What skills do people learn when consulting?
What I admire from the McK/BCG/BAIN etc. cadre is their confidence on being able to solve any problem you can throw at them. Of course this does not always work, but the attitude is a mixture between hard-work, power, arrogance and being extremely smart people.
Consultants aren’t superheros. But if you’re looking for some smart people to grind on some question you have you they typically deliver what you want. Sometimes they crash and burn (had that happen with McK once).
* The partners overseeing the client relationships, who have each worked with hundreds of clients, been involved with a thousand projects personally, and know something of 10x more. At that stage in their career, a huge amount of strategy consulting becomes instinctive pattern recognition.
* The firm's global knowledgebase, practice areas, research support teams, etc. These hugely accelerate your knowledge of an industry so you can productively and usefully engage with experienced managers at the client right from day 1.
I was a BCG consultant for a few years. Every 3 months, I'd be thrown into a totally new industry: forestry and paper making, clothing supply chains, retail banking sales incentive structures, car tyre manufacturing cost reduction, airline route pricing, production planning for brick manufacturing, ERP systems for electrical contracting wholesaling. Those were my first two years as a junior consultant.
On the day the project kicked off internally, of course I knew nothing. But a couple of days later, I knew how each industry worked, understood the competitive positions of the client and their main competitors, had some good hypotheses on the client's specific challenges, knew the terminology, and was fully equipped to start asking relevant questions.
I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't. Being humble, open, inquisitive, sensitive to others' perspective, and focused on the outcome gets you a long way.
"I never pretended to know stuff that I didn't."
Exactly! My feelings is that they pride not on knowing things, but on knowing _how_ to know things.
I had an ex-Mck associate partner as a boss and turns out he's a great guy (though his brain seems to be overclocked and that made it extremely difficult to work with).
Framed another way - The HN crowd loves to shit on PowerPoint slides right up until they need to make a pitch deck that doesn’t suck.
All that said, after many years of working with consultants from every major firm, I’ve definitely got mixed feelings about the actual value generated by a lot of engagements.
I understand the temptation to poke fun at this, but think of it from a startup POV. They do pitch decks as well, and they are making up numbers there too.
If it means churning out low value status updates then no thanks.
Just like how "coding" can be creating a work of art and delivering something amazing, or mindlessly burning down Jira tickets that you get shoveled on your plate.
The McK engagement manager who is a veteran and knows their job (and your job as CEO/CFO/VP) charges $10k per day, because they are basically an experienced executive for hire -- while the McK associate fresh from business school gets leased out for $1k per day. The latter are the equivalent of a smart but inexperienced freelance developer (who don't cost much less) -- though with the resources of McK corporate behind them, and the willingess to work 14 hours a day.
Learning to consistently convince people in power is a pretty nice skill to have IMO.
I think we're good at it if you believe from posts here at HN all we do is providing useless PPTs, and still growing double digits % each year while charging $2M for a 12w project.
It's about understanding how to organize thoughts and present a point in a way that an executive would want to make a decision on a topic. (When it goes the way it should.)
After a stint in consulting, you sometimes have meetings with people you work with up and down the chain in a company, and you wonder, "my god, how do you get through every day with the disorganized jumble of random thoughts you're spewing in this meeting?"
At its best, it teaches you how to find and organize evidence to make a point, convince people of something, and get things done.
At worst, well... those skills can be employed by people robotically going to create meaningless (or harmful) advice that a company already knows, for lots of $$$ wasted. Like so much else, it is often a reflection of the capability and state of the person paying for the work. You get someone who's under lots of deadline pressures, dug themselves into a bad budget hole, doesn't know what good work looks like, and you're gonna get a shitty consulting output that makes the headlines (or makes people remember) that consultants can produce lots of BS.
have you been working in a management/strategy consultancy? If yes, would you be up for a chat / email exchange?
My contact details are in my profile.
Cheers!
Even just helping a company come up with a rationale plan to identify key issues and succinctly communicate that to leadership is a huge benefit.