Six years at Strategy Partners — the #1 Russian strategy consultancy at the time. Projects in government, telecom, automotive distribution, high tech: corporate and business strategy, operations, org design, performance management. Later — partner at KSK, where I built a strategy consulting practice from scratch and personally sold and led projects.
We all know the jokes about consultants who look at your watch, tell you the time, and charge $1,000 an hour for it. But it’s actually a damn good school. I want to write a bit about it because it shaped me in many ways.
What consulting gives you
The ability to get up to speed on any topic very fast and become a near-expert in a month. It’s a specific technology and skill. I remember on one project the client’s agronomists came to my consultant asking whether this crop rotation scheme was optimal. A month earlier he had no idea about agriculture at all.
Discipline. Everything must be sufficiently verified and proven. You can’t just make something up and say “it should be like this because I’m the expert and I know.”
The right balance between upfront research and a leap of faith when forming the base hypothesis. Too much research and you drown in it for months. Form the hypothesis too early and you come up with nonsense not grounded in data.
Exposure — how things work in dozens of different companies. It gives breadth, rather than the situation where you spent ten years at, say, Google and now try to do everything the Google way everywhere, because you’ve never seen anything else.