Chapter Four: Redemption on a Bain Business Case

Through a Bain business case, Terance discusses how to distinguish between analyzing a problem and assembling the answers to arrive at a strategy. I felt lucky and relieved to have survived the scare of my last Bain business case. The relief did not last very long. I had to very quickly show that I deserved to be at Bain. With the engagement manager having left, I felt there was greater attention on my performance. Would I be able to rise to the occasion and prove that this was a personal issue or was there something really wrong with my performance? I also felt a personal obligation to not disappoint the partners who had stood up for me. I did not have long to wait for the opportunity to prove myself. Leading the business case Just one week after my performance review, I was assigned to another aviation project. As you will see over time, the aviation sector and strategy became my area of specialization. Bain had been appointed to develop an IT strategy for one of the largest air carriers in the continental USA. I was assigned to lead an important piece of work. The firm wanted to test me and asked…

Chapter Five: Bain Airline Turnaround Study

Chapter Six: First Bain Operations Study

Hallelujah! I managed to get myself onto an Bain operations engagement, but as you probably guessed, I am still stuck in the airline sector. At this point I have resigned myself to accepting that this sector is so important and growing so fast that Bain would recognize my efforts here. I would not be punished for not having more diverse experience. My end of project performance review for the Eastern European airline project went very, very well. I needed to continue maintaining that momentum. Yet, that was proving to be difficult largely due to my own poor planning. The fatigue was starting to creep up on me and I was getting a bit more tired more often. Heck, I thought I was too young to worry about this. So far my career was going well despite a very wobbly first project. Some of my Bain colleagues had a rule of taking about 5 days’ vacation after every 2 month or 3 month project. It helped them relax after the project stresses. I had been at the firm for 18 months and I was still not taking any time away. Between projects I was working on knowledge capture work and internal…

Chapter Seven: Benchmarking Airlines at Bain

In this article we discuss the very practical challenges of applying benchmarking and the need to stress-test each recommendation in a "live" setting. This was Terance's first benchmarking study. Benchmarking is a powerful tool used by Bain. An effective set of benchmarks can quickly tell us how far away a company is from reaching parity with its competitors. Benchmarking provides a rough magnitude of the scope of change possible and is critical to developing a top-down business-case. The problem with benchmarks is that unless you apply common sense you can arrive at some fairly ridiculous conclusions. I have seen this all too often in my career. Benchmarking results may lead to ridiculous conclusions The low-cost carrier project provides some especially illuminating examples. On this project the client had invited a specialist aviation benchmarking firm to benchmark a few processes within the operations and provide a blueprint for improvement on some of the core processes. Bain would use these as input into their analyses. Very quickly into the process, and much to our dismay given the tight timelines, we realized the benchmarking exercise resulted in benchmarks which were of little value. The low cost airline had a major hub in South-East Asia and…

Inside A McKinsey Financial Services Engagement

Emerging markets and micro-finance are hot topics at the moment. Whether it is micro-finance in Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan or Indonesia, the sector is definitely growing. All the major consulting firms from McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group to Bain have tried to break into this sector. As expected, McKinsey has been heavily involved in micro-finance work and has undertaken some of the work significant and landmark projects. This posting is based on a series of discussions we have had with several McKinsey consultants working on a micro-finance project in Latin America. We follow them through a real engagement and see how they tackled the study. The McKinsey consultants interviewed spoke off the record and where not authorized to speak about the engagement. Background The country setting for this engagement is a power house among emerging economies. It is usually mentioned in the same breath as Brazil, India, China, Russia, Turkey and Indonesia. A vibrant commercial sector has seen many consultants and consulting firms enter the market. A new president and more open trade policies saw a steep increase in the per capita GDP of the country. It was becoming awash with wealth and this excess liquidity was causing an equally…

Inside a McKinsey Electricity Strategy Engagement

Stories which delve behind the scenes of consulting engagements are very rare. Today’s lengthy post is just such an article. It is an in-depth analysis of a major McKinsey assignment in a developing economy, South Africa. Background There are many ways in which we collect this type of information. We obviously have an extensive and active network in management consulting who feed us information and serve as corroborating sources. Sometimes we get lucky and are fortunate in that a user sends us lots of material about a critical project. We treat this information from the latter source carefully. Usually we do not do much with it. We try to honor privacy codes and where we share information; we present such a sanitized view that it is difficult to decide the overall impact of the study. Early this year we received over 45 documents by email from an employee of a South African state-owned-enterprise called Eskom (Pty) Ltd. We did not know much about the company and simply ‘filed’ this as an interesting set of documents worth looking at later. Then the FIFA 2010 World Cup came along and shined a spotlight on South Africa and we learnt a few interesting…

Learning From Consulting Mentors

I have spent a long time examining my own career path from associate to principal. Mainly because there was always a fair degree of luck involved. It is not as if I was a break-out superstar and knew I would become a partner. I was good, but there were other better associates who did not become partners. So, I must have done a few things differently to compensate for this perceived disadvantage I possessed. I eventually realized that I succeeded not only because I was analytical, could communicate well, develop great storyboards, was great at math etc. Let’s not be mistaken, I needed those skills. Yet, they were not enough if you did not know how to use them. Everyone had those skills when they entered BCG, McKinsey et al and these were not enough to distinguish oneself. Even today, many outstanding candidates are managed out every month and most are surprised when it happens since almost all have the skills listed above, and in great abundance. I know because we receive several emails a week from distressed management consultants seeking guidance. I succeeded because a partner took me under his wing and personally mentored me when I was just…

Skills McKinsey Associates Do Not Learn

This article explains skills and activities required to start and grow a boutique consulting firm. The economy in the US, Canada and the UK is starting to pick up again. In some parts, it is booming. Clients are spending, engagements are increasing and consultants from McKinsey to LEK are busy. What invariably happens is that some McKinsey associates and engagement managers, usually the former, will decide that the work is so easy to do, they might as well start their own small firms. They reason that since they have been doing the analytic work for about 2 years, they can manage on their own with a lower cost structure and pocket the higher margins. And they usually succeed for about 1 or 2 assignments. Yet, they typically fail after 1 year. Why is that? Why do obviously bright and hardworking McKinsey associates routinely fail to set up successful mid-size consulting firms? Sure, there are a handful of examples that work, but they are a mere fraction of the McKinsey associates who ultimately fail to succeed. In this post, I will explain how partners maintain this cycle of career and firm growth. Invariably, I will discuss the skills you need to deploy…

Career Lessons from McKinsey’s Hypothetical Death

Using the hypothetical decline of McKinsey as an example, this article reveals several crucial career lessons on how to combine frugality, or efficient living, with ethics to significantly improve your career options and career flexibility. *** Firmsconsulting is built on a strong foundation of ethics. Many clients struggle to understand how that leads to business success. They assume it is an intangible benefit. It is not. There is a clear, measurable and direct link. This piece explains how such a model can be used to create significant upside in your career. Career flexibility is a pre-condition for career success. However, you cannot have career flexibility unless you live well within your means. And if you live outside your means you will be forced into poor ethical choices, which further reduce your career flexibility. How does that work in practical terms? Ethics, Frugality & Career Flexibility Most people who breach their values do not get up one morning and decide that today is the day they will cross the Rubicon. It happens much more subtly and usually with a forced drift into such a situation. Good people routinely do not do good things. There were times when I have done things I…