The Blog
Long-form essays, field notes, and frameworks from the FIRMSconsulting team — published weekly.
All posts
Published weekly-
What is productivity and how can it be increased?
What is productivity and how can it be increased? Every company wants to raise its productivity. We all want to raise our personal productivity. Most businesses understand the importance of productivity and believe they have a plan in place to improve it. We often assume doing more, producing more or completing more tasks increases our…
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Business Case Study Research: The Pernicious Mistake Made
Business Case Study Research: The Pernicious Mistake Made Today’s article draws some of the key lessons out of the LAB study, the market entry strategy study and the corporate strategy and transformation program (the power sector study). All of these rely heavily on case studies and this article examines one of the big mistakes consultants…
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Disastrous First BCG Engagement
A discussion of reasoning used by a partner to analyze a BCG associate’s poor engagement performance. There are almost no excuses for weak performance.
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Succeeding as a Management Consultant
How to learn and demonstrate core management consultant skills: analytic abilities, emotional intelligence and political awareness.
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What is Analytical Problem Solving?
This article addresses some very common misconceptions and myths about analytical problem solving in management consulting.
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Launching A Consulting Firm
Nine key considerations are discussed when ex-partners of McKinsey and BCG leave the firm to start their own consulting firms.
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Implementation, Strategy, and Operations Consulting
This article explains the differences between strategy, operations and implementation consulting, and which firms are good at which type of consulting.
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The Speech that Defined McKinsey
Delivered by Marvin Bower. The Speech that Defined McKinsey. Annual McKinsey & Company Partners’ Conference.
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Internal Strategy Units Rarely Create Strategy Consultants
Internal strategy units at banks tend to be attractive alternatives to McKinsey and BCG. This article argues they are not and the accompanying podcast discusses the practical problems a typical analyst would face in the unit.
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Chapter One: From Pepsi to Bain
An ex-Bain partner discusses his rise from Pepsi into Bain’s aerospace practice and his lessons along the way. This chapter highlights his almost serendipitous arrival at Bain.
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Chapter Three: My First Engagement at Bain
Terance discusses his disastrous first Bain engagement when he was taken off after disagreeing with the case leader by challenging the recommendation of boosting investment in the marketing department.
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Chapter Two: Learning MECE and 80/20 at Bain
Terance discusses learning about consulting analyses, MECE, 80/20 and storyboards in Bain’s internal research team during his first year.