Wednesday class in Consultative Processes was very interesting. First we had a panel of four consultants currently working for some of the very well known and not so widely known consulting companies: Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PWC), Deloitte, North Highland, Grant Thornton. In spite of the fact that the image of a consultant sometimes is more readily associated with a buttoned-up, dark-suited, white-shirted, tied-up men, all panelists, incidentally, happened to be ladies. By their own admission later in the panel, the gender make up in their respective companies is actually about 50/50. Go figure!
They introduced themselves and then were open for questions from the students. I am not going to recollect all the questions. Just a few general observations.
Most of them are currently working, or have been in the past, with public sector. For DC area it means mostly federal government agencies. All of them have been pointing out that working with the government is a somewhat tedious experience compared to the private sector consulting. Engagements with government consulting take a long time, and recommendations presented to the clients are more often than not left without actual implementation. On the upside, if you are located in DC area and work in public sector, your travel, which is a hallmark of private sector consulting, is rather limited, because there are so many available engagements in the capital area. On second thought, young consultants without family may appreciate extensive travel, so it is not a clear cut upside for everyone.
All present panelists consider themselves generalists, rather than Subject Matter Experts in a narrow field. They conceded though, that their companies have other consultants with specialized expertise too.
Another interesting thought from the discussion was about getting into consulting. Generally you can get into consulting with pretty much any professional background as long as you can demonstrate how your experience lends or translates to the company’s overall expertise. Advanced degrees, Masters/Ph.D., are very much preferred, but it does not have to be MBA.
I jotted down skills, qualities and attributes of a good consultant according to our panelists. Compare this list to the one that our class came up with last week. You will see that they are almost identical, if only sometimes differently worded:
- Analysis
- Communication
- Research
- Presentation
- Initiative
- Desire to learn
- Quick learner
- Humility
- Flexibility
- Networking within and outside the company
- Proactive in getting yourself engaged
- Negotiation
- Reputation
- Hard working
- Finisher
The second part of the class after the panelists left was about interviewing with consulting companies. Just to bog you down with the lists today, here is the one our professor presented us with about the skills assessed during the interview:
- Leadership skills
- Analytical skills
- Presentation skills
- Energy
- Attention to detail/Organization
- Quantitative skills
- Flexibility
- Maturity
- Intelligence
I hope you are sufficiently informed about the skills and qualities of consultants by now, if not downright bored with them. Time for me to log off 
I mentioned before that McKinsey Mind is the required text for my Consultative Processes course. I started to read it after the first class and I cannot get my hands off of it. I am half way through now. I plan to read it twice, as was suggested by the authors. One time – straight through, and then by pieces for my actual class assigned reading.
The book is written by two alumni of the Firm, as the associates of the company refer to it internally. Notice they don’t use ex-employees, but alumni, which is supposedly render more dignity than the ex- or former employee and underscores the overarching sense of belonging to an exclusive elite club that does not have membership expiration date. This term alumni refers to all former employees who left McKinsey for one reason or another. Present employees of the company, on the other hand, are called McKinsey-ites. When I read that I immediately remembered Nordies from the Harvard Business case Nordstrom: Dissention in the Ranks, which I had a group project on in Human Capital Management course in Spring term. (Along those lines, the George Washington University students are refered to as Colonials, Georgtown University- Hoyas, University of Maryland – Terrapins, American University – Eagles).
I have really enjoyed reading the book. As is well-known, and I mentioned already, McKinsey is indeed a very elite and exclusive company (as are Bain and BCG – the other two of the Big 3 Consulting companies). However the authors have managed to maintain rather humble general position. You can see on almost every page their pride in belonging to the alumni club of the company, but they do not slide into arrogance and snobism.
The intent of the book is not to spill the (dirty) little secrets of the company, but rather to share the methods and techniques that has earned the company its reputation for solid and rigorous analysis, and actionable value-adding recommendations and solutions to the clients’ problems. What the authors do is give a general overview of how the company addresses its consulting engagements through the structured framework and describe the elements of the framework, such as stating the hypothesis, desinging analysis, gathering data, interpreting results, and presenting recommendations. These elements are further divided into smaller chunks and all of them are presented in a very formalized, well-structured way. The authors bring a lot of real-life examples and quotes from McKinsey alumni and current McKinsey-ites which really gives ultimate relevance and credibility to the book.
Even if you are not interested in Management/Strategy Consulting this book gives a lot of references to how the McKinsey mind, methods, techniques could be adopted at any organization for approaching and solving their internal problems. McKinsey is very picky in their hiring, but with this book you can take a peek at what is going on the inside and learn some valuable lessons.
Today I had the first class in my elective course – Consultative Processes. From the syllabus and the first class it became obvious that the class is going to be very writing-intensive and group work oriented. We will have to submit three individually prepared cases from Harvard Business Publications. And there will be two group projects, each consisting of a write-up and an in-class presentation: Consulting Proposal and Consulting Report. On top of that a lot of reading assignments too.
From the Professor’s comments in the class it appears that, just as I expected based on the syllabus, it is going to be relatively general, high level introductory course to Consulting. However, the cases and especially the two group projects are going to give me enough exercise and taste, for me to decide if I want to take more advanced classes geared to Consulting later on in my MBA program.
In class we did some exercises, namely the students were giving their answers to three questions about Consultant’s professional attributes. Here is the result of our collective brain-storming. I think it gives some interesting insights for those who are not very familiar with what Consultants work is like. The bullets are in no hierarchial order, but rather in the order they were suggested by the students. Every suggested bullet was supported by specific example, but I have no time for those details here, and you would have to interpret some of the more vague points on your own. So here are the lists.
What Consultants DO:
- Diagnose the problem and figure out how to address it
- Provide expertise/capacity to the client
- Identify opportunities
- External revies of the client’s processes
- Benchmarking
- Changem management
- Soft skills
- Conflict management
- Avoid conflict of interests
What Consultants Should NOT DO:
- Undertake projects outside their expertise
- Cover up illegal activities of the client
- Bad customer service
- Sell up unnecessary services
- Make decisions for the client
- Breach confidentiality
Skills (and attributes) of Consultant:
- Communication
- Listening
- Absorb a lot of new information quickly
- Analytical skills
- Project management
- People skills
- Ethics
- Negotiation
- Humility (I guess this is not very popular notion among consultants, but apparently clients are expecting this)
- Dealing with ambiguity
- Continuous learning
- Creativity
- Receptive to client’s feedback
- Research skills
- Interviewing skills
The list is not exhaustive, but a good start nevertheless. I hope it would be helpful for those who are interested to learn more about consulting, but do not have very clear understanding about what Consulting is yet.
The required text for this class is The McKinsey Mind by Ethan Rasiel and Paul Friga.
. The book itself was not very expensive, because it is not a formal textbook. Which was nice, especially in comparison to the one I had to buy for Financial Markets. But unfortunately this price advantage was all but eliminated by the cost of other materials that need to be purchased for the class: the pack of Harvard Business cases and the course pack. Well, it’s not something new. (MBA) Education is pricey. I have kind of got used to it 
