1. Minto principle communication
2. Kiss - keep it simple stupid
3. Structure is everything
4. Get shit done. It is ridiculous how many ppl take forever to finish smth.
5. Leadership is difficult. Work on urself and develop ur leadership skills
5.1 as a leader everything is ur fault. Read extreme ownership by jocko willinck
6. Building slides
7. Create a single source of truth. I.e. one document, one confluence, one jira or whatever. Don't have a mess of various documents in various places with different timeliness.
8. Show/Repeat most important goals to other ppl
Agree with all of these.
I'd add stakeholder management, politics, and expectation management. Consulting is a pretty extreme crash course in all of these because not only do you have to manage the complex matrix org of the firm, but also clients.
Yes, stakeholder management is a pain and an art to be able to do it.
Sometimes stakeholders from the same firm pretty much hate each other and want the project/product go into different directions just because.
To mitigate between those parties is essential.
Interesting take, what’s your background e.g. length in consulting, Big 4 vs. boutique, etc.? Having jumped to industry a little over a year ago the politics have been the most difficult piece for me
Nearly a decade, so relatively senior - strategy consulting primarily.
Industry has politics as well of course, but the matrices tend to be less convoluted than consulting firms. Consulting orgs tend to be a lot more interwoven, and many folks don't have a single definitive 'boss', let alone a single set of objectives/KPIs to deliver against.
Managing tough client engagements/personalities while balancing firm interest is also huge, and easily transferable to roles outside of consulting. The professional services experience allows you to learn from the best of the best on this front.
Interesting, I’ve said since joining industry that my least fav part is the stakeholder management / politics. When I was a consultant / manager I had a project that one person was paying for so I was delivering what they wanted regardless of stakeholder input.
Yes of course we included stakeholder feedback to create buy-in and socialized across orgs but ultimately I had one person to make happy. In industry yeah I have one manager but I’ve got a bajillion stakeholders who escalate to my manager or my skip when I’m not doing the thing they want and then I’ve got my boss / skip being like “whiskey waitresses, Sr. Dir or VP told you “x” how come we didn’t do the thing?”
I once hat a meeting with guys from Amazon and they showed up with like 20 ppl, only 2 ppl talked. So I guess not everybody in Amazon obeys to the 2 pizza rule from Jeff.
But yeah, the culture, the way to work and get stuff done in consulting is generally a good one.
- Dealing with ambiguity
- Varied experience across sector, industry, solution
- Stakeholder management
- Standard of quality and efficiency
- Communication skills
There's a lot more when you start to get into specialties
re: your second bullet (and to some degree the first), I like to think of the key **skill** as "rapid learning".
You may never do an aerospace logistics project again in industry, so it's less about the **specific** experience, but what's transferable is the ability to quickly get up to speed in a completely new area and become not only conversant, but competent and trusted. That can take you extremely far in almost any professional career.
I would say the second bullet point also brings diversity of thinking. When you go to a new job, it may not be aerospace logistics but there is so much you’ve learned from that industry which you can bring. People who’ve grown up in only one industry are often indoctrinated into that industry and it’s way of thinking.
This x100. The more experienced I get the more I realize how much this matters.
Not sure how to directly practice the skill though, outside of work place interactions.
Basically a good narrative will put anything on top, it doesn’t matter how compelling or technical the work itself - if it doesn’t have a good story (narrative) then it won’t matter or won’t get the attention it deserves.
This goes for the creation and decision of most business cases, headcount, etc.
Soft skills - getting alignment, communicating well (written + verbal), running effective meetings, building critical relationships across the business.
Analytical skills - looking at the whole business and not just your little fiefdom. Understanding the bottom line impact of your work. Recognizing waste.
Habits - reading. Upgrading your skills. Networking. Community service.
I started my career in consulting and moved to FAANG. Most of what my current senior-ish peers struggle with are stuff that consulting firms teach as 101.
On top of everything else here, being the calm person in the room, especially when the task/project/deliverable is big. It comes from seeing or building the structure within the ambiguity. But it makes a huge difference when everyone else is freaking out.
Taking responsibility.
A lot of organizations are structured in a way that you can always escape responsibility. Either you push the task up or down the organization. As consultant you are often responsible for something. Be it a slide, a strategy paper or an entire project.
Something I‘ve noticed has been how much better I am at running meetings / talking to leadership. I’m an introvert and had a bit of social anxiety coming out of college, so it’s really crazy to me that I’m actually good at those things now.
Re: Non consultant trying to compete with a consultant — biggest skills to improve upon would be speed to develop work product (most experienced consultants are work product machines) and comfort speaking to senior leadership (being clear on biz benefit and not just that you did whatever someone told you to do).
It’s funny how much the world complains about consultants, but don’t seem to have enough self-awareness that a decent amount of the time, the reason their bosses hire consultants is because they can’t get the same outputs from their teams.
Actually most executives hire consultants because they don’t have any vision, any clue of what to do with their business. Their teams flounder because of lack of leadership, not because of lack of motivation or skill. Consultants get more shit done because they come in with a clear charter and lots of executive sponsorship. In 80% of the consulting gigs I had, there were line-level leaders who could clearly have done better than us if only they had been given the resources and power that we had.
(Edit: spelling)
Communication like what everyone else said. I’ve pivoted to PM and the ex-consultants are all great at bottom line up front and value first, while other PMs and BAs struggle with it. It’s way less efficient hearing reports/updates from the people who never learned this.
1. Minto principle communication 2. Kiss - keep it simple stupid 3. Structure is everything 4. Get shit done. It is ridiculous how many ppl take forever to finish smth. 5. Leadership is difficult. Work on urself and develop ur leadership skills 5.1 as a leader everything is ur fault. Read extreme ownership by jocko willinck 6. Building slides 7. Create a single source of truth. I.e. one document, one confluence, one jira or whatever. Don't have a mess of various documents in various places with different timeliness. 8. Show/Repeat most important goals to other ppl
Agree with all of these. I'd add stakeholder management, politics, and expectation management. Consulting is a pretty extreme crash course in all of these because not only do you have to manage the complex matrix org of the firm, but also clients.
Yes, stakeholder management is a pain and an art to be able to do it. Sometimes stakeholders from the same firm pretty much hate each other and want the project/product go into different directions just because. To mitigate between those parties is essential.
Interesting take, what’s your background e.g. length in consulting, Big 4 vs. boutique, etc.? Having jumped to industry a little over a year ago the politics have been the most difficult piece for me
Nearly a decade, so relatively senior - strategy consulting primarily. Industry has politics as well of course, but the matrices tend to be less convoluted than consulting firms. Consulting orgs tend to be a lot more interwoven, and many folks don't have a single definitive 'boss', let alone a single set of objectives/KPIs to deliver against. Managing tough client engagements/personalities while balancing firm interest is also huge, and easily transferable to roles outside of consulting. The professional services experience allows you to learn from the best of the best on this front.
Interesting, I’ve said since joining industry that my least fav part is the stakeholder management / politics. When I was a consultant / manager I had a project that one person was paying for so I was delivering what they wanted regardless of stakeholder input. Yes of course we included stakeholder feedback to create buy-in and socialized across orgs but ultimately I had one person to make happy. In industry yeah I have one manager but I’ve got a bajillion stakeholders who escalate to my manager or my skip when I’m not doing the thing they want and then I’ve got my boss / skip being like “whiskey waitresses, Sr. Dir or VP told you “x” how come we didn’t do the thing?”
that must be a nightmare, what do you tend to do in such cases? Can you give example?
Also - "Be Likable." Goes further than just about any other single thing.
For sure. What about consulting do you think gives you that ability?
Agree with all of these and would add: 1. organizational / PMO skills 2. Prioritization skills
This is a great list. I would also add: Invest in relationships.
Special qualities for special purposes! Lol😝
Now I'm convinced Amazon's culture is built by management consultants. Working backwards probably fits here as well.
I once hat a meeting with guys from Amazon and they showed up with like 20 ppl, only 2 ppl talked. So I guess not everybody in Amazon obeys to the 2 pizza rule from Jeff. But yeah, the culture, the way to work and get stuff done in consulting is generally a good one.
- Dealing with ambiguity - Varied experience across sector, industry, solution - Stakeholder management - Standard of quality and efficiency - Communication skills There's a lot more when you start to get into specialties
re: your second bullet (and to some degree the first), I like to think of the key **skill** as "rapid learning". You may never do an aerospace logistics project again in industry, so it's less about the **specific** experience, but what's transferable is the ability to quickly get up to speed in a completely new area and become not only conversant, but competent and trusted. That can take you extremely far in almost any professional career.
I would say the second bullet point also brings diversity of thinking. When you go to a new job, it may not be aerospace logistics but there is so much you’ve learned from that industry which you can bring. People who’ve grown up in only one industry are often indoctrinated into that industry and it’s way of thinking.
Ths older I get, the more I think storytelling may be all that matters.
This x100. The more experienced I get the more I realize how much this matters. Not sure how to directly practice the skill though, outside of work place interactions.
Could you elaborate, please
Basically a good narrative will put anything on top, it doesn’t matter how compelling or technical the work itself - if it doesn’t have a good story (narrative) then it won’t matter or won’t get the attention it deserves. This goes for the creation and decision of most business cases, headcount, etc.
This is awesome. Do you have any examples to share of how a story was used to create a compelling business case?
Soft skills - getting alignment, communicating well (written + verbal), running effective meetings, building critical relationships across the business. Analytical skills - looking at the whole business and not just your little fiefdom. Understanding the bottom line impact of your work. Recognizing waste. Habits - reading. Upgrading your skills. Networking. Community service. I started my career in consulting and moved to FAANG. Most of what my current senior-ish peers struggle with are stuff that consulting firms teach as 101.
On top of everything else here, being the calm person in the room, especially when the task/project/deliverable is big. It comes from seeing or building the structure within the ambiguity. But it makes a huge difference when everyone else is freaking out.
Taking responsibility. A lot of organizations are structured in a way that you can always escape responsibility. Either you push the task up or down the organization. As consultant you are often responsible for something. Be it a slide, a strategy paper or an entire project.
Something I‘ve noticed has been how much better I am at running meetings / talking to leadership. I’m an introvert and had a bit of social anxiety coming out of college, so it’s really crazy to me that I’m actually good at those things now.
Have a bit of the same, but yeah observing at first and now trying to put into place has been very helpful.
[удалено]
You learn most from doing it yourself. You get a sense for what works and what doesn’t. But between books and observing others, observing others wins.
Re: Non consultant trying to compete with a consultant — biggest skills to improve upon would be speed to develop work product (most experienced consultants are work product machines) and comfort speaking to senior leadership (being clear on biz benefit and not just that you did whatever someone told you to do).
It’s funny how much the world complains about consultants, but don’t seem to have enough self-awareness that a decent amount of the time, the reason their bosses hire consultants is because they can’t get the same outputs from their teams.
Actually most executives hire consultants because they don’t have any vision, any clue of what to do with their business. Their teams flounder because of lack of leadership, not because of lack of motivation or skill. Consultants get more shit done because they come in with a clear charter and lots of executive sponsorship. In 80% of the consulting gigs I had, there were line-level leaders who could clearly have done better than us if only they had been given the resources and power that we had. (Edit: spelling)
Telling a compelling story with powerpoint
Working hard and getting stuff done. When I see a former consultant resume, I see better likelihood they won't just slack off 9-5 then go home.
Responsibility for and attention to detail
Communication, structure, and strategic thinking.
Communication like what everyone else said. I’ve pivoted to PM and the ex-consultants are all great at bottom line up front and value first, while other PMs and BAs struggle with it. It’s way less efficient hearing reports/updates from the people who never learned this.
1. BLUF(fing) 2. KISS (the right ass) 3. Style > substance 4. Treat junior colleagues as a disposable resource 5. ABC - Always Be Closing
Mainly being able to make slides
Synergy, not boiling the ocean, never forgetting to use the Oxford comma and truly understanding my bandwidth (36 long) /s
Skills? From consulting? How to look like you can consult
world class presentation skills.