Raju Narisetti on steering publishing at McKinsey and his leadership philosophy

Editor’s note: The Fix is running the “What’s your media job” series where we look at different job positions and career trajectories in and around the news industry. For this edition, we spoke with Raju Narisetti, Leader, Global Publishing at McKinsey & Company. 

Raju Narisetti’s career in the news industry has spanned from his days as print reporter to managing digital transformation for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, to launching Mint as one of the world’s first integrated newsrooms. Today he leads global publishing at McKinsey, steering a 100-person team in a 45,000-people-strong multinational consultancy.

The Fix spoke with Narisetti about his position leading publishing within a large non-publishing company, his leadership lessons from a 35-year career in global media, and his advice for media leaders. 

A look at McKinsey’s publishing engine 

McKinsey is one of the world’s biggest consulting firms with some 45,000 employees and over $15 billion in annual revenue. The global publishing team led by Narisetti is responsible for repackaging the consultants’ business insights for a wider audience with a goal to strengthen the company’s brand – and, in the long run, win over more customers. 

Narisetti oversees a range of products. He says the primary platform is the website McKinsey.com, which in the past year got over 90 million reads to the 1000+ articles produced by the publishing team. The team manages about 25 podcasts and close to 50 email offerings, which consist of article alerts and curated newsletters, like a recent addition for Gen Z and their managers.

McKinsey also has a big social media following, including 6 million people on LinkedIn, and publishes the McKinsey Quarterly magazine in print. The core audience is global business decision-makers, as well as nonprofit and public sector leaders. The products are published primarily in English, but Narisetti says the audience is global, with only 25% coming from North America.

All the products are free, and the publishing team measures success in McKinsey’s share of voice compared to competitors and inbound engagement from readers. As Narisetti puts it, “the best [return on investment] is when somebody tells us, ‘I read this article or I listened to your podcast, and I reached out, and you then helped me solve my business problem’. But our publishing is not lead generation in a conventional sense. We are not here to simply tell you how wonderful McKinsey is. We want the power of our insights to convince you that McKinsey is the best place to go help solve your problem”.

Global publishing is a team of about 100 people within the Reach and Engagement function at McKinsey. The structure is “very similar to a newsroom minus the news”, Narisetti says, with four main sub-teams. The biggest group, editors, works with colleagues across McKinsey to edit and write articles and other products. Three other categories are editorial production, audience development & innovation, and visual storytelling & design.

Narisetti says the management layer is thin. He only has two direct reports: the global editorial director / deputy publisher and head of audience development & innovation. The leadership team also includes the head of people excellence & editorial operations and the head of technology; they do not report to Narisetti.

In addition to leading the team, Narisetti spends some of his time creating content, such as anchoring the Author Talks series where he interviews authors of business and non-fiction books. He also oversees McKinsey’s book publishing efforts. The company doesn’t publish books itself but rather pitches book ideas to major publishers.

Narisetti’s leadership approach – balancing between a telescope and a microscope, pushing to create meaningful differentiation 

Over the past several decades Narisetti worked as the leader and senior manager in major media companies, including as founder and editor-in-chief of Mint, managing editor of The Washington Post, senior vice president of growth and strategy at News Corp, and CEO of Gizmodo.

The role at McKinsey, which he took four years ago, was an opportunity for him to bring insights from previous experiences but also an opening to learn as he had never managed B2B publications before. As Narisetti puts it, “the way I have made career decisions has been around answering a fairly simple sounding question, which is, when is the last time I did something for the first time?”

For him, “leadership is balancing between being a microscope and a telescope… making sure you are not over indexing in either micromanaging or being absent”. Narisetti says he is very in the weeds when he needs to be, such as offering headline ideas or suggesting new email bundles, but he also takes a long-term perspective on where the team needs to go. 

Another point is pushing to “create meaningful differentiation and not better sameness”. Here he emphasises the importance of driving true innovation and unique value rather than simply improving on what already exists. “It’s easy for a team to say, ‘we published a thousand articles. We’ve done it last year, we’ll do it next year’. The trick is to always be thinking about what is the meaningful differentiation we are creating, not just in terms of McKinsey versus others, but also in terms of what we did last year”.

Narisetti’s advice for aspiring news leaders is to think past the traditional church and state model of journalism and embrace the intersections of editorial, business and product/tech dimensions. “I would encourage people to… think about how church and state can work together. ‘What are the skills I need? What do I bring? What do I not have?’”.

He also thinks it’s important for leaders to cultivate diverse interests and a broad awareness rather than a narrow specialisation. In today’s media environment, there is particular value in being a generalist who can connect disparate ideas and spot wide-ranging trends.

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of Raju Narisetti

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