Author: Steve Shu

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not really qualified to write on this subject, but a reader has asked if I would share my thoughts on the subject of PhDs in management consulting (sorry for the late reply but I have not checked my personal email for more than 2 weeks, and there were a few thousand to sift through [not counting having to read any!]).

One firm comes to mind immediately when I think about the subject of PhDs in management consulting … it is McKinsey. I recall that McKinsey actively recruits on campus for PhDs. I know very little about their formal programs for PhDs, so if anyone would like to share their thoughts, please feel free to do so.

The handful of McKinsey PhDs I have known were slotted into typical team structures as either individual contributors or engagement managers (I don’t think this is necessarily representative of the career tracks for PhDs for reasons I will elaborate on below). The individuals that I knew shared no common trait other than they were brilliant and structured thinkers. One had a strong propensity to actually lead people. Another had a very strong quantitative and statistics background.

When I was at PRTM, the PhDs I knew tended to be grounded in both an industry sector (e.g., biotechnology) and functional speciality (e.g., product development) from the get-go as compared to other, non-PhD consultants that would specialize later down the road. In my opinion, PhDs can get slotted this way because PhDs are considered true "experts" in a particular field, they have invested more time in both schooling and focus on a particular industry, and they can command better premiums for their personal investments when they leverage this background.

I also know a lot of PhDs through my wife’s affiliation with the business school community as a PhD and professor. It is common for professors, who do a lot of management consulting on the side, to provide consulting in their specialized (research) area of expertise, e.g., corporate tax, venture finance/valuation, antitrust. This is in contrast to non-PhD consultants that come down a similar path that I have, e.g., the MBA path where consulting may be of a more general nature but derive specialization over time through greater industry focus (e.g., telecom), functional focus (e.g., sales operations) , situation focus (e.g., growth business) and problem-type focus (e.g., virtual network operator) as part of client projects.

Some successful traits I have seen in PhDs that pursue management consulting are as follows (and the requirements are probably more intense for strategy and research-type consulting firms as compared to firms that get more involved with execution or implementation):

1. structured thinkers
2. ability to apply quantitative methods (e.g., statistics, triangulation, valuation) to seemingly impossible problem areas
3. fact-based researchers and consultants
4. clear communicators
5. industry experts or experts in their ability to translate the language of other PhD experts that cannot communicate in business terms
6. experts that can provide due diligence, e.g., on a complex engineering or science subject

Some traits where I have seen PhDs fail in management consulting situations:

1. Cannot communicate in business terms
2. Too academic in their approach to solving problems
3. Not ready to move at a very fast pace (as often required in consulting)

Now a lot of the successful/unsuccessful traits I’ve mentioned above can also apply to non-PhD consultants too. That said, I think I would stress stuctured thinking, communication skills, and leadership skills as being most important for non-PhD/MBA types.

Business school and management consulting firms provide their people with methodologies, best-in-class practices, historical case studies, scientific techniques, and the like as a foundation to the knowledge base. Usually there’s a past experience, a past consulting project … something for consultants to draw on to solve a client’s problem in the present.

But cases arise when a consultant in the field needs to solve a problem where it is (for all practical purposes for one reason or another, e.g., lack of sufficient time) impossible to draw from any prior experiences or any general framework. Problems of this flavor posed to me in the past include:

• figuring out the optimum workflow for an outsourced function where the client is one of only two direct competitors in a closed industry where standard reference models are unknown
• examining the operating model of a biofuel business (where I had no prior industry experience)
• sizing the business value and economic value of a human life (for insurance and product development purposes)
• valuing the price of a lease instrument that had never been created before (but that could be modelled ("mimicked") as three separate instruments that had been created and valued before)
• predicting the nature of a competitor’s bid (based on imperfect and annecdotal information on their salesforce structure, estimations of sales quotas, estimations of sales cycle times, # deals, etc.)

I often liken the complexity and fuzziness of such situations to the situation of being posed the problem of having to take apart a locked car with one’s bare hands, without the assistance of tools, machines of any kind, or prior knowledge of past practices. How would you take apart the car quickly and if your life depended upon it?

Philosophically, one might try to breach the exterior of the car to get inside, where it might be easier to disassemble parts. One might break the window first, remove winshield wipers for make-do tools, use metal parts from the wipers as screwdrivers, unscrew pieces of the dashboard, and then try to move on from there. (Note that there’s no one way to approach the problem, but there are some ways that are probably less effective than other approaches).

The real point of my post is that a creative, never-give-up type of mentality is required, if anything as a last resort for a consultant. This same can probably also be said of entrepreneurship and other business scenarios, but I tend to associate this characteristic more with consulting (probably because of the project-driven, problem-solving nature of the practice). The Tao of Taking Apart Cars With One’s Bare Hands is a lesson in creativity, fortitude, and resolve in problem solving.

An updated version of this post appears in The Consulting Apprenticeship.

This past week I was involved with a fairly typical discussion that occurs during the preparation phase for a management consulting project that includes a diagnostic or assessment phase. A goal of an assessment may be for a consultant to help a client quickly zero in on where major problems are and to quickly determine where to focus business improvement efforts. For an operations project that may span many business units and the work of thousands to tens of thousands of people, data collection and interviews play a critical role in the analysis. As one can imagine in analysis projects, if one gets garbage in, one likely gets garbage out.

In comes the role of the “hunting license”. As one can imagine, consultants may need to get very sensitive information (e.g., financial, sales, operational) in order to help a client analyze what is going on. When working in the trenches of a client organization, the individuals on the line may be reluctant to give the consultant information. If a consultant has be given an adequate hunting license, essentially an authorization by a manager or executive (e.g., CEO, COO, CFO) to obtain any operational data needed, a consultant can better navigate through the client organization and obtain information needed.

That said, consultants need to recognize that their hunting licenses do not generally mean that they have a right to “fish” (for information). When consultants seek information and/or question workers in the trenches, they should have a clear goal in mind. They should not randomly seek information just for the purpose of seeking information and in hopes that client problems will reveal themselves down the road. Seeking information can take up a client’s precious time and resources, so the effects of asking for substantial amounts of information should be recognized.

Sometimes avoiding fishing is not as easy as it seems, especially in cases where the problem may not be readily visible. That said, to avoid the pitfalls of fishing, a consultant should use a structured methodology for attacking a problem, and the methodology should be connected to end results (and/or prove, disprove hypotheses along the way) as much as possible. For example, in analyzing a backoffice operation, one may want to look at people, processes, and systems as the structured methodology. One may look at the roles people are playing, document the workflows people are using, and examine the computer support for various paper handling steps. To show how the connection of data to end results must be clearly understood, if during the backoffice analysis case I mentioned it is determined that salary information of the workers analyzed will be off-limits to the consultant, then the consultant may want to state that any potential problems about whether a client’s workers are paid competitively (thus potentially affecting worker quality and effectiveness) would be beyond the analysis.

Another way to avoid the pitfall of fishing is for the consultant to ask for information in a layered way. That is, before diving deep in every area of investigation, a consultant can ask for broad information first. Once a problem has surfaced, a consultant can then ask for more detailed information regarding the particular area.

So all in all, I would say the hunter instincts are good traits for consultants, but fisher tendencies need to be watched with caution or avoided entirely.