#46 Head of Global Publishing @ McKinsey, Raju Narisetti
A storied career through media and now, at McKinsey
Welcome! I’m Simi Shah, and in this newsletter, I dive deep into the journeys of South Asian trailblazers. Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for more content + upcoming events. Find our podcast on Apple and Spotify.
Hot off the Pod 🎧 Raju Narisetti, Global Publishing Leader @ McKinsey
Today, I’m joined by a legend in the media business: Raju Narisetti, Global Publishing Leader at McKinsey.
Raju grew up in India where he studied business and journalism. He immigrated to the U.S. in the 1990s, initially earning his Masters in Journalism from Indiana University. He kickstarted his media career in local news in Dayton, Ohio. In 1994, he was recruited to the Wall Street Journal, where he climbed the ranks, becoming Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal Global and Editor of the WSJ Europe. After 12 years at the preeminent outlet, Raju left the Journal to found Mint, a first-of-its kind business media company in India. Upon his return to the U.S., he went on to number lead digital transformation and strategy across news organizations including the Washington Post, Dow Jones & Co., and News Corp.
In 2016, Raju was tapped to become CEO of the Gizmodo Group, home to brands like Jezebel and Lifehacker. When Univision exited the business in 2018, he decided to pay his vast experience in media forward, leading the Knight Bagehot Fellowships in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University and serving as a Professor at the School of Journalism. In January 2020, he was recruited to McKinsey, the world-renowned management consulting firm, to spearhead their global publishing efforts. With a career in media that spans 3+ decades and some of the most prestigious organizations in the world, Raju has much insight to share. Episode excerpts below:
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Simi: You join the Wall Street Journal as a staff reporter in 1994. By 2000, you're Deputy National Editor and you go on to serve as Managing Editor of Wall Street Journal Global and Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe. How did you climb the ranks so quickly? What do you feel you did to set yourself apart at one of the most preeminent business outlets in the world?
Raju: So this was 1994. And while there are a lot of Asian and Indian American journalists now in the U.S. — relatively speaking — at the Wall Street Journal, globally, there were four Indian journalists, including me, out of perhaps 2,000 people in the newsroom. We were a minority by a vast measure. But the Wall Street Journal then, and perhaps even now, is the closest I've ever worked to a pure meritocracy — where your weird sounding name, your accent (which I still have), mattered less. What mattered was: Do you have good ideas? And can you execute on them? Can you break news? And if you did that, they really didn't care about your ethnic background or anything else. And so the more you did that, the more opportunities that you got. I had two big turning points. The Journal typically comes to you after you’ve been in a role for a year and a half and says, ‘Hey, do you want to do something else now?’ And so in my first five years, I had three different jobs, covering very different industries.
Then, they asked me if I wanted to move to New York to cover the East Coast tech companies at a time. I did that. And then I felt like I could perhaps veer into editing. I became the first tech and media editor at the Wall Street Journal. We created offerings in the paper called ‘The World Wide Web,’ a column on the internet. I did that for about a couple of years until 9/11. When 9/11 happened, the Journal was very dramatically affected because we were in the World Financial Center right next to the World Trade Center. One of my leaders at that time inhaled a bunch of smoke that day and was pretty much out of commission for six months. I just stepped into that role without necessarily being asked. And I suspect that that gave the Journal leadership a chance to see that I could manage things. A year later, I was called into a meeting and asked, ‘Would you like to go be the managing editor in Asia? Or do you want to be the managing editor in Europe?’ Amazing choices, right? And that's was my last role at the Wall Street Journal before I ‘quit’ for the first time.
Simi: In 2020, you join McKinsey, one of the world’s leading management consulting firms, to lead their global publishing arm. Why move in-house to a consulting firm after spending all these years working across news organizations?
Raju: McKinsey leaders approached me towards the end of 2019 for a couple of reasons. I think it was my multimedia background, ability to engage a more diverse, perhaps even a younger business audience, and that too, globally. McKinsey has a storied history. We are the inventors of thought leadership, if you will. It began with the McKinsey Quarterly nearly 58 years ago. It's a very historic brand with a great legacy of insight. But often, all historic news brands or other content publishing organizations tend to kind of focus on longevity over relevance. The smart companies say longevity and relevance is what we want. And sometimes you need to over-index on relevance — create more engaging experiences, attracting newer audiences, thinking about how to get people to spend more time with you because the days of a particular publisher publishing on a topic that nobody else is working on is no longer the case.
We believe that McKinsey knowledge and insights are unique and actionable, which they are. But the trick is, you will only realize that if I get you to actually consume it. So the idea was to create interesting experiences, make it more interactive, and become an insights partner to show you how we can be an impact partner. So that was the direction McKinsey was heading in, and they thought that some outside perspective and experience would be useful. But guess what? In 35 years of being in media, I was in B2C. So per my career philosophy, I asked myself, ‘When is the last time I did something for the first time?’ I felt I could contribute a lot. I know that I bring a lot because of 30 years of experience. But every day, I'm learning a lot because I've never done the B2B before. And that's what makes for an interesting job, because if you come in saying ‘I know everything,’ it's a recipe for failure. But if you come in saying ‘I know a lot, I can help. But I also don't know a lot,’ then every experience becomes a learning experience.
Catch my full conversation with Raju on Apple, Spotify, or our website!