Case Interview Preparation & Management Consulting | Strategy | Critical Thinking

For those of you who want an update on where we are in Week 0 of the US financial services study, this podcast will provide a detailed update of the final preparation as the team goes into their on-boarding with just 5 days before the start date. Expect a few podcasts this week since I am leading the onboarding training and it is much quicker, and less rude, to prepare podcasts versus typing up updates in front of the interns. Next week, I will shift back to more written updates with a few podcasts and videos thrown in. Note that this study and the underlying issue of the economics of small business loans is a complex topic. It is best to read the live blog from the beginning to see how we have thought through the issue and structured the team to analyses the hypotheses. Related: - You can read about strategy related articles from our Quarterly - Learn more about financial analysis in our strategy library

Our managing partner Michael Boricki gave an interview at Accepted, a well known site for MBA admission.

This podcast is a response to the email below. The client wanted to know how to change a consulting firm so that her firm could compete against McKinsey.

This podcast is a controversial and thoughtful response to a letter from a reader who overheard his career counselor describing him as a "dumb black kid" who "has no future in business."

In this podcast we look at the rise of value modelling as a shiny new management technique in 2003 and its implosion in 2009. Value modelling is a lot like other big trends like the balance scorecard, business process re-engineering etc. which went belly-up.

Young consultants make some very common mistakes when they start out, and I explain how to use the strategy insight ratio to correct these problems.

Aspiring and some young consultants tend to have a narrow outside-in view of management consulting. They make significant assumptions about why and how strategy studies are done, and try to replicate this assumed behavior. They think "being analytic" means analyzing things before every decision is made.

Aspiring NBA stars make a classic mistake when trying to watch, analyze and replicate the reasons why someone like Michael Jordan was so successful. In this podcast I explain why aspiring management consultants and those in industry make the very same mistake when watching, analyzing and replicating the reasons why McKinsey and BCG are so successful.

[Update June 11] The 1st strategy training map is live! All 16 steps of strategy planning and 200+ critical points are complimentary to all our members!

It is fair to say that being assigned to develop the case studies to help a team on the strategy study is considered a dead-end role for most consultants. An associate or analyst would much rather want to be leading the corporate strategy analyses, business case or even the business unit analyses versus studying how other companies have tackled the same problem as the client.