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My best friend – let’s call her Tina – works for one of the top consulting firms.  She’s constantly jetsetting between Rome, Mumbai, London, and Johannesburg (or Jo-burg, in her parlance) for the different projects she’s not allowed to talk about.  She joined the firm almost 3 years ago after finishing her MS, and has been talking about quitting in 6 months for the last 2.  But every 6 months there’s a new project that she’s crazy excited about, and so she puts off leaving the firm.  One of the reasons she wants to quit is because she doesn’t have enough personal time, and wants to be able to start a normal relationship.   

We don’t usually talk about work, but last weekend I got an interesting glimpse into her career when I sat in on an information interview she gave to a first year MBA from Stern who was looking to get into consulting.  

The thing that struck me is her firms focus on professional development – on the constant striving for improvement through continuous feedback.     

It was also revealing to learn just how little Tina is motivated by impact.  She actually said, “It doesn’t matter to me that these two pharma companies merge, or that a deal I’m analyzing goes through, or that a company successfully starts an office in India.”  What matters is that she can be in London when Darcy Bussell dances in Balanchine’s Jewels or in New York when Karita Matilla gets naked in Salome.   

I’ve been torn about whether or not this is something I’d want for myself.  As much as I’m attracted by lifestyle, the prestige, the brand name of being at McConsulting & Co, I don’t know that I could hack it.  I could probably be good at it, but I’m not sure I would love it.  Following this weekend’s discussion, Tina sent me a book called “Now, Discover Your Strengths”.  One of those self-help books for the overachiever set.  I’ll keep you posted on what its brilliant insights bring.  

The thing that made me crazy about my own small firm design consulting experience was that I never felt like I owned anything that I did.  We would design a product for a client, or create a strategy for a new product direction, or recommend a branding strategy – but after 4 months, or 6 months, or a year we would walk away.  

So, years down the road when one of those products became a top seller for Proctor&Gamble, we could look back and talk about why that product was successful and why we were responsible for that succes.  For the other 85% of projects, we were happy to collect our fee, and were free to blame the client’s execution, or their entrenched way of doing things, or inability to understand our brilliant direction if things didn’t pan out.

Mostly, what bothered me was the nagging feeling that we were often working on the wrong project. The project that Business Development sold to the client wasn’t the project that was going to make any impact – or wasn’t the right application of the technology the client was developing.  

Working for a top-tier consultancy can certainly be a spring-board to an amazing career in arts administration, or private equity.  You could potentially gain the skills needed to run a start-up or a pharma giant. 

But at what cost?  At this cost: Tina mentioned that the thing she liked least about McConsulting is that 20% of the people she worked with were “hard-driving assholes.”

Hrm.

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