Eating

If you are in Consulting and are always staying at hotels, you hardly get time to exercise. In such case, you need to resist temptation and avoid foods that are unhealthy. Remember, what is good to taste is bad for the waste.

Generally, clients don't like a unfit consultant. They have an image of a consultant who is fit, polished etc. So, avoid these unhealthy foods if you are in India and these ones if you are out in the west.

Dear MBA Class of 2011

You'll enjoy this. The author was a Management Consultant who underwent a career change- and now works for Mint!

Advice for the worthies undergoing campus placements, delivered in Morgan Freeman-style to soft hip-hop-ish beats


It is that time of the year when business schools all over the country begin to go through the collective voluntary torture that is campus placements. So if you are in business school right now, I guess things are pretty crazy. Chill.

Around this time annually, I usually get a few emails from students seeking advice. Usually it’s career advice— “Should I be doing marketing or banking?”—and sometimes it’s advice on alternatives—“I am convinced I have an exciting book, about non-vegetarian cupcakes, inside me. What should I do?” (My answer to both questions is: “banking”.)

This year I have decided to encapsulate all the advice I have to give, not all of it useful, into one Cubiclenama piece. That way I save you the hassle of writing to me, and I save myself the agony of cutting and pasting the same email to all of you without screwing up the “Dear Babykutty” bit in the beginning.

However, you know how kids are these days. With their short attention spans and their disregard for old-fashioned things. Hence I have decided to make my advice sexy by delivering it roughly to the tune of Baz Luhrman’s popular 1999 single Wear Sunscreen. That song was also targeted at young people and gave them life advice.

But my version is tailored for a mature MBA audience. Imagine it as being delivered by Morgan Freeman to a soft hip-hop-ish background beat.

***

Ladies and gentleman of the MBA class of 2011,

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, a good USB memory stick would be it. The long-term benefits of a USB stick have been proved by the number of times people lose laptops, or are suddenly asked to submit resumes on a plane or at a conference. The rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my meandering work experience.

Enjoy your last few days in business school. Chances are you’ve already cynically dismissed the whole bloody place. But trust me, in five years you’ll attend an alumni reunion and realize that business school was perhaps the last place you were both truly intellectually challenged and emotionally excited. Both will happen again. But rarely together.

You are not as smart, or stupid, as you think. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to make investments based on research reports that will, one day, be written by that same clueless idiot sitting next to you in the canteen right now. The real troubles in your life will never be solved by a presentation or spreadsheet, and will always involve other people. And people are unpredictable sons of bitches.

Spend a little time every day doing nothing.

Listen.

Don’t expect organizations to be as committed to you as you are to them. They don’t work that way. If you do find one that is as committed, never leave.

Jog. (Or walk briskly, or cycle, or do yoga.)

Don’t judge yourself by how much money you make. (And no good comes from knowing who this is.)

Record all the feedback you ever get in your career. Especially the inaccurate, pointless, biased and vague bits that drove you nuts. This will help you when you eventually give feedback to somebody yourself.

Keep a copy of all your old resumes. When you are struck by bouts of existential crisis, flip through them in chronological order. Do the same with resignation letters.

Shave.

Not a lot of people are “meant” to do something. They just say that to sell bad books. Salman Rushdie might make an excellent, and content, supply chain management consultant. Who knows? You will find various amounts of meaning and satisfaction in various things. Choose your compromises wisely.

You’ll like the job a little better if you like the dress code.

Take chances when you’re young, single and don’t have loans to repay. You’ll take larger chances. Large chances are more fun than small ones.

Be nice to people for the heck of it.

Maybe you’ll retire when you’re 45, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll get an Awesome Alumnus Award, maybe you won’t, maybe you will marry your school sweetheart, maybe you won’t. Whatever happens, do not forget those probability lessons they taught you in school. Things tend to even out.

Dance. But keep it classy.

Avoid reading business books. However feel free to write them.

Travel light.

You will most certainly face difficult choices. In most cases it helps to think of what choice maximizes gain, instead of agonizing over what minimizes loss.

Invest in a good suit, pair of shoes and get a shave. Thanks to society’s shallowness, the returns will be considerable.

Calm down.

Let people give you advice. Develop the art of looking interested even if you are not. Pay attention to advice from people who have a stake in your happiness, and not a stake in your success.

Please stop listening to Pink Floyd.

But forget everything else. Quickly go buy that USB stick.

Best of luck.

Cubiclenama takes a fortnightly look atthe pleasures and perils of corporatelife. Your comments are welcome atcubiclenama@livemint.com

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011

Interesting HBR blog that talks about the state of strategy consulting in 2011.
The author sums it quite well - There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy any more. McK and BCG are moving down the chain - in places like the UAE and others, they are doing operations projects as pure strategy work. The other interesting point is about consulting firms fighting it out for “whale” engagements that are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice.

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011
by Walter Kiechel

Like Satan in the book of Job, I've been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants, and former consultants. Among my questions to them: How are you thinking about strategy these days? Is the highest of managerial arts — or sciences, if you prefer — dead, as some allege? And what's hot on the corporate rialto by way of consulting work?

Some tentative conclusions:

There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy studies any more. Or, put another way, trying to base a consulting business on same is a mug's game. The days when you could make a living responding to companies' discovery of strategy, as in "Gosh, we gotta get ourselves one of those," are gone with the 1970s (or maybe the 1990s in the "developing world"). Strategy has triumphed, the installed base is huge, no self-respecting company would be without one.

This poses a dilemma for consulting firms. On the one hand, membership in the top bracket — the lofty heights occupied by the likes of McKinsey & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group — still seems to require a strong strategy credential. Which is why you hear outfits such as Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen & Hamilton advertising themselves on the radio (public, of course) as strategy consultants.

But consultancies clinging too long to a specialization in strategy at the expense of other practice areas now find themselves in trouble. They may have done a swell $2 million strategy study for a client, but then have to watch from the sidelines as a more broadly based firm swoops in to do the $15 million project — a total systems redesign, say, or a corporate reorganization — entailed in implementing the strategy. Marakon, which put value-based management at the core of its strategy concentration, is essentially defunct. Monitor & Co., co-founded by Michael Porter back in the early 1980s, has seen better days.

Meanwhile behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain. McKinsey teams are beavering away in places like the United Arab Emirates and the 'Stans — Turkmenistan, say, or Tajikistan — but they're as likely to be doing operations projects as pure strategy work.

The most intense competition between consulting firms is for "whale" engagements. Undertakings with $20 million price tags such as the post-merger integration of a giant pharmaceutical client and its equally humongous acquisition. Or redesigning a company's entire store system and approach to customers. While BCG or McKinsey will still proudly help a client devise a corporate strategy, in the eyes of many in the industry such projects have become what retailers call "loss leaders" — products you have to offer to get the customer in the door, but not where you make the real money.

Ultimately what the consultancies are competing for are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice. In this context, as the Olympian firms broaden their offerings, their challenge becomes maintaining their pricing power, their ability to charge strategy-level rates for types of work that consultants from Deloitte or Ernst & Young will offer to do for a lot less.

At real live companies, strategy isn't dead; it's embedded in other initiatives. To be sure, you can still occasionally find a company buying a whole-hog, build-me-a-strategy-from-the-ground-up project. Typically such purchasers are emerging from some sort of major corporate unpleasantness — a near bankruptcy, say, or having missed out, Nokia-like, on a ground-shaking technological shift. Or, sometimes related, they have a new CEO with a mandate to shake things up and make her mark.

At most companies, though, the strategy has been established, even institutionalized. One CEO I talked with rattled off a list of undertakings for which he had enlisted consulting help. None sounded to me like company-defining strategic. But when I asked if, for him, strategy was dead, he was close to being offended. "Of course not," he replied. "For us, our strategy informs every big decision we make — what markets to enter or exit, what acquisitions to make, what products to introduce." (The very issues he had consultants gathering facts on.)

Foolish me, I came away thinking, underestimating the ubiquity, and triumph, of corporate strategy.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.