Categories
Consulting

5 Benefits of Internal Strategy vs Consulting

Last year, after 2.5 years in management consulting, I transitioned to a Fortune 50 US company in an internal strategy role. Having had about a year on the new job, I want to highlight the benefits of this transition to give the many consultants out there some perspective. Before outlining the benefits of internal strategy, […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

Fool-Proof Note Taking: The Verbatim Approach

As consultants, we are required and recommended to take notes for the meetings we attend. This seems like a simple task because formal education has forced us, at one time or another, to take notes. The world of formal education, however, is typically parsed out so an individual only needs to focus on one subject […]

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Career Advice

The Ups and Downs of a Career in Consulting

Consulting is one of the most prestigious careers you can pursue upon graduation. Every year thousands flock to apply to top consulting firms such as McKinsey and Company, Bain and Company, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Without a doubt, a career in the management consulting industry comes with many short- and long-term benefits. However, many […]

Categories
Consulting Industry

Is Consulting an Attractive Career Option?

Have you ever wondered why someone would be attracted to consulting as a profession? Prior to Accenture offering me a position, one of my interviewers asked me “what attracted you to consulting?” This is a common question in consulting interviews, and it is one that usually throws people off. I often hear people say they […]

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Career Advice

Choosing Management Consulting as a Career

As a young professional, fresh out of university I was certain I knew which career path I wanted to take. I had done extensive research into the consulting industry and was a member of the consulting club at my university. I knew then without any doubt that consulting was the great career choice for me, […]

Categories
Consulting Industry

Economic Consulting vs Management Consulting

Consulting is one of the most sought-after careers for graduate students looking to work in a high-responsibility and dynamic work environment. While almost everyone has heard about the prestigious careers in management consulting, there is a career that is quite similar and just as lucrative in economic consulting. In this article, we will examine a […]

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Career Advice

Consulting: Blazing your own trail

Apart from the rigorous selection process that consulting firms use to assess their potential candidates, securing a job and thriving within the consulting industry is not easy. The most frequently asked questions that consultants are asked by students include: “what is consulting”, “what do consultants do” and “what are the minimum requirements needed to get […]

Categories
Consulting Industry

What is Consulting? Is Management Consulting a Good Fit for You?

What is Consulting? Many of us have heard the term consulting before, whether it comes up in a chat with friends about making money or just throwing around the term loosely when trying to come up with an entrepreneurial idea. What does consulting actually mean and is consulting right for you? The term consulting is […]

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Career Advice

How I Unexpectedly Ended Up in Management Consulting

When I started graduate school three years ago, I had only a marginal interests in pursuing a management consulting career. Low and behold, I’ll be starting my first day in management consulting in New York City a month from now. I sometimes chuckle in reflecting on my unlikely path into this field. My story is […]

Categories
Internships

Three things I wish I knew going into my summer internship

As an undergrad embarking on my first management consulting internship, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. On campus, I was involved in a consulting organisation where we did project work for clients, but I questioned if the skills I gained would be transferrable and applicable. It didn’t feel “real” enough. Upperclassmen who had done […]

Categories
Learning

Creativity

I was going to post a single quote for creativity but, in keeping with the nature of the word itself, there appear to be multiple different views on what creativity actually is. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has described creativity as the freedom to fail and try again. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which […]

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Career Advice

Preparing for Your Consulting Application

Well, let’s embark on the journey. First things first, your consulting application is the most important part of the recruitment process for two reasons. Firstly, it is your very first touch point with the firm. The HR person will look at your Resume, Cover Letter, and Transcript and decide whether you are qualified to attend […]

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Career Advice

Understanding Firms’ Selection Criteria

Before starting your application journey, the very first thing is to understand the recruitment process and selection criteria of those management consulting firms. I assume that you have carefully considered those four critical factors outlined in my first article and really committed to the management consulting position that you are targeting, since the consulting application […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

Managing impressions: how to get by doing less

Top-tier consulting firms are notorious for two or three-year up or out policies, and poor work-life balance. But by working smarter, doing ‘just enough’ is usually sufficient for promotion and can also improve your quality of life. Before getting into the tips, I remind you that your personal life is more important than being a […]

Categories
Media / Internet

Creating More Value Than You Capture

As an aspiring consultant, it is easy to see what you stand to gain from this career choice: high salary, high status, strong networking opportunities, and attractive exit options. But a more productive question might be, what do you plan to contribute? With the arrival of the internet, we entered an age of hyper competition […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

The Consulting Value Proposition

Why do organisations hire consultants? If you are a junior consultant, knowing why your work is valuable is likely to make your job more meaningful. If you are a partner, knowing why your work is valuable is likely to help you sell consulting projects and make money for yourself and for the firm. Below we […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

Consulting Exit Options

One of the benefits of starting your career in the management consulting industry is that it provides many favorable exit opportunities. Some of the possible exit opportunities that a consultant may consider are outlined below. 1. Another Consulting Firm Just because you leave a consulting firm doesn’t mean that you have to leave the consulting industry. […]

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Career Advice

Passion Versus Profession – Are Management Consulting and Music Production Really That Different?

As an aspiring management consultant who has also been working as a music producer for several years, composing, arranging, and producing songs for multiple artists, I get a lot of questions about this seemingly strange combination of interests. “If you love music so much, why don’t you do it as a full-time job?” “If you […]

Categories
B-School / Consulting Clubs

Making The Most Out Of A Networking Event at University

If you are going to university, it is likely that you will attend a corporate networking event at some point. Whether you want to form connections with your dream employer, find out about a specific company or industry, or simply go because that’s what all of your friends seem to be doing, these events can […]

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Career Advice

Mythbusters: The Management Consultant Edition

So you’re interested in being a management consultant? Great! But what is it that they actually do? If you’re still not sure of the answer then read on, as I bust the myths and reveal the realities of what it truly means to be a “management consultant”. 1. Consulting only pertains to the business sector- […]

Categories
Career Advice

Finding the One: A Job-hunter’s Fallacy

In today’s world, the lives of fresh grads are meant to revolve around their careers and professional advancement, and so it is obviously no surprise that so many of us struggle to commit to a specific field, out of fear that it’s not THE perfect job for us. Much like dating, job-hunting is a game […]

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Career Advice

The Consulting Myth

The first piece of advice I was given when I started my Master’s in Management at London Business School was to beware of the mirage of consulting. On the first day of orientation, we were told that we should start applying yesterday, especially if we wanted to get into consulting – but not to put […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

5 Steps to Structuring A Professional Email

One thing they don’t teach you at university, but which every young professional needs to learn, is how to write an effective email. Here are five (5) steps to help you successfully structure your professional emails. Step 1: Start with a greeting You should start your email with a greeting. It is important to do […]

Categories
Interviews

Why Consulting?

First and foremost I want to address the myth that all high achieving students have about consulting, “You need talent to be a consultant!”. I completely dismiss this notion and would like to replace it with another idea, “You need no special talent, you only need to be passionately curious!”. Curiosity drives intuition and that’s […]

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Career Advice

Management Consultancy 101: How to navigate your first application

So you’ve decided you want to be a management consultant? Congrats, you’re now one of thousands competing for the same job! And there’s your first problem: how do you stand out? The first step is always the hardest and sadly the most important, so here’s my guide on how to tackle your first consultancy job […]

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Career Advice

How to get a head start as a first-year student

Every now and then, I meet students in their final year at university who are worried about applying for graduate jobs in consulting. “It seems like a great job – but I just don’t think my CV is good enough” is something I have heard many times. True, graduate schemes at top firms are very […]

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Career Advice

Travel, Training and Mentorship

Three significant aspects in the life of a management consultant: travel, training and mentorship. Travel When it comes to travel, different consulting firms have different policies. McKinsey consultants often spend Monday to Thursday at the client site with Fridays in the office. Bain and BCG often spend a lot of time with the client at the beginning […]

Categories
Economics Frameworks Strategy

The Spirit of Giving – Re-examining the notion of “Value”

Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noël! Sheng Dan Kuai Le! (圣诞快乐!) Wishing you an enjoyable day, and a happy holiday season spent with good people, surplus amounts of food and drinks, and a large number of gifts! One idea that is firmly associated with Christmas is gift giving. This is a central part of the Christian tradition, […]

Categories
Leadership

5 Strategies To Create Workplace Happiness

This is a guest post from Riya Sander. Creating a happy workplace can make it easier to retain your workers, allowing you to avoid the costs related to employee turnover. It can also increase the morale of those who stay, which may lead to higher productivity and a greater likelihood that your people take ownership […]

Categories
Leadership

Leadership Lessons: How to Reinvent Yourself as a Leader

This is a guest post from Caryn Walsh. Being a good leader has never been easy. Not everybody can learn how to carry the expectations, demands, and ambitions of a company on a single pair of shoulders. You need to know when to be tough and have a willingness to make the difficult decisions, but […]

Categories
Innovation

Corporate Career or Entrepreneurial Path?

I am a bit of a late bloomer in some ways – certainly academically. At the age of 48, I decided, after a life spent in business of all kinds, to go back to school, obtain my EMBA, and focus on an entrepreneurial career. It’s not really that delaying my master’s was a choice. When […]

Categories
Management

The Lessons I Learned From Peter Drucker

It is not like I knew Peter well – as a real live person. In fact, I only met him once – in Claremont – as a very old man. That said, I always found it rather funny and more than touching that for a man who helped chart the academic progression of American management […]

Categories
Strategy

Knowledge, Networks, and Branding

It’s what you know. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. Knowledge, networks, and branding. You have to start somewhere, and the logical starting point is to acquire knowledge. Society understands the importance of this, which is why primary and high school education can […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

Surviving in a Procyclical Industry

Management consulting is a service industry that earns its keep by serving large organisations – corporate, non-profit and government. During economic downturns these prospective clients typically have less money, or more uncertain cash flows, and so are less likely to spend money on consulting services. As a result, consultants are vulnerable to layoffs during economic […]

Categories
Strategy

How Empowered Are You?

What does it mean to say that someone is “empowered”? The Oxford dictionary defines the term as “stronger and more confident in controlling ones life”. Key to this definition is the idea of control; that is, the ability to influence the course of events. Roles in the community that we might think of as empowered include priests, professors, […]

Categories
Innovation

Essential Features That Your Serviced Office Should Have

It is very common these days for businesses of all shapes and sizes to use serviced offices. For smaller companies and startups, however, they are particularly valuable. If a young business wants to get off the ground fast, they can do so by paying a fixed rate fee to rent a fully equipped workspace. It […]

Categories
Economics

Cheap money, what is it good for?

Cheap money should help to stimulate the world economy, but is it working? Following the leave campaign winning the Brexit referendum, which will see the UK leave the EU two years after the Prime Minister notifies the European Council of its intention to do so, there was much fear about what this would mean for the strength of […]

Categories
Career Advice

“Up or Out” Policy

It is common for top consulting firms to subject consultants to a rigorous “up or out” policy. What this means is that consultants are required to advance to the next level of responsibility within a certain period of time or leave the firm. Consultants normally receive regular performance feedback and so have frequent opportunities to […]

Categories
Career Advice

Consulting Roles

A consultant who enjoys a successful career progression within the consulting industry will be promoted up through the ranks and hold various different roles along the way. Job titles will vary by firm. An entry level consultant may be called a business analyst or junior associate. New recruits who hold an advanced degree (e.g. MBA, […]

Categories
Economics

Harnessing Creative Energy

China comes up for criticism in modern times for stealing software technology from the West. Software is a language (or a set of languages) which can be used to make computer hardware do marvelous things, and because software is easy to copy (or reverse engineer), it’s easy to steal. But if there is software stealing going on in China and elsewhere, […]

Categories
Strategy

Sanitised vs Sanitary

Are you trying to build a work environment that is more sanitised or more sanitary? There is a difference. A sanitised work environment is generally inoffensive, and is designed to satisfy the strict (and habitually self-serving) requirements of the HR checklist. A sanitary work environment, on the other hand, is one that’s designed to be favourable for the health and proper functioning of […]

Categories
Career Advice

Generalist versus Specialist

The traditional consulting career model employed by top consulting firms like McKinsey was to develop generalist consultants who could apply general business principles and frameworks across different industries, sectors and functional areas. Clients increasingly value industry experience and specialized knowledge, and so firms are evolving the traditional consulting career model to accommodate these changing client demands. […]

Categories
Strategy

Destiny vs Destination

When things go badly, the optimist is likely to respond with a reference to forces outside her control, “our competitors got lucky this time!” When things go well, the pessimist is likely to respond in a similar way, “I got lucky this time!” In both situations the person is making a call to destiny. The optimist believes that things will go well […]

Categories
Career Advice

Brief History of the Consulting Industry

Executives often rely on the advice of management consultants. Was it always this way? Where did it all begin? The management consulting industry, as we know it, originated in America. The very first management consulting firm was Arthur D. Little, founded all the way back in 1886 by a professor at MIT whose name was […]

Categories
Economics

Taking Profit

I am currently living in Beijing, lecturing strategy and finance courses to undergraduates. One observation I’ve made is that the people here are good at identifying opportunities for profit. And I use the word profit not in a financial sense, but with the broader meaning of the French verb profiter, which means “to make the most advantage of”. This […]

Categories
Skills, Tips, and Tactics

Consulting Jargon

We have commented on consulting jargon before, but we will do it again. Organisations hire management consultants to provide advice on their most challenging business problems. Senior management are busy people, and so consultants need to communicate as clearly as possible. The need for clarity, however, has not prevented consultants from developing an industry jargon all […]

Categories
Leadership

How To Avoid Five Common Leadership Mistakes

If you have recently been placed in a leadership or managerial position in your company, then you may need to change the way you approach work each day. The five most common mistakes discussed below are made by those in management in virtually every sector of the business world. Learning how to avoid them can […]

Categories
Career Advice

Consulting or Banking

If you are a high achieving undergraduate or MBA student, then you are likely to be considering various highly paid and prestigious career options. This post provides you with a high level comparison of management consulting and investment banking. 1. Nature of the job Management consultants assist organisations by providing advice to address specific problems […]

Categories
Career Advice

Is Consulting For You?

Management consulting is a nice perch, but it is not for everyone. Many people go into consulting with a plan to gain a few years of experience and then apply for B-school or pivot into industry or entrepreneurship. This is a legitimate strategy, but it can also be a cop out with many people leaving […]

Categories
Innovation Strategy

3 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

We live in an increasingly digital and technology enabled world, which is increasing the level of competition between organisations. Why is this the case? There are three key reasons. Firstly, technology is helping to lower barriers to entry. It has never been easier to create new goods and services, and get them noticed by your […]