Bob Sternfels

Bob Sternfels
Sternfels at the 2023 World Economic Forum
Born	Lodi, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Stanford University (BA); University of Oxford (MA, Rhodes Scholar)
Occupation	Management consultant
Company	McKinsey & Company
Title	Global Managing Partner
Spouse	Ashley Sternfels
Children	Three

Robert Sternfels, known as Bob Sternfels, is an American management consultant who has served as the global managing partner of McKinsey & Company since July 2021, making him the 13th partner to lead the firm since its founding in 1926. He was first elected by the firm's senior partners in March 2021 to a three year term and was re-elected in February 2024 to a second and final three year term running to 2027.

Sternfels grew up in Lodi, California, and studied economics and history at Stanford University, where he competed on the university's NCAA Division I varsity water polo team. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1991 and went on to earn a graduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford. He joined McKinsey's San Francisco office in 1994 upon graduating from Oxford and spent nearly three decades in operations, private equity and digital roles before his election as the firm's top partner.

During his tenure, McKinsey has described itself as broadening from a strategy and management adviser into what it calls a full "impact partner" to clients, expanding into implementation, digital and organizational transformation, and sustainability consulting, including through more than 25 acquisitions, while generating record revenue of approximately $16 billion in 2023. His leadership has also coincided with the resolution of long running legal exposure tied to the firm's past consulting work for the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, including a 2021 multistate civil settlement and a 2024 deferred prosecution agreement with the United States Department of Justice, matters that stem from McKinsey conduct that predates his time as managing partner but that he has addressed publicly, including in testimony to the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Sternfels serves in a personal capacity on the boards of QuestBridge and the Rhodes Trust and on the advisory board of USA Water Polo, and in November 2025 he was elected a trustee of Stanford University for a five year term.

Early life and education

Robert Sternfels grew up in Lodi, California, a small agricultural town in San Joaquin County. He enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied economics and history, compiled what a contemporaneous Stanford news release described as a nearly straight A academic record, and was a member of the university's NCAA Division I varsity water polo team, which made three NCAA tournament appearances during his four years on the squad. He also worked as a campus tour guide and a psychology research assistant. He graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in 1992.

While still an undergraduate, Sternfels showed what Stanford's news service at the time called an "entrepreneurial bent." After failing to find a summer job following his freshman year, he and a fellow Stanford student, Mark Wallin, started Litigation Support Services of Palo Alto, a firm that hired students to summarize legal depositions for attorneys in the San Francisco Bay Area at about half the cost of using paralegals; the business employed between eight and twelve students at a time, and Sternfels planned to hand over his share of it to his younger sister, Katie, then a Stanford sophomore, when he left for graduate study.

In December 1991, Sternfels was named a Rhodes Scholar for the class entering Oxford in 1992, one of thirty two American students chosen that year alongside, among others, future U.S. senator Cory Booker. At the time of his selection he said he intended to study international law at Oxford with a specialization in Western Europe. He ultimately read for a graduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics instead, and McKinsey's own biography of him lists his Oxford qualification as an MA in politics, philosophy and economics earned as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined McKinsey's San Francisco office immediately after completing his studies at Oxford in 1994.

Career

McKinsey & Company, 1994 to 2021

Sternfels joined McKinsey & Company in its San Francisco office in 1994 and, over the following decades, worked with colleagues in nearly every McKinsey office in the world, including a six year stint living in Johannesburg, South Africa. His early published work for the firm focused on manufacturing and operations strategy; in a November 2004 article he examined "when offshore manufacturing doesn't make sense," and in a March 2005 piece for McKinsey Quarterly he wrote about "the onshoring option," both concerned with when companies should keep or bring back production rather than move it overseas.

By the mid-2010s, Sternfels had become a director (McKinsey's internal term for senior partner) based in San Francisco, where his employer's own biography described him as leading "global functions, growth platforms, and new client delivery models" and helping companies in basic materials, medical products, high tech, financial services, private equity and consumer goods redesign their operating models. He had by that point already led the firm's Operations Practice in the Americas and had advised clients across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia on operations, strategy and organizational performance.

By 2020 Sternfels was a senior partner and a member of McKinsey's Shareholders Council, the firm's elected board of directors, and of its executive team. In that period he led what the firm called its "new innovations" capabilities, said to have grown to represent approximately half of the firm's revenue, after earlier having led both the Operations Practice in the Americas and the Private Equity and Principal Investors Practice globally. In March 2017 he published "A roadmap for a digital transformation" for McKinsey. By the time of his election as global managing partner in 2021, Sternfels led the firm's client capabilities globally, a remit covering the firm's industry practices, functional areas and innovation priorities, with a particular focus on expanding the firm's digital and advanced analytics capabilities.

Election as global managing partner, 2021

On 10 March 2021, McKinsey announced that its approximately 650 senior partners worldwide had elected Sternfels, then 51, as the firm's new global managing partner, to serve a three year term beginning 1 July 2021. He succeeded Kevin Sneader, who had become the first McKinsey leader since the 1970s not awarded a second term, after senior partners did not give him enough votes to proceed to a final round. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sneader's support fell away in part because some partners objected to governance changes he had pushed, aimed at keeping the firm free of scandal, that also limited some partners' autonomy. The contest came down to a run off between Sternfels and Sven Smit, co-chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, in what the Journal called an unusually public leadership contest for the normally private partnership.

McKinsey's announcement described the election as a staged process in which senior partners first nominated seven candidates by preference, a second round narrowed the field to ten candidates decided by absolute vote totals, and a final round between the two strongest candidates, determined using the single transferable vote method, produced a majority for Sternfels; the vote was conducted by an independent third party firm and overseen by an Election Administration Committee of former and ineligible current senior partners. Under McKinsey's rules, the global managing partner may serve a maximum of two three year terms, a limit reduced from three terms in 2016. On taking up the role, Sternfels said he was "honored to be chosen by my peers as the next global managing partner of McKinsey," adding that he was "determined to use this moment to make our partnership stronger, more inclusive and better able to help our clients thrive in a fast-changing world," and that he intended to build on governance changes introduced under Sneader, including a 2019 client selection policy and expanded legal and risk control functions. Sternfels formally took over as global managing partner on 1 July 2021.

Testimony to Congress, 2022

On 27 April 2022, Sternfels appeared before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform to testify about McKinsey's work, including its past consulting relationships with Purdue Pharma and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In written testimony submitted for the hearing, Sternfels told the committee that McKinsey had "almost 100 years" of history, more than 38,000 employees globally with more than 12,000 based in the United States, offices in 27 U.S. cities and more than 100 additional offices across 65 countries, and that it was then serving more than 3,000 clients on more than 4,400 active engagements. He used the appearance to respond to a committee staff report on the firm's Purdue and FDA work, discussed further in the Controversies section below.

Re-election, 2024

On 1 February 2024, McKinsey announced that Sternfels, then 54, had been re-elected global managing partner by more than 700 senior partners worldwide, to begin a second and final three year term in July 2024. The re-election was not a formality: two earlier rounds of voting failed to produce a majority for the incumbent, and Sternfels ultimately defeated Rodney Zemmel, the leader of the firm's global digital practice, in a final run off. Other candidates in the second round ballot included McKinsey's chief financial officer Eric Kutcher, chief client officer Liz Hilton Segel, risk chief Carter Wood and former Asia chairman Oliver Tonby. In its announcement, McKinsey said that under Sternfels the firm had become a full "impact partner" to clients, with McKinsey Digital then accounting for more than half of the firm's client work and employing more than 7,000 digital and analytics specialists, and that the firm had generated record revenue of approximately $16 billion in 2023.

Leadership and management style

Sternfels has publicly framed his tenure around continuing and extending governance changes begun under his predecessor. In his first public statement after election in 2021 he said he was committed to building on reforms Sneader had "helped launch and our partnership embraced," citing the firm's 2019 client selection policy and the scaling up of its legal and risk control functions. In his 2022 congressional testimony Sternfels described the firm's Risk, Audit and Governance Committee, a subcommittee of the Shareholders Council, as continuing to review the firm's conflicts of interest policies, and he pointed to internal measures such as a Code of Professional Conduct limiting the sharing of client confidential information and a programme of senior partners designated to manage risk within their own practice groups.

In the same testimony, Sternfels described a client and engagement selection framework introduced in 2019 and in use throughout his time as managing partner, an internal framework the firm calls CITIO, an acronym for an assessment of the Country, Institution, Topic, Individual and Operational considerations of a prospective engagement. He testified that the framework is applied globally without exception and that it results in the firm declining or limiting work; under its rules, he said, the firm does not serve tobacco companies, opioid manufacturers, dual use technology companies in certain countries, or pharmaceutical companies seeking to deviate from industry pricing norms or circumvent regulatory requirements, and in the government sector the firm does not serve defense, intelligence, justice or police institutions in countries scoring six or below on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, nor does it serve political parties, advocacy groups, legislatures or individual legislators' offices. Sternfels told the committee that McKinsey had tripled the size of its risk, legal and compliance functions since 2015 and had spent more than $600 million over the preceding four years on compliance staff, training and related technology, including hiring the firm's first General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, and that a global Client Service Risk Committee of senior firm leaders reviews thousands of potential engagements each year and can direct the firm to decline a prospective project. Sternfels also described the firm's policies for its work as a U.S. government contractor, including a separate legal and operational structure for government engagements and an Organizational Conflicts of Interest Policy applied under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, work he said the firm had performed for more than 70 years.

The firm's own public description of his tenure emphasizes a strategic shift from the firm's traditional role as a strategy and management adviser toward what it calls a full "impact partner" to clients, with expansion into implementation, digital work, organizational transformation and sustainability consulting carried out partly through more than 25 acquisitions. That expansion has not been without internal friction: as described in the Controversies section below, reporting around Sternfels's closely contested 2024 re-election attributed his difficulty in part to internal divisions over his leadership style and his handling of a 2023 restructuring.

Sternfels was also elected and re-elected through an unusual internal governance system, a multi round, preference based ballot among the firm's senior partners culminating in a single transferable vote run off, which in both 2021 and 2024 required him to win a contested final round against a sitting rival rather than being confirmed unopposed.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Under Sternfels, the firm has described itself as pursuing an acquisition led expansion beyond its traditional strategy consulting base, completing more than 25 acquisitions as part of building out implementation, digital, organizational transformation and sustainability consulting capabilities; its own announcements naming specific deal values were not identified in the sources reviewed for this article. In 2023, the firm carried out a restructuring that cut approximately 1,400 back office staff positions; the restructuring and its reception among senior partners are discussed in the Controversies section below. In 2019, before Sternfels became managing partner but during his time in the firm's senior leadership, the firm decided to end all opioid specific consulting work globally, a decision Sternfels later described in testimony to Congress as part of an effort "to be part of the solution" to the opioid crisis. In early 2021, shortly before Sternfels took office, the firm proactively engaged with state attorneys general to reach the opioid settlement discussed below, rather than litigate the claims against it.

Financial and market performance

McKinsey & Company is a private partnership that does not disclose audited financial statements or trade publicly, so conventional share price and market capitalization data are not available. Figures the firm has disclosed publicly during Sternfels's tenure include the following. In testimony to Congress in April 2022, Sternfels stated that McKinsey then had more than 38,000 employees globally, including more than 12,000 in the United States, operated in 27 U.S. cities and more than 100 additional offices across 65 countries, and was serving more than 3,000 clients on more than 4,400 active engagements, with nearly half of the firm's revenue coming from U.S. headquartered clients. In announcing Sternfels's re-election in February 2024, McKinsey said it had generated record revenue of approximately $16 billion in 2023 and that McKinsey Digital then accounted for more than half of the firm's client work, with a headcount of more than 7,000 digital and analytics specialists.

Board memberships and outside roles

Sternfels serves in a personal capacity on the board of QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects high achieving students from low income backgrounds with selective colleges, a role he has held since at least 2016 according to McKinsey's own published biography of him. He is also a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, the organization that administers the Rhodes Scholarship he himself held. In February 2009, Sternfels, then a managing director at McKinsey and a former member of the USA Junior National water polo team, joined the USA Water Polo Board of Directors; the organization's chairman at the time, Michael Graff, said Sternfels had led the "McKinsey, USA Water Polo growth strategy team" and would help the board implement its findings. By the time of his 2021 and later biographies, McKinsey described his water polo role as membership of USA Water Polo's advisory board rather than its governing board.

Sternfels has also served as treasurer and business manager of The American Oxonian, the quarterly journal of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, and sat on that association's board of directors, according to a 2013 issue of the journal that lists him among its officers and directors.

In November 2025, the Stanford University Board of Trustees elected Sternfels to a five year term beginning 1 December 2025, alongside Sarah J. Friar, chief financial officer of OpenAI. Stanford's announcement described Sternfels as having earned his bachelor's degree in economics and history from Stanford in 1992 and his master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford, and noted that his professional focus had covered leadership development, economic growth and resilience, and cross border collaboration.

As of McKinsey's own biography of him published in mid-2025, Sternfels also served on the boards of the U.S.-China Business Council, FCLTGlobal and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on the advisory board of With Honor, and as a founding member of the African Leadership Group Advisory Board and of Partnership for San Francisco; he was also described as co-chair of the First Chance Campaign at Concordance and as an active member of the Business Roundtable, the Asia Business Council, the International Advisory Council for the Singapore Economic Development Board, the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management Advisory Board, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Controversies

Opioid consulting work and the 2021 multistate settlement

McKinsey's historical consulting work for the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma became a matter of public controversy before Sternfels became global managing partner, and its legal resolution has continued into his tenure. On 4 February 2021, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings announced a $573 million multistate settlement between the firm and state attorneys general resolving investigations into the firm's role in helping opioid manufacturers promote their drugs; Delaware's own complaint stated that, for more than a decade, the firm's marketing and consulting advice to Purdue, including guidance on targeting high volume opioid prescribers and circumventing pharmacy restrictions on high dose prescriptions, contributed to the opioid crisis, and that when states began suing Purdue's directors, firm partners discussed deleting documents and emails related to their work for Purdue. Under the settlement, the firm agreed to publicly disclose tens of thousands of internal documents relating to its opioid industry work, to stop advising companies on Schedule II and Schedule III narcotics, to continue investigating allegations that two of its partners had tried to destroy documents, to adopt a strict annual ethics code for partners, and to implement a new document retention policy. The settlement predates Sternfels's time as managing partner; he was elected to the role roughly five weeks after it was announced and took office five months later.

In his April 2022 testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Sternfels addressed the firm's Purdue and FDA work directly. He told the committee that the firm's work for Purdue had been "focused on legitimate prescribers and an abuse deterrent formulation," but acknowledged that the firm "did not adequately acknowledge the unfolding epidemic" and that its work "fell short of our standards," adding that the firm had decided in 2019 to end all opioid specific consulting work globally and had proactively approached state attorneys general in early 2021 to reach the settlement rather than litigate. He disputed a separate claim in a committee staff report that McKinsey had simultaneously advised both Purdue and the FDA on opioid related matters, citing statements from the FDA itself that it had not consulted McKinsey about any specific drug product or product class, including opioids, and that none of its McKinsey contracts related to opioids, their distribution or retail sales. McKinsey's work for the FDA, Sternfels testified, was limited to administrative and operational topics such as organizational structure, business processes and technology, and he told the committee the firm estimated that about 60 percent of its FDA engagements involved business process improvements, about 20 percent involved reorganization issues, and about 20 percent involved technology enablement, with none involving specific regulatory policies, decisions or outcomes. He argued that the committee staff report rested on three flawed premises: that it found a conflict based merely on the time period of the work without examining whether the work itself conflicted, that it applied an incorrect conflicts standard by treating McKinsey's unrelated FDA work as tainted simply because the FDA also regulates opioids, and that it drew speculative conclusions about individual consultants, such as treating an appearance on an unrelated email as evidence of work on an FDA matter. Sternfels also disputed the report's characterization of the firm's cooperation, telling the committee that McKinsey had voluntarily produced more than 350,000 pages of material, with most of the documents the report described as having been "obtained" by the committee in fact supplied voluntarily within two weeks of the committee's initial request. No source reviewed for this article attributes the underlying opioid related consulting conduct, which occurred between 2004 and 2019, to Sternfels personally; his public role in the matter has been as the firm's managing partner responding to and settling claims that arose from work performed by other McKinsey partners and consultants before and during the early part of his time at the firm's senior leadership.

2024 Department of Justice resolution

On 13 December 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the resolution of criminal and civil investigations into McKinsey's work with Purdue Pharma, a case the department said marked the first time a management consulting firm had been held criminally responsible for advice that resulted in a client's commission of a crime. McKinsey agreed to pay $650 million in total: more than $231 million in criminal penalties, a forfeiture of more than $93 million representing all money the firm was paid by Purdue from 2004 to 2019, a $2 million payment to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, and more than $323 million under a civil False Claims Act settlement for allegedly giving Purdue advice that caused the submission of false claims to federal health care programmes and for allegedly failing to disclose a conflict of interest arising from its concurrent work for Purdue and the FDA. McKinsey's U.S. subsidiary, McKinsey & Company Inc. United States, entered a five year deferred prosecution agreement and was charged in a criminal information with one felony count of knowingly destroying records to obstruct a federal investigation and one misdemeanor count of conspiring with Purdue to aid and abet the misbranding of prescription drugs. A former McKinsey senior partner who had worked on the Purdue account, Martin E. Elling, was separately charged with obstruction of justice and agreed to plead guilty. As part of the resolution, McKinsey agreed not to do any work related to the marketing, sale, promotion or distribution of controlled substances during the five year term of the agreement, and the resolution requires the firm's managing partner, the office Sternfels holds, to certify annually that the firm is complying with its obligations under the agreement and federal law. The Justice Department's press release describes corporate and individual conduct that occurred between 2004 and 2019, before Sternfels led the firm, and does not attribute the underlying conduct to him personally; his connection to the matter, as with the 2021 settlement, is as the sitting managing partner whose office is now responsible for the firm's compliance certifications under the agreement.

Internal restructuring and leadership criticism

As discussed above, reporting around Sternfels's 2024 re-election contest, drawing on Financial Times sourcing, attributed his unexpectedly close race in part to internal criticism of his handling of a 2023 restructuring that eliminated 1,400 back office jobs and to concerns among some partners about the concentration of decision making under his leadership. No settlement, regulatory finding or litigation connected to the restructuring was identified in the sources reviewed for this article; the criticism reported is characterized by the cited reporting as internal partner sentiment rather than a legal or regulatory matter.

Personal life

Sternfels is married to Ashley Sternfels. Like her husband, Ashley Sternfels was a Stanford varsity student athlete, competing in cross country and track, while Bob Sternfels competed in water polo. The couple have three children. Stanford's own account of the family describes the university as having long been a "second home" for the Sternfelses: both parents competed there as athletes, their three children attend the university, and Sternfels has said the family's game day tailgate remains one of his favorite pastimes. The family lives in Mill Valley, California. Sternfels has a younger sister, Katie, who as a Stanford sophomore in 1991 was set to take over the student legal support business he had co-founded as an undergraduate. McKinsey's biography of Sternfels describes him as an enthusiastic private pilot.

Public statements by McKinsey have described Sternfels's age at two points: he was 51 at the time of his election in March 2021 and 54 at the time of his re-election in February 2024.

Recognition

McKinsey's biography of Sternfels states that he has been awarded the Foreign Policy Association Medal in recognition of his contributions to global leadership and international affairs; the biography does not state the year of the award. His selection as a Rhodes Scholar in 1991, described above, was itself reported by Stanford as a notable student honor at the time.

See also

• McKinsey & Company
• Kevin Sneader
• Sven Smit
• Rodney Zemmel
• Stanford University
• Rhodes Trust
• Purdue Pharma

External links

• <ref>"Bob Sternfels".McKinsey & Company.Retrieved 28 September 2026.</ref>