by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Most everyone will agree that storytelling is important for professional success. When I recently surveyed some working professionals MBAs (read: folks with jobs), they rated it a 6.3 (out of a 7 point scale) with a stdev: 0.7, n=62. No pushback here. Storytelling...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It is interview season for consulting firms. People are writing up cover letters, fine-tuning their resumes, and practicing their cases. This is what I said to a packed room of students. Before the interview It’s all about curiosity. Great problem solvers...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Hope you’re enjoying the summer – full of beaches, lakes, friends, and food. As consultants, it’s often hard to stay “aware” and “fresh”. In reality, the travel and the clients can be a bear. Same hotel concierge lounge, same...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Tomorrow is a big day in my journey. Was voted by students as the distinguished educator of the year. Super winning. Speaking at the graduation celebration. This is the venue. Here is the outline of my talk. (My) Past: Did not always know what I wanted to do The job...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
This makes sense. . . Have you ever gone to a fancy restaurant and left disappointed? Of course. Expectations were probably TOO HIGH, and the food and service were good, but not THAT GOOD. As consultants, we are in the client satisfaction business. Happy clients =...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Charles Aris is a recruiter out of North Carolina that places ex-strategy consultants. Yes, you should sign up for their newsletter. They do great work. Some of their post-consulting job postings here. EVP of Strategy & Corporate Development (Boston –...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Management consultants make good coin. It would be silly to think otherwise. Think, 14% of Harvard’s undergraduate class go into consulting. There is a reason for that – work with smart people on difficult, fun problems. Charles Aris – executive...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Wrote this post in 2018, still applicable today. Mentors are critical One of the biggest mistakes I made early in my career is that I did not ask for advice. I plodded along, thinking I knew best, and did not get advice from others. B.I.G.M.I.S.T.A.K.E. Now, getting...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I teach strategy to business students. Strategy can be a difficult concept to describe succinctly. Recently discovered this video from Strategy& below. It’s short and good – plan to use it in the classroom. Covers many of the key tenants of business...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Platform for consulting? A few ex-consultant friends and I mused over this concept several times in Marriott hotel bars across the country. “Why not set up a two-sided platform (think: VRBO, UBER) where companies can hire consultants for 1/3 of the price? Cut...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Managers assume too much We get busy and think to ourselves, “I have seen this problem before, I know what to do, why don’t you get it?” We (falsely) assume junior consultants should know what we know. Silly bias. As result, expectations can be...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Management Consulting. It’s a lot of things. It is an industry; we all know McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PWC, and others. It is a profession built on asking good questions. It is a team sport. It is a bit of an attitude. It is a tribe that is difficult to get...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What does good look like? All thoughtful business people are curious what good presentations look like. Here are a dozen+ presentations (freely and publicly available online) from Boston Consulting Group. These BCG decks may not be in your industry, or your function,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Wrote this blog post in 2013 (yes, when I was 20% younger). New comments in red color. Key takeaway (TLDR), focus on getting really good at your craft (read: expertise, professionalism) and relationships. Three kinds of power: positional, relational, and expertise...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
The BCG 2017 M&A report has a great subtitle here (3Mb pdf) called the Technology Takeover. BCG notes that 30% of 2016 M&A involved the acquisition of technology companies (no surprise), of which 70% were from outside the technology sector (surprise). In sum,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Death of expertise I saw this book at the library and was intrigued by the cryptic title: Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (affiliate link), by Tom Nichols. I flipped through the book and landed on this high-powered...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It’s case interview season Seems like students just got to school. Moving in, meeting a few people, and getting into an academic groove. Then, BBAM it’s late September and time for case interviews. There is one huge upside. You may have a job offer before...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Some people get stuff done You know people like this. Doers. Winners. People who are not just efficient, but they are also effective. When they say they will get it done, #$@!, you might as well consider it done. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Love this expression I first heard this in a Tim Ferris interview of Marc Andreessen here (min 6:10). Andreessen created the Netscape Mosaic browser (making the internet easy to navigate), sold it to AOL for $2B, then spent last 15+ years investing and running a...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Career is not a straight line So much is changing. Interest rates, geopolitics, hybrid work, expectations of work/life balance. After so many years of continued specialization (yes, do one thing well), we are finding that we all need generalist skills too. Swing like...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It’s easy to say YES. Perhaps too easy. When the client asks for something – new research, some ad-hoc analysis, an extra workshop – it usually seems like a reasonable request. After all, they pay the bills and shouldn’t they get the most out...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I first read this catchy acronym in the Harvard Business Review here. It’s not a subtle metaphor, but very easy to understand. Apt. Vivid. In the United States, we have a huge obesity problem, and frankly, the same thing exists in corporations. This is not...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consulting is a big tent Consulting comes in many flavors. Or in other words, it spans all industries + non profit + governmental. Whatever story you read about in the WSJ, there is a consultant and an attorney who can help (or at least say they can help). M&A,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Good strategy is rare Richard Rumelt, UCLA professor, argues that good strategy is rare. He outlines the 4 common ways that companies often fool themselves into a bad strategy in a McKinsey Quarterly article here. Based on his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Hypothe – what? Yes, I know it sounds like jargon, but actually it’s part of the secret sauce of management consulting. It’s more than educated guessing; this is how consultants smartly break down complex or ambiguous problems, and quickly start...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
This was a phrase coined in 1969 by Dr. Laurence Peters – an educator who wrote a 100+ page satire called The Peter Principle (affiliate link) replete with fake data and everything. Apparently, it was a NY Times best seller for 1 year, and is still in print...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
After reading Switch (affiliate link) by the Heath brothers, I am convinced that successful consulting projects must appeal to the head, the heart and the hand. It’s a simple way to think about change management, but it also makes a lot of sense. We all want to...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Gap analysis sounds fancy. . . Gap analysis is exactly what is sounds like – figuring out how far you are from a particular goal or target. Consulting firms do this all differently. It takes many forms, but is super common. In fact, I can’t think of any...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
The Financial Times wrote a short scathing article on the management consulting industry here. Some valid points, but clearly a quickly assembled article with a Warren Buffett quote and visual used as a wrapper. If you are going to argue that a $133 billion industry...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Everyone understands inventory It’s the stuff sitting on Walmart’s shelves. It’s the frozen pizzas in the freezer. The unsold house in the neighborhood. The empty hotel rooms and empty movie seats. Non-billable consultants are no different....
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What do McKinsey presentations looks like? Please find links to 30+ McKinsey presentations which are publicly available online. Many of these are from conferences, or governmental / non-profit organizations clients who have chosen to make them available online. Yes,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I wrote this post 6 years ago. It is still true today. Management consultants use the phrase “best practice” often. Perhaps too often. You will see that magical phrase mentioned numerous times in white papers and research on these websites: Boston Consulting...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
McKinsey’s advice McKinsey, in a 2011 article entitled Have you Tested Your Strategy Lately here, makes the very valid point that executives and leaders too often treat strategy as a ” procedural exercise or set of frameworks”, rather than a way of...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Geek out I have been using this slang a lot. Many of us who have heard this expression know that it means to become a little bit obsessive about something (usually a hobby). Applying this to business problems, my argument is that business consultants and students...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Charles Aris Charles Aris is an executive recruiting firm based in N Carolina that specializes in placing top-tier consultants into industry. They are good at what they do. Take a look at their 2017 strategy consulting compensation study here. More recent studies...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
So this morning there was a fantastical headline in the Washington Post here: Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste What the hay? Isn’t this a Ben Affleck movie about a government cover-up? No, it’s an internal report created by...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What consultants talk about Was at a table tonight with 5 ex-management consultants from the Big 4. When discussing some slides we had seen from recent MBAs, one person smartly commented on his PowerPoint sniff test: Every page should be judged to see if it passes. ....
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It is called “rolling off” a project, not jumping Client service (and definitely management consulting) is a relationship business. Your long-term success depends on your quality work and awesome reputation. Basically, you need to navigate smartly among...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
This is from 4 years ago and covers the Minto’s pyramid principle – one of the most important concepts in executive communication and logical structuring of arguments. This is really big at all the big 4 and big 3. It is the scaffolding of management...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
This is my favorite framework Yes, I know that is the geekiest thing I would ever say. This is a simple and elegant framework from Bain that describes how companies lose their way as they grow. The path from start-up to global juggernaut is not a straight line and...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
A statement of work (SOW) is a phrase you will hear almost daily in your life as a consultant. It’s the contract with the client on what you will be done and how much they will pay. Basically, it’s the lifeblood of a firm’s utilization,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It’s consulting interview season This means well-groomed MBAs are sitting across small tables with consulting firm partners and senior managers in something called a case interview. For those readers from consulting firms – you know this fire drill...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Recently co-facilitated workshops for 2 days Lots of coffee, sticky notes, talking, listening, and filtering of ideas. We walked away with a list of prioritized recommendations and lots of action items – so I give it two thumbs up as an effective workshop. They...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Lean. Toyota Production System These are words and concepts that any business person should readily know and understand – even if you are not an operations consultant. Process improvement initiatives built on these concepts take out billions of dollars of waste...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Yes, this morning I did 4 hours of data entry Yes, data entry. Our project was in a time crunch and we had major issues getting good operational data, so we begrudgingly took some print outs and manually typed them into excel. Yikes. Yes, we did look at other OCR...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
The Effective Executive The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is a a classic. Written 40+ years ago, and still enormously relevant. You can find pdf online for free or buy it used at Amazon for $2 (affiliate link). A steal. Great quotes from Drucker (shown in...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
The title of the BCG report sounds serious, but its a bit of a gem – easy to read and understand – here. Boils down to three points: Successful CEOs need to plan the transformation before they start work Transformation is expensive, need to fund the...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consultants should use surveys more often They are cost-effective, seemingly impartial, easy to use, and provide data in the “touchy and feel-y” areas where data might be hard to find, collect, or quantify. Bain, PWC, BCG, Deloitte all use surveys; see the...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What do McKinsey presentations looks like? Please find links to 20+ McKinsey presentations which are publicly available online. Many of these are from conferences, or governmental / non-profit organizations clients who have chosen to make them available online. Yes,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
One brutal week Was glad to just make it through the days without disappointing people or making too many mistakes. I had 32 different conference calls, a boat-load of work, a dentist appointment and planning for my mom’s 70th birthday. Apparently, the military...
