It’s not the first time I got this question, but, now that I’m done (at least for now) – what do I really think of management consulting? Great first job: I believe this is one of the best first jobs that you can get coming out of college or business school. It challenges you to [...]
A little over three years ago, I entered the world of management consulting. Yesterday was my last day. In true consultant fashion, I sent the office a slide-as-farewell-email and enjoyed a few glasses of wine and a few bottles of beer with my “war-buddy” colleagues and other well-wishers at a local bar in the early [...]
One of the dangers of a consultant looking at tech is that he can get lost in jargon. A few weeks ago, I did a little research on some of the most cutting-edge software startups in the cloud computing space (the idea that you can use a computer feature/service without actually knowing anything about what [...]
My consulting experience has been pretty atypical so far. Most consultants rotate between cases and roles every couple of months. Me? Up until about a few weeks ago, I had been doing corporate strategy work for the same technology client for 18 months (which is a long time – hence the picture of the old [...]
Two weeks ago, I sat down and had a long overdue chat with a partner on my case about my career and what I should do to make the most out of my consulting career. And, like a good MBA/consultant, he put together a framework – although instead of it being a 2 x 2 [...]
… looks like this (courtesy of, duh, Dilbert): One man’s trash is another man’s “brilliant” executive strategy. On a more serious note, though, one of the tasks that any strategic executive (or consultant for that matter) needs to be able to do is to take crazy assumptions and to test them to see what would [...]
My good friend Shang explains consulting: Sometimes I sit around trying to figure out how to explain consulting to my friends. Sure, it’s about providing strategic advice to various clients in all industries. When it comes down to it, consulting is a client-oriented service, and one that works with tight deadlines and intellectually demanding work. [...]
The most challenging thing to deal with at a any job is balancing a personal life with the demands of the job. This is something that is especially difficult in a professional services setting, where client demands make the job unpredictable and very stressful. This is not only a problem for individual consultants who oftentimes [...]
Consulting, for better and for worse, involves a great deal of secrecy. On the one hand, it means my firm pays for each consultant to have a company laptop (Thinkpad T60) with encrypted hard drive and a 3M privacy filter. On the other hand, it makes it extremely difficult to talk about my work, or [...]
My current case is working on high-level strategy work with a tech company, the goal being to help guide their strategic thinking as they attempt to map a strategy for future growth. The case, while very challenging because of its breadth, has been very interesting, not only because of the interesting strategic questions that we [...]