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 experience; it’s like career at 1.5x speed
• Help build the consulting practice based on your values, talents
• Benefit from multiple post-consulting, exit opportunities (read: great new job) 
• Oh yeah, it pays well too. . . .

Consulting is a craft

If you’ve ever worked with a skilled partner, managing director, it’s an amazing experience. Think: Jedi.

Yet, consulting acumen (GMAT word) is hard-earned. It’s not a math formula you memorize. You will learn how to: 

• Get smart quickly on new topics; ask great questions, in the right order
• Engage (and impress) clients who might be more knowledgeable / experienced than you
• Develop grit to struggle through difficult analyses; collect stories that make you a better manager
• Develop mastery by observation / thinking in frameworks, not just experience
• Gain confidence through increasing competence; being “so good they cannot ignore you”
• Adapt to different client and manager working styles; succeed in multiple types of team roles 
• Self-manage career progress; operate at the next level of performance before asking for a promotion
• Thoughtful and authentic networking within the firm; develop your reputation for passing the airport test
• Break down problems into logical “buckets”; finding patterns between different clients and projects  
• Tell stories with PowerPoint; giving clients the insights and the conviction needed to take action 

Wise beyond your years

Effective consulting is like living at 1.5x speed; getting another MBA of experience every year. It’s exciting empowering, but also difficult.  Yes, new consultants need to learn through apprenticeship and their own painful mistakes. Agreed.

Okay, I’m convinced. What do I need to know? 

From my experience, here are the topics I advise you to get smart on.  Of course it varies by industry, function, staffing model, and types of projects:

Adults learn differently

After you graduate from university or a master’s program, there is no syllabus. You need to find smart ways to learn this. Be a little selfish and continually ask yourself, “How will this help me in my career and better serve clients.”

• This should not be boring or seem irrelevant. If so, stop reading
• Put this all into practice, just reading it once on a blog doesn’t make you an expert. Deliberate practice
• Get yourself promoted

Please feel free to reach out and let me know how else I could be of help to you, your company, or your teams.

John (jkstrategy@consultantsmind.com)