I have returned from training (or I did two days ago and have been too busy to blog about it). I’m still astonished at the amount of resources that consulting firms are willing to invest in training their employees, especially since many consultants eventually leave to do other things (including *gasp* working for other consulting [...]
When I’m asked about my job, I tend to think of it in terms of three Cs: compensation, convenience, and career development. Compensation is of course important, because I don’t intend to work for free. My family has spent the last four years funneling an enormous amount of money into the belly of a major(ly expensive) educational [...]
Confidentiality is a big part of consulting. In much the same way that the practice of medicine and law would be very different (and probably for the worse) if there was no confidentiality between parties, consulting (both the selling of cases and the actual act of providing advice) would be severely hampered without a basic [...]
Where I work, just like in college, I have instant electronic access to numerous databases. While I no longer have access to Scifinder Scholar (for Chemistry papers and structures and patents) or (almost) full access to journals on PubMed (which indexes every biological/medical paper published), my research workhorses are now Factiva (for news and magazine articles), [...]
In many ways, scientific training crosses over very well into consulting. It trains individuals to think critically about the world around them, to take in all observations for careful analysis, to skeptically consider evidence, to craft and test falsifiable hypotheses, and to find rigor in numbers and computation. It is no small wonder that so many [...]
For those of you who are interested, I was staffed the day after the Fourth of July on an internal project. But… shhh… if I tell you any more, I might have to kill you. While doing research for the secret secret internal project (I’m sorry, if I tell you, I do have to kill [...]
It’s rare to see ANY mention of management consulting in the press. For good reason. Because consulting is an insider service, firms are required to maintain the highest standards of privacy. The only time you ever hear about the clients that a consulting firm has dealt with is when the clients themselves consent (and probably only after a [...]
This just in (hat tip to The Chem Blog): BEIJING: In the first such case, a Chinese youngster was killed when the battery of his Motorola cell phone exploded, police in northwest China’s Gansu Province confirmed on Wednesday. The accident occurred at noon on June 19, when welder Xiao Jinpeng was working at the Yingpan [...]
When I first started work, several senior consultants noted that starting consultants would oftentimes find themselves “on the beach” as they waited for staffing rounds to fill them into cases. They noted that most starting consultants would grow restless and worried over their state of limbo. I thought I would be above that: “You mean, [...]
I ran into a remarkable bit of trouble trying to explain to people that I, now finally finished with the first round of new hire training, was “on the beach.” More than a few of my friends (even some new hire consultants! — they were of course, at rival firms) thought the phrase was meant literally. So, for [...]