by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
One PowerPoint slide a Day I first heard the expression “One PowerPoint a Day” reading McKinsey Way (affiliate link), many many years ago and still find it useful. While management consultants have many flaws (oh yeah, we do), we are generally disciplined thinkers. ...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What consultants talk about Was at a table tonight with 5 ex-management consultants from the Big 4. When discussing some slides we had seen from recent MBAs, one person smartly commented on his PowerPoint sniff test: Every page should be judged to see if it passes. ....
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Reading PowerPoint = Painful to watch Last week I was a in a painful 1 hour meeting where the presenter kept reading his slides. Ouch. Each page was like a kick to my shins. Imagine, this is what clients see and feel when you read your PowerPoints. PowerPoint is the...
by Consultant's Mind | Fun
“Excellence is a habit” Apparently that is something Aristotle said. If we are what we repeatedly do, then you are not “excellent” once, by chance, but by training, diligence, muscle memory, and habit. Anders Ericsson talked about...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consultants spend hours making slides It’s a common sight to see consultants pouring over their PowerPoint slides – moving pages around, adjusting the colors on graphs, mulling over wording, checking verb agreement and proof-reading. Presentations are also...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
What’s the so what? You will hear this phrase used on projects a fair amount. It is not the best usage or even politely worded, but it’s critical: Your presentations need to have a point Since consultants are paid for insights, recommendations and...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
Death by PowerPoint Presentations can be boring. We have all sat in large conference rooms held captive by a speaker wielding a poorly thought-out PowerPoint. To misquote a bumper sticker, “PowerPoints don’t kill, people do.” Don’t put lipstick on a pig Some people...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Really enjoying ChatGPT If you have not tried ChatGPT, please stop reading this blog post and do that first. It’s worth your time. Massive hype The amount of (probably justifiable) hype on ChatGPT cannot be understated. Heck, my dad sent me a 20+ min video on...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Not a lawyer So I couldn’t tell you the difference between copyright and trademark (whoa, ignorance), until I read this article from the Economist. It turns out that many famous works are going into the public domain. This means that you can adapt and use it...
by Consultant's Mind
After 10+ years blogging about consulting, I’ve finally put it down in a more systematic way for you. Spent 8 months recording videos on the following topics. You can access it here: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/managementconsulting There are 5...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
One PowerPoint a day I tell junior consultants to practice making PowerPoints. Read a simple article, group the ideas into buckets. Write a useful title. Have a diagram that helps understanding. Use data points to persuade. This is one for today. US state tax...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Parents worry about their kids’ education Of course they do. That’s part of the job description. Clothe them, feed them, love them, teach them values, and give them the education they need to win in life. Yeah, talk about an underpaid job. The last two...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
One-pagers are super useful Consultant put their thoughts on PowerPoint. Sometimes, it’s for the final presentation, but much more often, it’s for simple one-pagers. These one-pagers serve a diversity of purposes: Checklist of data collection progress and...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I asked 40+ recent college graduates a bunch of questions. This is their response to the questions: What is your key takeaway about consulting / corporate life? What surprised you about corporate life? What would you like to share with juniors and seniors in...
by Consultant's Mind
Welcome to Management Consulting Consulting is awesome. Too many benefits to list them all: Work with smart people on tough problems Learn from every project and gain new marketable skills Discover the key challenges faced by leading clients Accelerate your...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consulting is broad Management consulting is a disparate field with more than 700K+ Americans describing themselves as consultants. Yes, that’s possible – even though there are probably a good number of project managers, contractors, subject matter...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Good decisions require data Of course. Without some robust thinking and analysis based on data, it’s called (um) . . . guessing. Even if you are not a “quant”, you better be able to explain what a regression is and roughly how it works. Look –...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Starting in mid-March, I went on an intellectual camping trip with 226 university students. We decided (a generous expression) to take our learning remote. How did it go? What did I learn? What worked? As with all things strategy, it involves trade-offs and using your...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
Consultants use PowerPoint almost to the point of parody. Yes, some of us turn it on first thing in the morning (hat tip: FL). Kinda makes sense. We are in the business of turning the complex into the simple. We put things into buckets – and the individual...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
First of all, you gotta love the provocative title of this article from Roger Martin, ex-Dean of Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto here. Big. Lie. Hard to get past those two words. Big Lie. Why is strategy (potentially) a scary thing? Martin starts...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Writing is a superpower Putting your thoughts on paper in an organized way pays massive dividends. If executives can learn quickly from the work you’ve done and make smart decisions, then you are winning. If it’s a pleasure to read and reflect on, even...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What should you be doing mid-project? Just got off the phone with a project manager (hat tip: FH) about working smart in the middle of the project. Seems like we talk a lot about the beginning (proposal, kick-off, problem set up) and the end of the project...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Proposals are the life blood of any professional services, consulting firm. As Peter Drucker said, the purpose of business is to create a customer. In professional services, easier said that done. Customers don’t always know with clarity what they want, who...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
It’s the end of the semester, so I will be grading 50+ final strategy papers. Unlike previous write-ups, the students have the freedom to choose their company and use any resources they want. This sounds deceptively simple: choose a company, do the research,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Last Friday, I spent time with two of our case competition teams. We chatted about the logistics, judging, teamwork – but the majority of the time was spent on making killer presentations. Here’s the way I framed the pow-wow. 1.1 Start with the audience...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Successful client service means doing great work AND exceeding the client’s expectations. If the client worries unnecessarily, gets surprised, or is somehow unaware of the scope of work, the consultant has done a poor job of communicating. For experienced principals,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consultants, by the nature of their project-based work, are process oriented. Projects have a start-middle-end. That’s part of the luxury, tempo, and fun of the work. At the beginning, proposals are signed and kick-off meetings held. At the end,...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It’s the beginning of the year and firms are lining up their projects and consultants. Proposals and statements of work are getting written and signed. My students (management consulting class M 10-1pm) have a proposal-writing assignment due, here’s what I...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I work at a business school. So we teach (yes), stay curious about business (yes), and also cheer students on to get great jobs (definitely yes). Set them on the way to career satisfaction and success. Many business students (undergraduate and 2 year MBA) are aiming...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Most everyone will agree that storytelling is important for professional success. When I recently surveyed some working professionals MBAs (read: folks with jobs), they rated it a 6.3 (out of a 7 point scale) with a stdev: 0.7, n=62. No pushback here. Storytelling...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It is interview season for consulting firms. People are writing up cover letters, fine-tuning their resumes, and practicing their cases. This is what I said to a packed room of students. Before the interview It’s all about curiosity. Great problem solvers...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Advice from Students. Shouldn’t we learn from those with more experience and great track records. Stand on the shoulder of giants. Use best practices. Learn the hacks. Work smart. I started asking students who crushed my class last year, what their advice was...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
The NounProject is a website where you can search, download, and customize millions of icons. Consultants are continuously “bucketing” ideas and concepts, and icons are a classy way to draw the viewers attention to a bucket. This is different from clip art...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
These two phrases have become my pedagogical mottos. Learn how to learn. Think about your thinking. If we value a liberal arts education (I do), and believe that the nature of work will be forever changing (I do), then the smartest thing we can do: 1. Learn how to...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Grading papers is work Grading papers is a double-edged sword; it’s insanely time-consuming, and yet enormously valuable. As a ballpark estimate, last semester I reviewed 500+ written pages (MS Word, double-spaced) and countless presentation slides (MS PPT)....
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
In the corporate world, most presentations are to small groups. In fact, the most common format is actually with 1 person in his/her office. The slides typically have more details (think: 18-22 font arial) and should be completely self-explanatory. They are skimmable...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
Stories matter If you type “storytelling” into Amazon, it spins up no-less-than 20,000 book titles. Yikes. It’s a popular business topic and for good reason, we humans are wired (think lizard brain) to tell and remember stories Business storytelling...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Management Consulting. It’s a lot of things. It is an industry; we all know McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PWC, and others. It is a profession built on asking good questions. It is a team sport. It is a bit of an attitude. It is a tribe that is difficult to get...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Case competitions are great fun I did 9 of them during my MBA days. It’s a chance for you to compete with students and see how good you are at ‘cracking the case’. The format differs considerably: Some competitions last 3-4 hours, while others can...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
It’s easy to say YES. Perhaps too easy. When the client asks for something – new research, some ad-hoc analysis, an extra workshop – it usually seems like a reasonable request. After all, they pay the bills and shouldn’t they get the most out...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Consulting is a big tent Consulting comes in many flavors. Or in other words, it spans all industries + non profit + governmental. Whatever story you read about in the WSJ, there is a consultant and an attorney who can help (or at least say they can help). M&A,...
by Consultant's Mind | Fun
Great presentation It’s always good to look at consulting decks to see how they put together data in a coherent way to tell a story. It is a craft and an art form. Was reading through reddit, and they mentioned this odd presentation from 2016. BCG was giving the...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
What do McKinsey presentations looks like? Please find links to 30+ McKinsey presentations which are publicly available online. Many of these are from conferences, or governmental / non-profit organizations clients who have chosen to make them available online. Yes,...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Clearly, eloquence has many parts – content, structure, conviction, tone, pacing, empathy, and word choice. Ah, words. Let’s not forget the words. Word inflation. Seems like we are bombarded with words constantly – most of them advertising or loose...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
I made 1,000+ presentations in my life That’s completely possible. 20 years + PPT application is open on my computer every day. Executive summaries, teaching lessons, or sometimes even 1 pagers. Some were financial and operational reviews. Some were full-scale...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Geek out I have been using this slang a lot. Many of us who have heard this expression know that it means to become a little bit obsessive about something (usually a hobby). Applying this to business problems, my argument is that business consultants and students...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Career is a long time After 20+ years in corporate America and working at 5 different Fortune 500, I will say that it’s easy to burnout if you’re not careful. Microsoft analyzed a bunch of MS Office data and showed that we spend about 8 hours a week doing...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Today I was speaking with some friends about metacognition. Yes, I realize that is a $10 word, but the idea is fairly simple on the surface – being aware of your own thoughts. Essentially, thinking about your thinking. Whoa – deep, I know. Skills...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
So this morning there was a fantastical headline in the Washington Post here: Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste What the hay? Isn’t this a Ben Affleck movie about a government cover-up? No, it’s an internal report created by...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
This is the final section review of Duarte’s Slideology (affiliate link). I am going to pick and choose what to share with readers. Consulting presentations (for good or bad) are fairly conservative and a bit regimented. As a result, the parts of the books about...
