I think a lot of this ability is selected-out or outright discouraged in a lot of environments.
If the new employee starts fixing broken things, they’re often crushed for stepping out of line.
And god help them if the problem becomes worse (caused by them or not) when it wasn’t their job to touch it.
New employee: why do we do X in Y way?
Veteran: because that’s the way we always did it
Reminds me of when I made my own way-finding signs for visitors. While my director loved it and wrote me a thank you card, that didn’t stop janitorial from ripping them down. While they were 100% helpful, they were 100% unapproved.
I still oil door hinges and clean some of the uncleaned areas myself. And fix other things that aren’t “my problem”, but it’s a fine line.
I would take a different perspective. The issue is not 23 year olds being better than others. It's the fact that the 23 year old from McKinsey comes in with incredible political capital equivalent to whoever hired him at the top, and that enables him to be multiple times more productive than someone else. Most organizations are... slow.
This will sound stupid but MBB have industry benchmark spreadsheet databases that are a significant competitive advantage against our smaller firm.
How much do those more experienced analysts make per week? I would think $50k per week would be enough to buy me the undivided attention of _all_ of whatever team of people at the consultancy has the expertise I need.
Most data scientists... don't know what to do. And most clients... don't know what to do with them. So they do little data science projects and build dashboards that few people use. Coming out of McKinsey you can quite confidently say you've learned how to identify top problems, organize a project around it, and solve it in a fast timeline with realistic solutions. That's pretty much gold. It's really useful to be able to say you've worked with c-suite leaders.
Finally, it's probably a function of just fast growth internally. You gain responsibilities much faster at McKinsey than at most most companies. The company invests in your development more. And when you leave, you get weeks of paid time off to search for a new opportunity.
1) You don't need to work your way up the approval chain. Your idea is already going to people with the authority to act on it.
2) You have significant ability to just call people and get them to share their data and domain knowledge
3) You have little risk of long term problems from saying something that someone doesn't like, so long as its not the person who hired you.
4) The pace is probably very very fast relative to the speed of most large orgs. Probably not sustainably fast tbh. It's fine because it's several weeks of hard focus and then a bit of a break.
If you feel like you're doing fine and are answering important questions then you probably are doing just fine and your company's data culture is healthy. IMO people who build analyses that few people want or need are acutely aware of it.
How do you find the split between guys like yourself and the more traditional consultants?
I see little difference. Sometimes it's an EM + 1 or 2 data scientists. Sometimes its an EM + 1 data scientist + 1 or 2 BA/Associates. We solve similar problems, its just the data science people tend to solve it with data and the traditional consultants solve it with interviews and whatever. That's not a swipe at them either. There's a significant quantity of problems that can be easily uncovered by talking to someone who knows the answer but can't get the business to acknowledge it OR by spending a week churning through data to discover it yourself. You might feel better with the hard fact base in hand, but doing those interviews and using the traditional consultant skill set tends to make you far more targeted and efficient in scoping and planning.
"QB" I think operates a little differently, whereby they get the data and tend to do more stuff on their own with dedicated modelers, data engineers, and designers. More "I am the expert here, leave me be". (Also not intended to sound like a swipe. That's a reasonable point of view sometimes).
Hard to answer because "management consultant "(MC) is really an umbrella term for a lot of different roles. One MC might gain quite a lot of experience analyzing the financials of mergers & acquisitions, and so they would develop those skills and be valuable to a company looking to acquire another. Another MC might specialize in projects doing market research for athletic clothes. A third might specialize in finding inefficient processes in a supply chain.
Outside of niche specializations like that, most MC firms (especially the 'elite' ones) work you really hard and expect you to be able to adapt very quickly to new types of projects. This requires a lot of dedication to your work (and willingness to sacrifice non-work obligations) and the ability to learn new things very quickly. If you survive that work for a few years, then, having something like McKinsey on your resume is more like a certification that you are willing to work hard and can learn quickly, which is obviously valued by a lot of companies.
You don't hire overachieving 4.0 HYPS grads that have "played the game" since they were 14 because they're the smartest guys / gals around, you do it because they'll work 18 hours a day if needed. It's a great indicator of at least two things
1) The person is able to learn quick, and pick up new things very fast
2) The person has exceptional work ethics, and will do what's expected. You're driven enough to not lose motivation.
And then you set them to do menial grunt-work like fixing spreadsheets and formatting PP slides.
Disagree
> It also explains their virtually universal requirement for an Ivy league (or similar) background.
This is all it is. It’s an indicator that you played the connections game well enough to get into an Ivy and kept up the skills after graduating.
You don’t hire from them for hardworkers. You hire from them for connected people.
Soft skills that we IT folk tend to hate with a passion, and which really make a massive difference over a life-long career trajectory
The rank and file of many orgs have no thoughts of their own.
But the really shocking thing is how executive level management as so many organisations can't either. Most execs have no idea what their strategy is, they're just the 'responsible people who are in charge'.
FYI in some cases, 'the Firm' may actually have deep knowledge in a particular area - such as 'fast moving goods' or whatever . So the company is actually 'buying' the exposure the consultants will have had to other folks in their industry.
But the prices are boondoggle insane, out of touch with reality.
To be clear, when a consultancy like McK puts a 23 year old analyst on a project, the $50k/week bill isn't just paying for the knowledge in the analyst's head. The analyst is really just a vehicle to deliver the expertise of the actually-experienced consultants and knowledgebase of the entire firm. The experienced consultants don't have the time to sit and write out the powerpoint deck, so instead they throw as much knowledge as they can at the analyst and the analyst is the one who synthesizes it into something digestable by the customer. Is it worth $50k/week? Fuck no. But it is at least worth recognizing that you are getting more expertise than a sole bachelor's degree.
Second, as someone who has both worked as a consultant at major companies like McK and worked on the other side of the table, and as someone who has long despised the consulting profession because of its overpriced bullshit, I think the author would be surprised at how effective even a measly 23 year old can be. As a consultant, it would drive me insane that my company was billing me out at $700/hr to help implement an IT system when all I was actually doing was reading and regurgitating the software's documentation and making sure that the client didn't ignore it. Surely the client could do this themselves and save the $700/hr, right?
It took me a long time to realize that the answer to this question was actually no. The typical HNer will probably be surprised (and saddened, if you're like me) to realize that the average corporate worker bee is in fact not competent enough to do the most basic tasks, such as refer to documentation, without hand-holding. It is an unfortunate reality that sometimes a well-educated and well-vetted 23 year old analyst can do things much better than an 20-year industry veteran. Companies do know this, and this is what they are paying for, much to the chagrin of the rest of us.
As a last note, the author mentions the possibility of just hiring an IT professional to do the work instead of hiring a consultant. This is something I also see come up a lot in consulting discussions. The reason this isn't done is because hiring an employee full-time brings on a lot of risk to the hiring company. It can take months to hire someone, many more months to train them, and then if they don't perform up to snuff, it can take years to build up a case to fire them, all the whole they are sitting on your payroll taking up budget. A consultant, on the other hand, can be hired in a day, trained in a week, and if needed, can be fired in a minute. You pay a premium for the agility to hire and fire them quickly, but that's the entire point.