McKinsey versus Marakon: The Battle Between Global Management Consulting Firms and Boutiques

Source: http://managementconsulted.com/boutique-firms/recruiting-decisions-what-is-the-difference-between-global-management-consulting-firms-and-boutique-consulting-firms/#

This is an important issue when recruiting for a business consulting job. In finance, most people think you must work for the biggest – the Goldman-Sachs-or-bust mentality. And while the big management consulting firms (like McKinsey and Bain) get the lions share of media attention, there are many successful and well-respected boutique consulting firms(like Katzenbach Partners, LEK, andMarakon) that I would recommend prospective applicants consider.

So what are the differences between the two? First, I’ll start with the similarities:

1) Consulting travel will usually be a component
2) You’ll work in teams, interacting closely with clients
3) As an analyst/associate/consultant, your focus will be on data gathering, analysis, and presentation. In plain English, this means you’ll receive lots of data from your client, do calculations in Excel, combine that with thorough Internet research and some interviews, and put it into slides to share at meetings

But the differences are very important:

1) While the fundamentals of your work will be the same, theapplication of that work can vary. Boutique companies like Kurt Salmon typically focus on narrower questions and in fewer industries. At a Big 3 consulting firm (Bain, BCG, McKinsey) you receive exposure to different industries and functions (eg, strategy, operations, organization). In boutiques your exposure is more narrow – at Kurt Salmon, your primary focus would be on retail and consumer goods companies. This is both a pro (you start building expertise) and a con(what if you decide the retail sector is not for you?).

But again, the day-to-day will look very similar. The difference is in the longer-term.

2) As for travel – it depends. Some boutiques do a lot of traveling if they have an industry focus (Kurt Salmon is a well-regarded expert in the retail/consumer goods space, with clients spread throughout the US and internationally). But other boutiques have a more local focus (eg,Slalom Consulting) and thus you may travel very little – most of your work would be with area clients with whom your firm has developed a lasting relationship

3) While you’re guaranteed to work in teams and with clients, both the types of team members, types of clients and nature of interaction could be different. Boutiques have less coverage for clients overall, which could mean you’ll see significantly more client interaction from an early stage, and with more senior members (this is the norm – but I have heard of smaller consulting firms like ATKearney with enormous teams at the client, so it can vary). Your teams will usually be smaller, often with you and maybe one other person as the only real day-to-day presence at your clients. Each of these comes with its own set of pros and cons.

Further reading: Interview with an ATKearney Shanghai consultant

4) Culture can be vastly different

I use the example of a small liberal arts college (Brown) vs a large, public institution (UCLA).

Brown offers greater personalization and support, everyone knows your name, you’re a big fish in a small pond. At UCLA, its harder to standout. The support network is not personalized and easily accessible. While there are more opportunities, it’s up to you to seize them. You’re a small fish in a big pond, but the upside can be higher.

The analogy also applies to large city offices versus satellite/smaller city offices (for example, Bain’s San Francisco office versus their satellite offices in Texas. A great discussion of consulting office selection can be found in my interview with Marquis)

5) Future jobs/exit options. In particular I need to put a disclaimer here, because your situation is largely within your control and the actual situations vary widely. But when we discuss the ACCESS that you have to exit opportunities across industries and job functions, larger firms (like Boston Consulting Group) are the clear winner. Much larger alumni networks, more internally shared recruiting emails and advice, greater brand recognition, the list goes on. Boutiques, given their strong reputation in particular niches, offer plenty of opportunities in the same space – but are distinctly behind in offering opportunities to enter unrelated career paths. These corporate paths usually include (and this is not counting the many who enter graduate school):

• Finance – investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, investment management – consulting-friendly private equity firms and investment funds are the norm here
• Corporate/Fortune 500 – roles range from corporate strategy to product management to marketing and business development
• More consulting – either internally at your current firm in a new position, or at a new firm, new country, etc
• Startups – probably the least frequent choiceFurther reading: Part 1 of a series on management consulting exit options
  

  Also, as a note for prospective summer interns – many boutique firms do not offer consulting summer internships in the U.S. This practice is more common internationally. However, summer internship season can offer a great opportunity to see how the Big 3 management consulting firms/Big 4 accounting/one-stop-shop firms operate from the inside. While recruiting is competitive, the opportunity is golden if you get it

 

Email Is The New Pony Express–And It’s Time To Put It Down

BY RYAN HOLMES
Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3002170/email-new-pony-express-and-its-time-put-it-down

Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here’s where companies are headed next.

In early 2011, the CEO of a French IT company issued an usual memorandum. He banned email. Employees were discouraged from sending or receiving internal messages, with the goal of eradicating email within 18 months. Critics scoffed. Workers rebelled. But Thierry Breton, the CEO of Atos, has stuck to his guns, reducing message volume by an estimated 20%. His company, by the way, has 74,000 employees in 48 countries.

Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today. I’ll admit my vendetta is personal. I run a company,HootSuite, which is focused on disrupting how the world communicates using social media. Yet each day my employees and I send each other thousands of emails, typing out addresses and patiently waiting for replies like we were mailing letters on the Pony Express.

As we’ve expanded from 20 to 200 employees over the last two years, the headaches have only grown. Anyone with an inbox knows what I’m talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc’s and spam.

It’s not just me who thinks email’s days are numbered. Among 18-24 year olds, time spent on webmail has declined 34% in the last year alone, and nearly 50% since 2010, according tocomScore’s 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report.

So what’s the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast–with a click–to the world. Conversations isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And it’s worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well be reading email its last rites. Here’s why:

Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email, according to McKinsey’s 2012 Social Economy report. Our inboxes have become an open door for anything and everything, some of which is pure spam and most of which is neither time-sensitive nor relevant in the here and now. The average business user wades through 114 emails a day, which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life).

Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. Try setting up a meeting time with a group on email and that becomes painfully obvious. Messages flood in, getting out of sync and leaving users scrolling madly to track the conversation. A better option: Facebook-style discussion threads where multiple employees can post, reply, and view centrally in real time.

Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. Brilliant messages race across the Internet at light speed only to end up trapped in an inbox. The clear advantage of social platforms is that content is shared and reshared among whole communities of followers, triggering the viral cascade that makes social media so powerful. Using internal networks and discussion threads instead of email, enterprises can instantly broadcast innovation and crowdsource solutions company-wide. HootSuite’s Conversations takes this up a notch, enabling employees to amplify select messages to Twitter and Facebook, sharing ideas with the world at a click.

Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company can’t. And all that locked-up knowledge represents a massive, wasted reserve of internal expertise. Office productivity could be improved by up to 14% just by moving those emails to a searchable, central discussion thread, message board, or wiki, according to a 2012 McKinsey report.

Sharing documents on email is a joke. Let’s set aside the inconvenience of uploading and attaching files, over and over again. The real trouble with sharing on email starts when multiple recipients download and modify a document. It’s all too easy to lose track of which revision is the latest, leading to redundant edits and wasted time. An infinitely better solution is to put a single document in one, shared location accessible to all stakeholders. Using tools like Google Drive, history can be tracked and multiple collaborators can edit simultaneously.

Seeking the path of least resistance, the next generation of office workers are finding better, faster, easier ways to communicate. It’s about time.