Joining the invisible hands

A demystifying reflection on my experiences as a management consultant

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

This essay has been updated and revised as of November 1st, 2023.

The weight of Corporate America feels heaviest in the little moments. For us — the ones who watched our parents work two jobs for minimum wage— the guilt is nothing flashy. I took no part in turbocharging the opioid crisis. I have yet to compromise my morals. No, the guilt is much quieter. It’s a sinking pain in your chest when you don’t have time to call your mom nor have dinner with your partner. That weight is real — and heavy.

I moved back home in part because I wasn’t sure how much I would be travelling, but primarily to spend more time with my family. My parents. My brother. Aunties and uncles. Also, my best friend who still lives in Dallas. Yet, in the early months, I spent 70% of my week in rural America working in a manufacturing plant and the remaining 30% too tired to socialize. I felt immense guilt when I wanted time to recoup or exercise as opposed to seeing loved ones — people I moved back to see in the first place.

This is perhaps worst with romantic partners. Though I am in a long distance relationship, I see few differences with my peers who are in traditional relationships. They live with or near their partners yet are separated Monday through Thursday. They attend corporate social events on Thursday and Friday evenings, sometimes weekends, taking valuable date nights. And the worst part — something I’m guilty of — is that our sought-after quality time together becomes tainted by inevitable conversations about work. The job does a great job at making work equivalent to life. No matter how hard we try to be real people outside of work, the 60-hour week doesn’t give you much to talk about besides the gig.

On the problematic side of consulting

There are, unsurprisingly, some moral complications. The elephant in the room — in every room, all the time — is how well compensated consultants are. Young consultants fresh out of undergrad or graduate school earn a six figure salary and cost a client tens of thousands of dollars each week, despite offering little to no expertise in the industry they’re consulting. Meanwhile, wages in the U.S. remain stagnant for fifty years despite productivity doubling since the 1970s. This inequality is harrowing when frontline employees of our clients are fired in order to protect large executive bonuses.

Catering to executives also limits the impact that I am able to have, despite being at the table. There are many power dynamics and intricate relationships at play. Consultants, being in the influence business, end up spending a lot of their time managing personalities and politics. After all, someone hired us — for a reason — and someone did not hire us — for a reason. For example, we could be hired by a new CEO seeking to transform the company. At best, the CEO hired consultants to research and present unbiased opinions. More often than I expected, they’ll have hired consultants to justify what they already had in mind. At worst, consultants act as scapegoats for when things go south.

Furthermore, the obligation to fulfill the client’s wishes may mean recommending destruction. Is that hyperbolic? Well, big businesses have long been obsessed with short-term profits for their shareholders — cutting costs by outsourcing jobs or increasing profits by raising drug prices. Consultants have had an active role in these decisions since the inception of the consulting industry. At my firm, we can oppose projects that are morally unacceptable for us, and the company at large has rejected a lot of profitable yet harmful work. Notably, we have transitioned a lot of our work in fossil fuels to primarily target decarbonization. It’s something I’m proud of when I go to work. However, it doesn’t help that the bad stuff is sold to some other consulting firm.

Not to mention, consultants can provide recommendations without the necessary context behind each decision. Senior partners will craft stories based on executive summaries and a couple meetings. Firms do not even see this as a problem. They actively train entry-level consultants to communicate as concisely, briefly, and high-level as possible — failing to do so results in “poorer” performance.

I would like to dispel the notion that consultants rarely understand what what is going on, especially regarding new graduates. Behind those summaries are teams of young consultants diving into data, research teams curating materials, and confidential knowledge provided with anonymous expert interviews. However, my problem lies with the sentiment that ideas can be summarized in 3 to 5 bullets on a slide as opposed to a format more akin to academic papers (i.e., complete sentences in prose with paragraphs of important details). I find Corporate America’s need to move fast and break things immensely challenging, problematic, and unsustainable.

On a separate note, I have found personal performance to be equally dependant on skill and luck. New consultants lack the agency to choose cases that interest them, which means that they work at the whims of what is available. What is available may not lend well to learning and development. The constantly moving variables — content, case team, office location and specialization, and client counterparts — make it difficult to ensure a safe learning environment for new employees, which puts those with no corporate experience at a severe disadvantage.

Finally, the elitist and churlish archetypes drawn to this line of work can be off-putting. For starters, consulting firms are generally categorized into rankings and tiers. At the top of the food chain are the MBB firms — McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. These companies have target schools, such as the Ivy leagues, and the non-target schools, or everyone else. Elitism is embedded in the recruiting process, with opportunities gatekept to the most prestigious universities— a factor based more on the socioeconomic background of the student than their quality of education.

Even if you were to claw your way up to these elite schools, there are students that have already been handed keys to the gate. Those that know what consulting is in their first year of college. Those that have the ability to do summer internships. Those that have the resources to practice case interviews with books, tutors, and live coaches. I know a colleague who practiced hundreds of case interviews — over a hundred hours — with paid professional tutors. The application process is on an entirely different playing field for the already rich and elite.

Once you get the job, after the excitement of financial stability passes and you put on your big adult pants, you quickly realize that the workplace is not the most inclusive. Many of the partners are white. Many are men. Retention rates are quite low for employees of color and women. The hours do not lend well to child-rearing. Hypothesis-based thinking seems to be a symptom of male answer syndrome. And everyone talks about skiing.

Still, I remain an optimist. After all, being a management consultant means a comfortable salary, strong health insurance, and being treated like a middle-class human being. I’m able to visit my long-distance partner halfway across the country with little to no thought. I can afford to take my parents out to dinner. The work is interesting or at least fast-paced enough to keep me from being bored. I’m able to have an outsized impact despite being early in my career and can sample many different functional roles. And my coworkers are clever at a minimum, with some being truly brilliant. It’s a privileged predicament — one I feel empowered to critique, but not encouraged to complain (too much).

Consulting for the non-elite

I had never been exposed to Corporate America before this job. My parents work in a garment factory, and my cousins work in healthcare. I have a couple mechanics for uncles and nail technicians for aunts. Even amongst friends, I was one of the only ones who chose an “elite” career in business over graduate school or non-profit endeavors. Naturally, my friends and family and the internet and I had one question: what does a consultant do all day?

In October 2023, John Oliver produced a popular segment on McKinsey consultants, based in part on the book When McKinsey Comes to Town. There have also been recent exposes from New York Times writers, such as Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All. Each of these stories sought to tackle the question of what consultants do — often depicting a team of bright-eyed pimply twentysomething Ivy League graduates laying out potentially reckless or half-baked recommendations to executives.

This is especially compounded by the mythos built by the consultants themselves. At your local bar, you may overhear a consultant on a first date who talks about their 60-hour work weeks and the dire straits of an upcoming meeting. On campus, you may walk by a recruitment booth pitching the invaluable experiences of providing recommendations to C-suite executives early on in your career. Neither of these situations are entirely false nor are they completely truthful.

To understand what a consultant does, I had to first understand that consultants are hired as a team — a unit. From my experiences, the team is comprised of three consultants: the expert, the manager, and the monkey.

The expert is the consultant providing credible, trusted, and sales worthy recommendations. They are the managing directors and senior partners who have had decades of experience in the field. The expert sold the case to the client, and the client hired us for their expert opinion. While they may be less connected to the work because they are selling multiple cases at once, the expert ultimately gives the final sign-off on recommendations.

If the expert is selling the work, there has to be someone who manages the day-to-day — somebody that keeps the project on track to fulfill the expert’s ideas. These are the managers. The manager could be called a project leader or engagement manager or associate principal. Managers are the ones who make sure tasks are completed on time. They work with clients to ensure they’re on the same page (key word: alignment) and spend most of their days in meetings — aligning their teams, partners, and clients.

Finally, below the expert and the manager are the people who do the brunt of the work — the monkeys. These are the analysts, associates, and consultants who spend their days sifting through data to find trends of interest and building slide decks to report their findings. They’re the ones doing “the work.” The monkeys are the most common consultant one may find due to their sheer volume relative to managers or partners. Monkeys are also young and hip, taking over bar counters and dating pools in metropolitan areas. Out of all three archetypes, I will discuss what the monkeys do because “the work” is purposefully and painfully nebulous.

I am a monkey. I have been a monkey for a while and have gotten quite good at the job. Accordingly, I feel qualified and confident in detailing what consultants mean when they say they spend all day doing “Excel and PowerPoint” — an undescriptive and unhelpful explanation considering both tools used by most office workers.

I spend about half of my week working as an amateur data analyst. Monkeys are responsible for collecting data, which could be as simple as tracking down the right employee at a performing arts center to pull 5 years of ticket sales. For some, like me during my first project, it could be recording videos of technicians working machinery and conducting interviews about their working habits. Even further, you could be tasked with purchasing 12 blueberry pies and weighing them on a scale (true story). Once the monkeys have collected the data, they analyze the data — looking at thousands of rows of data to find interesting tidbits. Perhaps they calculate financial projections based on a company’s future investments or summarize survey responses based on various sampling criteria.

The other half of monkeying is to be an adept communicator and report your findings. Sometimes, reporting is as simple as composing an email recapping your progress and remaining questions to investigate. More often, reporting takes place in a publishable document, either a word document or PowerPoint presentation. Here lies the graphs that summarize one’s data analyses. Graphs live next to text boxes of takeaways and insights. Every now and then, there are process slides to depict how we intend to solve a problem. If the project is great, a monkey will spend most of their time writing a story that honestly details their findings and provides helpful recommendations. On the other hand, one could be stuck with the menial labor of aligning shapes and text boxes or adjusting the font color across 60 pages while the managers and experts write the story. Out of all parts of the job, reporting requires the most self-advocacy.

Of course, there are other roles that a consultant at this level may take on, including administrative tasks like planning team events, taking notes, and scheduling meetings. They may manage client relationships and mentor newcomers. However, a majority of the work will fall into one of the two major categories of analyzing data and reporting findings.

None of these activities are uniquely challenging compared to other knowledge-based careers, yet it always seems like consultants (and bankers and private equity analysts) face insurmountable tasks that require 60 to 70 or 80 hours of work per week. Truth be told, I have not worked those hours in this job, nor do I ever plan to do so. Still, I have noticed that long hours tend to be driven by: (1) waiting on feedback and iterating on content when feedback arrives last minute, (2) irrational deadlines of short-notice asks ranging anywhere from 2 to 24+ hours, and (3) unsustainable working cultures where performance and “dependability” may depend on your reachability. In short, a consultant works long hours because the job needs too many things done in too little time far too frequently.

Advice for the young monkey

The first-generation, older sibling side of me wishes to never see new monkeys struggle like so many consultants before them. If you are considering a career in consulting or are early on in your journey, I will share the best advice I have received and internalized thus far:

Tip #1: Minimize tortuosity. The biggest hack to the job will not come from keyboard shortcuts and Excel formulas. Those hotkeys will only get you 20% faster. The biggest hack of the job is taking the shortest path to the goal.

To that end, I encourage working out of a word document or email chain and gaining total alignment from your team before working on any Excel model or PowerPoint deck. I believe in dedicating multiple days to gather context, sift through data, and read prior documents because your greater understanding of what already exists will save you from reinventing the wheel. Finally, I empower you to review any inherited documents with a critical eye and rethink the entire project if it means that you can get to the goal faster, better, and simpler than what was provided by a previous case team member. More often than not, you are walking into a situation that requires disruption (otherwise, the previous member would have finished the task before they left); if it turns out the former member was correct, then you now have a greater understanding of the problem.

Tip #2: Utilize AI as much and as often as possible. You do not want to be left behind when every other new consultant is moving at two or three times your pace. I leverage ChatGPT multiple times a day. I also use Text FX by Google for writing prompts. Additionally, Microsoft just launched Copilot across their Office Suite, so you may be able to integrate an entirely new, capable workflow.

If you are looking for some simple ways to incorporate ChatGPT into your workflow, here are my three most useful functions:

1. Email generator. While AI email clients can help with writing responses, the largest challenge is they never capture my language and tone correctly. One way I have worked around this is to reserve a conversation in ChatGPT for emails, exclusively. I fed the conversation 50+ emails so that it would learn my writing style, and it can now replicate my email style with very informal, off-the-cuff prompts.
2. Thought partner. Often times, when you’re running a module on your own, you want to be able to brainstorm and test ideas with someone. However, managers and other monkeys do not often have the capacity to be an on-call thought partner. I have turned to ChatGPT as a partner by writing long, thoughtful ideas and proposals, then asking ChatGPT to recap what I sent to validate whether my ideas make sense. The trick is to ask the bot to evaluate the ideas as if it were a 5th grader with no context of your case work — that will truly test whether your ideas are developed and where you can further research or explain.
3. Code spawner and debugger. When using complicated Excel formulas, VBA code, or any coding language that you are less familiar with, ChatGPT can be a gamechanger. Simply write the fastest version of what you think should work, or merely describe what you want, and give it to the bot to provide you the more correct answer. I have created entire workbooks and Python code using ChatGPT, saving me tens of hours of work in exchange for 30 minutes of refining generated code.

Tip #3: Eat your vegetables. Seeking nutritious meals can sometimes be the most challenging part of the job. Fiber and vitamins are a critical driver of long-term, sustained energy levels. And while bowls that contain cucumbers, tomatoes, and avocados are quite common, they are far from fibrous. My biggest recommendation is to look specifically for broccoli, spinach, legumes, and other above-soil greens options, especially during lunch. Proteins and carbohydrates are offered at most places; quality greens are not as prevalent.

Rapid fire tips:

• Utilize the Zero Inbox methodology.
• Color code your calendar.
• Publicize offline periods via calendar invites to your team (e.g., Brian is Offline from 6pm — 7pm).
• Consume food away from your laptop or computer.
• Consider doing Lunch-n-Learn’s to meet your team and build knowledge.
• Carry backup shoes in your suitcase, whether it be dress shoes if you’re on the casual side or leather sneakers if you’re on the fancier side.
• Purchase copies of your chargers, toothbrush, toothpaste, etc.
• Offset your carbon emissions with Klima (certified B-Corp), especially from the excessive amounts of flights you will take.
• Purchase TSA PreCheck.
• Check every bed for bed bugs and keep your luggage on a fabric-free luggage platform.
• Leverage the Michelin Guide, Eater, and other food review guides when considering team events
• Never fly in the first row (there’s little to no space for your personal item).
• Consider flying Monday nights rather than Monday mornings.
• Familiarize yourself with sports or current events for small talk.
• Work with parents (people who have children tend to have better work-life balance).
• Organize your files with clear folder nomenclature for future inheritors.
• ALWAYS CHECK FOR BED BUGS.

Epilogue

Consulting is the epitome of modern business. It’s strange. It’s an intentionally nebulous field with long-winded answers and buzz words galore. Consultants like to say they’re doctors for businesses (though I prefer the idea of a personal trainer) without really getting into what that means. Consultants are well off, and they take up all the airline lounges. There’s clearly a lot of considerations — morally, socially, culturally — for new or prospective consultants. That being said, I hope my reflections were able to resonate with other like-minded, conflicted folks. And I was able to give some tactical advice for my fellow newbies. Hopefully, it holds up in a few months.