Change Agent

Shelley Stewart III is one of the top executives at McKinsey and Co., the largest and arguably most influential of the “Big Three” management consulting firms. Stewart helps to run a company that has forty-five thousand global employees, annual revenues of $16 billion, and a client list that spans the world’s most powerful businesses, governments, and nonprofits. A senior partner, he has three distinct roles at McKinsey, and they overlap at a single point: the idea that corporate profits can be a societal good.

“I believe that growth of companies fuels broad value creation in society,” Stewart said on a Tuesday afternoon in April. Growth creates jobs and wealth, he explained. “The total of the individual things that we do as a firm must sum up to a world that has more opportunity, where more people are more prosperous, more happy.”

In his role as global leader of reputation and engagement, which is akin to a chief marketing and communications officer, Stewart is in charge of everything from the company’s pro bono work and charitable giving to McKinsey Global Publishing, whose articles, videos, and podcasts about McKinsey research and insights reach a monthly audience of millions. He also advises McKinsey clients in industries such as private equity, manufacturing, and telecommunications on how to grow and transform, helping them think about, for instance, product launches, market share, and new technology.

In addition, Stewart is the cofounder and chair of the Institute for Economic Mobility, a McKinsey think tank and research group that after initially focusing on Black economic advancement has broadened to address Latino and rural Americans—groups that today have less economic mobility than many others in the country.  

Stewart said his work is motivated by his upbringing. “I grew up with a sense of obligation to serve people as part of what I do,” he said. After attending segregated schools on Long Island, New York, Stewart’s father became the first in his family to go to college. “My grandfather had to sit-in and be arrested so that my dad could get a decent education.” Stewart said he was raised to consider both that sacrifice and his own privilege. After majoring in economics at BC, Stewart earned an MBA from Columbia and later added a master’s in public administration from Harvard.

“I didn’t go off and join the Peace Corps, and I’m not working for free at McKinsey—I don’t want to portray it that way,” he said. But, he continued, he learned from his family that, “regardless of what you’re doing, you have to find a way to help people who are less well off, less privileged, who have less access than you do.”

Stewart believes that we must go big on developing and scaling new technologies and approaches that can improve the lives of everyone. Take, for example, generative artificial intelligence. According to McKinsey research, generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to the global economy by 2040. “For the United States, which dominates generative AI investment, it could boost labor productivity and economic growth,” Stewart wrote in an article for Forbes.com last year.  

At the same time, Stewart acknowledged that investments like these must be handled strategically, if all people are to benefit from their promise. In the case of generative AI, that requires supporting workers who might otherwise be displaced: During a CNBC interview earlier this year, Stewart warned that 60 percent of entry-level jobs will be “severely impacted” by generative AI, and Black Americans, who are disproportionately represented in entry-level jobs, are among those likely to be the most affected. But he is optimistic that companies will be able to identify transferable skills and proactively retrain workers to meet future needs, in part thanks to a methodology McKinsey has developed.

Finding opportunities to link business success to human advancement is exactly what keeps Stewart energized and inspired in his work. “If we invest upstream to foster more economic mobility, the payoff for society is massive,” Stewart said. “Yes, there are short-term costs, but the ROI is quite high.” ◽