My 13 years in McKinsey helped me develop a whole range of skills and gave me access to a network of talented professionals. A somewhat counter-intuitive aspect was that my functional expertise as a specialist deepened significantly during my tenure. In this blog, I wanted to emphasise the benefits of working in a generalist consulting firm for people who may be on the path of developing functional mastery. It is a worth stating that my conclusions are based entirely on my own experience in McKinsey which is a unique company, and the lessons may apply in varying degrees to other firms. I also left McKinsey in 2012, and I can imagine a lot has changed. The five big advantages of being in such a firm are given below:
1. Focusing on significant business outcomes
In a generalist firm, one is exposed to hard and relevant problems on the minds of CEOs. There is a disciplined approach to problem solving that is invaluable to learn. Apart from being instructive, it is highly motivating to know that everything that you do, be it conjoint analysis or ethnography, matters because the nature of the output will affect the possibility of achieving strong business outcomes. Whilst my learnings are based on my expertise in customer insights, I think this point applies to other functional areas as well. I listen to podcasts featuring founders of cutting-edge AI firms. Whilst it sounds obvious, almost everyone highlights the importance of developing realistic use-cases with the potential for business impact.
2. Making your expertise agile by training on highly varied situations
A common criticism of expert intuition is that it is developed through repetitive practice in a specific context and is less useful in unfamiliar situations. However, if you encounter highly heterogeneous situations, the expertise you develop is more agile and adaptive. You are more likely to work skilfully in novel and uncertain situations. Let’s take the example of segmentation. A client in a pharmaceutical company asked me how many times I had conducted segmentation work to develop expertise. The number they had in mind was in the 5-10 range. I counted and at that time the number was over 50, and that too, varied on many dimensions – type of problem, e.g., preventing customer attrition, launching an innovation, changing a behaviour, building a brand; industry, e.g., B2B, FMCG, consumer durables, healthcare, technology, art organisations, financial services; geography – so many countries across the globe, notably in North and South America, Europe, and Asia; data types – attitudinal, behavioural, conjoint utilities, qualitative; and even statistical techniques – hierarchical, K-means, CHAID, latent class cluster, latent class regression based – outside McKinsey, I haven’t met a single person who has used a latent class regression based segmentation ! When one trains like that, the repertoire of ideas is very large and enables a more creative response to a specific situation. Companies like McKinsey & Company may appear monolithic from the outside, but internally the diversity is mind boggling on every aspect – it’s like having access to thousands of small businesses.
3. Pressure testing expertise with smart people
One’s colleagues at such firms tend to be intellectually rigorous, inquisitive, and challenging. They do not simply accept your expertise at face value. You must know your field well and communicate its value in terms of first principles. This sharpens your expertise.
4. Learning from expert peers and mentors
A critical factor for success in such firms is having functional centres of excellence. You need a critical mass of experts who get together with the purpose of pushing the boundaries of a field whilst serving the needs of the organisation and its clients. This is where we would not only discuss an approach for client service, e.g., insights for innovation, but also get deep into highly technical questions, e.g., the merits and demerits of using hierarchical bayes vs. latent class methods for estimating utilities in discrete-choice models. You have access to a world-class peer network that serves as a sounding board on difficult issues related to your expertise.
5. Reinventing to stay relevant.
Demand for your expertise is driven by the perceived relevance and ability to adapt to the changing world. I have had opportunities to transform myself by focusing on various efforts, e.g., testing a new approach to segmentation, leading work on innovation, founding a group for behaviour change. In a way, the constant reinventions helped me develop the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to start my company.
So how can one create these benefits in a small firm? At Insight Dojo, I have chosen to serve the C-Suite. In over 90% of our projects, the CEO is involved. I have also built on the problem-solving approach that I learned and adapted it to our situation. Whilst it’s impossible to create the diversity inherent in a large firm like McKinsey, I ensure that the problems we solve are varied in terms of problems, industries, and geographies. With the practice of pragmatic polymathy, we ensure we are always immersing in many disciplines. Finally, we are constantly networking with many individuals and firms cross the globe.
Let me close this blog by highlighting a few watchouts of working in a generalist firm by mentioning certain things that work better at Insight Dojo. First, being a specialist firm, we have the space to go much deeper and be far more experimental on projects. Second, I find clients are more willing to do creative and qualitative work with us than when I was in McKinsey. Designing innovative products, creating branding campaigns or developing novel go-to-market programmes has been particularly fulfilling at Insight Dojo. One of the things I enjoy the most is the speed of implementing a new idea that strikes us because we have direct access to senior clients. Finally, as an expert in McKinsey, I did not have as much visibility of the impact we generated over time. At Insight Dojo, we have relationships that have been lasting for years and can see the progress of a product or brand over time. We do soup-to-nuts strategy-to-execution projects, often with other partners, and that ensures greater accountability for our recommendations.
On balance, though, I strongly recommend working in a generalist consulting firm even if it is for a few years.