Earlier this week, I received my first full performance review. In consulting firms this is a bit more challenging to do as each consultant has probably worked with several teams and each in very different contexts and circumstances. To deal with this variability, at my firm, each individual is assigned a “consensus reviewer” — someone [...]
United Airlines writes you a letter telling you that you’re one of their top 30 fliers — worldwide. What is this referring to? A partner at our firm who has been helping the firm set up offices across Asia and Australia!
I apologize for the lack of blogging lately — I have recently been embroiled in a very long and involved exercise involving a very complicated set of analyses to look at where the profits are in the broader technology industry — something which my manager and two partners have jokingly referred to as a Vasa [...]
Not sure I agree with this, but it’s still amazingly funny. (Hat tip: D. Chu)
… have been revealed. Well, sorta (hat tip: A. Phan). Pamela Slim from the blog Escape from Cubicle Nation did a guest post on I Will Teach you to be Rich about the consulting profession and some classic consulting pitfalls to avoid for those who are just starting (like me, I suppose). I picked out [...]
From Megan McArdle’s blog: “Corporations spend gargantuan sums of money on projects of little or no value all the time, for which management consultants should get down on their knees and thank God every day.” Let’s ignoring McArdle’s slight to my current employment, and instead consider the interesting point that her quote brings up here. [...]
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 [...]
Slide-umentation is more than just bad as a form of communication, it can break up your relationships (hat tip: co-worker who somehow stumbled on this recently updated Boston Consulting Group classic) Consultant’s love life
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 [...]
I’m not sure if this is typical for other consultants, but I spend a lot of time reading through corporate annual and quarterly reports (called 10K’s and 10Q’s, respectively, after the SEC form names). These reports give lots of information, including a description of the business (useful for technology and biotech/pharma companies which can be [...]