Business & Finance: Second Scot

• Share

Common though they are in Govern-ment today, professors in business are relatively scarce. Last week Chicago's Marshall Field & Co. picked one for board chairman. President John McKinlay announced that he would henceforth share his executive burdens with another Scotsman named James McKinsey, who will fill the vacancy created three years ago when James Simpson quit to rehabilitate the Insull utility companies in Chicago. The Marshall Field chairmanship is Mr. McKinsey's first corporate job.

Born 46 years ago on a poverty-stricken farm in Mexico, Mo., Chairman McKinsey went to State Teachers College, studied law at the University of Arkansas, earned an M. A. at the University of Chicago, joined its faculty in 1917. After a turn in the Army, which he entered as a private, he lectured at Columbia and the Uni-versity of California. Tall, quiet, professorial, he summers with his wife and twin sons, 14, in Wheaton, Chicago suburb, winters on Lake Shore Drive.

For the past ten years he has been a management counsel with his own firm of Jas. 0. McKinsey & Co. His clients are corporations with a problem—personnel, organization, manufacturing, distribution, financial. His firm has just completed a long survey not of the big department store but of two major Marshall Field divisions, wholesaling and manufacturing. The Field directors were so impressed with the McKinsey recommendations that they asked the firm's senior partner to put them into effect. Though accepting a client corporation's proffer for the first time, Mr. McKinsey will retain his partnership in his management counsel firm.

Marshall Field news is never neglected by Chicago's daily papers but last week they outdid themselves with stories about the "farmer boy who took literally the world's greatest epic entitled 'America, the Land of Opportunity.'" Jeered Financial Columnist Royal F. Munger of the Chicago Daily News: "Slavish adulation along Horatio Alger lines by interests with one eye on the box office."