Barbara Minto is an American author and consultant focused on the subject of executive communication.

Biography

Minto's career began as a secretary at an American railway company in the 1950s "making 400 bucks a month". Concerned that her supervisor's age and ill-health would result in the loss of her well-paying position, she applied to

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...

, which at the time did not require an undergraduate degree, and was admitted upon passing the entry exam. Minto graduated from Harvard Business School in 1963. She was one of only eight women to graduate in a class of 600. Minto was the first female MBA hired by

McKinsey & Company McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm founded in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey, that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. McKinsey is the oldest and ...

, starting with the firm in

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

in 1963, and moving to

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

in 1966, where she served until 1973. After layoffs at McKinsey arising from the

1973 Oil Crisis The 1973 oil crisis or first oil crisis began in October 1973 when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo. The embargo was targeted at nations that had supp ...

, Minto began her own training business focused on the executive communication techniques she pioneered during her tenure. Minto published her book, ''The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking,'' in 1985, and an upgraded edition entitled ''The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking and Problem Solving'' in 1996. She continues to conduct training sessions for small groups of participants globally, through her business Minto Books International, Inc.

Work

Minto is the originator of the

MECE principle The MECE principle, (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) pronounced by many as "ME-see", and pronounced by the author as "Meese" like Greece or niece, is a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets that are mutually ...

pronounced "ME-see", a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets that are mutually exclusive (ME) and collectively exhaustive (CE). MECE underlies her Minto Pyramid Principle, which suggests that people's ideas should be communicated in a

pyramid A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...

format in which summary points are derived from constituent and supporting sub-points: * Grouping together low-level facts they see as similar * Drawing an insight from having seen the similarity * Forming a new grouping of related insights, etc. Minto argues that one "can’t derive an idea from a grouping unless the ideas in the grouping are logically the same, and in logical order.”

Publications

Books * 1985: ''The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking'' * 1996: ''The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking and Problem Solving''

References

External links

Barbara Minto
on LinkedIn * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Minto, Barbara American consultants 20th-century American writers 20th-century American women writers American business executives American women business executives Harvard Business School alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American women