey’s June 2025 article, A new operating model for a new world, retires the firm’s own 7-S framework and replaces it with a new one: twelve elements, built from a survey of 757 senior executives, interviews with academics, and, in its own words, “extensive experience working on redesigns” — its own client history. It then compares your organization’s “operating model fingerprint” against a set of “exemplar” companies, including the two case studies — an unnamed airline and an unnamed financial-services company — that the article uses to demonstrate the framework working.
Definition, benchmark selection, and remediation sit inside one relationship, priced on the outcome of the diagnosis it performed.
None of this is unusual for a strategy practice, and none of it is evidence of bad faith. McKinsey is simply the firm that documented its own methodology clearly enough, in one public article, to make the pattern easy to trace.
Structural Analysis
One firm, four roles
Built the 12-element operating-model framework
Ran the 757-executive survey that calibrates it
Chose the exemplar companies you're benchmarked against
Sells the redesign engagement that closes the gap found
Every major firm in this industry runs some version of the same setup — a proprietary survey, a proprietary framework built from it, and a paid engagement to close whatever gap the framework finds. What’s worth naming plainly: the same firm filling all four boxes above is also the firm paid to run your redesign once a gap is found.
12
Framework elements
757
Executives surveyed
1 wk
To the companion piece
That relationship didn’t end with one article, either. McKinsey published the promised companion piece a week later, then kept extending the same framework through 2026 with a second executive survey and a standing “Organize to Value” practice page. The instrument isn’t a one-time diagnostic; it’s the standing operating procedure of a campaign that is still running.
Mechanism
Why this isn’t a fairness complaint
The easy read here is cynicism: firms say self-serving things. That undersells the mechanism. Authoring a rigorous instrument is expensive, specialized work, and the only party with both the incentive and the analytical capability to do it well is usually the party who profits when the instrument recommends action.
The Same Shape, One Gate Over
A firm-authored framework, calibrated on the firm’s own survey, benchmarked against the firm’s own exemplars.
A vendor-authored ROI model, a benchmark the vendor’s own product was tuned against, a conformance test run on the vendor’s harness.
Closing Test
Before you accept a “fingerprint”:
Ask one question the report itself won’t answer on its own: who selected the companies you’re being benchmarked against, and did the party doing the selecting also stand to profit from the gap they found?
If the answer is the same firm both ways, you are not looking at an independent diagnosis. You are looking at a sales instrument with a research methodology attached to it — which can still be useful, but not neutral, and worth pricing accordingly.