Relationships Archives - Page 5 of 14

Once McKinsey

McKinsey & Company keeps track of more than 65,000 alumni. It hosts about 180 alumni gatherings each year. It says roughly 90 percent of its former consultants take part regularly in at least some of these programs. In 2025 Fortune counted 18 current Fortune 500 CEOs who had worked at McKinsey.

Many alumni later work with the firm again, often as clients. One senior partner told Fortune: “There isn’t a single major client situation I’m in where there isn’t at least one McKinsey alum involved.” Another said: “When someone becomes a CEO and the stakes are high, they come back to the people they trust.”

People Leave Managers, Not Companies

“People leave managers, not companies” is a widely repeated saying in American business. A variant recorded in 2002 is “people do not leave their jobs, they leave their bosses.”

The saying appears in First, Break All the Rules (1999) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman: “It tells us that people leave managers, not companies.” The phrase researcher Barry Popik found the same words in the Washington Times of May 3, 1999. He says the book “probably originated or popularized” the saying. It is not certain who used it first.

The Traitorous Eight

On September 18, 1957, eight young scientists and engineers resigned together from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Among them were Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Eugene Kleiner. With money from Sherman Fairchild’s Fairchild Camera and Instrument, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor. They wanted to build transistors “the way they wanted to, not the way Shockley decreed.” They became known as the “traitorous eight.” Nobody knows who first used the name.

Fairchild in turn led to dozens of new companies, called the “Fairchildren.” In 1968 Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to found Intel. In 1972 Kleiner co-founded the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Clients Are Not Property

The American Bar Association’s Model Rule 5.6 says a lawyer may not offer or make an agreement “that restricts the right of a lawyer to practice after termination of the relationship.” The official comment explains why. Such an agreement “not only limits their professional autonomy but also limits the freedom of clients to choose a lawyer.” Massachusetts uses the same wording in its own rules.

On December 4, 2019, the ABA’s Formal Opinion 489 said it in four words: “Clients are not property.” When a lawyer moves to another firm, both the lawyer and the old firm may tell the clients. Then the clients decide. They can stay with the firm, follow the lawyer, or go elsewhere.

An Epidemic of Loneliness

On May 3, 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Even before COVID-19, “about half of adults in the country reported measurable levels of loneliness.” For people aged 15 to 24, time spent in person with friends fell “from about 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020.”

The advisory compared the mortality risk of social disconnection to smoking “up to 15 cigarettes a day.” Murthy also spoke of “making sure our workplaces cultivate connections.”

We’re Friendly

American English grades closeness with care, from a name in a contact list to a best friend.

We’re friendly. We get along well, but we are not friends.

We’re not close. We know each other, but we share little that is personal.

We know each other professionally. We know each other only through work.

An acquaintance. Someone you know by name and face.

A contact. A connection. Someone in your professional network.

A friend of a friend. Someone you know through a person you both know.

A close friend. A good friend. A real friend, not just a friendly contact.

A fair-weather friend. Someone who is friendly only while things go well.

I Love You, Man

In the comedy I Love You, Man (2009), Peter Klaven is a Los Angeles real estate agent. He proposes to his girlfriend Zooey, and she accepts. But “he does not have any close male friends to share the news with, only family and female acquaintances.”

Peter overhears Zooey’s friends talk about his lack of guy friends. So he makes “a series of overtures toward various men.” They go badly. Then he finds a friend through work. At an open house at Lou Ferrigno’s mansion, which Peter is trying to sell, he meets Sydney Fife.

Fewer Confidants

In June 2006 the American Sociological Review published a study of the people Americans confide in. In 1985 Americans named on average 2.94 close confidants. By 2004 the number had fallen to 2.08. A quarter of Americans had no close confidants at all.

The finding was disputed. The sociologist Claude Fischer said the data “seem internally inconsistent or simply implausible” and “shouldn’t be relied upon.” A software error was later found that had miscoded 41 responses. One of the authors said the corrected results still showed a significant decline.

One Friend in a Lifetime

In the 1907 edition of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams writes: “One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”

The linguist Anna Wierzbicka quotes Adams to show that “The meaning of the English word friend has changed over the centuries”. In what she calls Anglo societies, “the number of ‘friends’ that a person can be expected to have has increased over time.” To get the old force back, “it is now necessary to use the expression close friend.” That expression, she writes, “is definitely modern.”