Fifteen Minutes: Consulting Consultants
I waited in the South Station bus terminal for the Peter Pan bus to get going. On this trip to discover what the life of a management consultant was like, I was quickly discovering what it was not. I rode in a bus for four hours in front of a man singing the same four bars of a song over and over again. I wondered whether this adventure was a good idea. The bus delivered me to New York's Port Authority with just enough time to change into more respectable clothing in the definitely proletarian bathroom. I hailed a cab and rode across town to a French restaurant, eager to meet Shih-yu Wang, the young consultant I would be shadowing for the next 24 hours.
Wang and her colleagues from Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath arrive at 8 p.m. for their "team dinner." They are disturbingly punctual, a characteristic I note on my list of consultant stereotypes, along with "overachiever" and "talks in bullet-points." Wang, the "business analyst" and most junior member of the team, chose the restaurant and puts the blame on Zagat's when Tom, the "project director" makes fun of the fancy French decor.
After dinner, Mike (the Canadian techie) takes the wheel of the rental car. We are on the way back to the hotel. Six minutes later, he announces that we are lost. His attempt to take a more efficient route had failed. "It didn't make sense to go south first when we want to go north," he explains. Tom informs me that riding in a car driven by a consultant is not always the best idea, since they have a strange propensity for fender-benders. Not only do consultant drivers want to get where they're going as fast as possible, says Wang, but "they are life-long overachievers and they just want to win." Tom agrees. "I'm not really satisfied unless I'm the first one in line for the light--I mean, look how far back we are!" We were five cars back from the intersection.
We arrive at the hotel without incident. Since consultants do much of their work on the road, it is important for the accommodations to be tolerable, and this place is much more than that. Billing itself as a "small luxury inn" the hotel of the PRTM team is fully equipped: well-stocked mini-bar, extensive room service menu, Martha Stewart Living on the coffee table and a phone next to the toilet. But the team doesn't have time to enjoy these amenities tonight--they have an early start tomorrow morning.
Wang was concerned that I would not be able to rouse myself from my hotel bed in time. "Are you going to be OK tomorrow morning? We usually meet in the lobby at 7:45. Learning to get up early was one of the hardest things about this job!" Shih-yu Wang has been out of MIT for approximately five months and assures me that when you're used to having your first class at 10 a.m., 7:45 is mighty early. But my wake-up call is right on time and I make it to the lobby before anyone else.
Wang, accompanied by the rest of the consultants assigned to her project, meets me in the lobby at 7:44. We head over to the client's headquarters, about 15 minutes away from the hotel. Seven minutes later, Conrad (the marketing guy) pulls the rental car into the parking lot. The sprawling building before us looks too industrial to be the central office for a major manufacturing company. There is no "campus" a la Microsoft or Nike, no sculptured lawns or basketball courts. We enter the building and make our way through a sea of cubicles (c. 1970). The atmosphere is that of a conventional office; everyone is working hard, the copier hums in the background and commemorative plaques and employee motivation posters decorate the hallways.
The client is a manufacturer of the old school, started over 90 years ago by a lone, hard-working visionary selling products he designed himself. The son of the founder--feisty at 83--still runs the company and eats in the cafeteria with everybody else. The client enjoys a very strong position in the market for their main products, but recognizes a need to focus on high-tec products to defend their market position. They have brought in the PRTM, consultants to technology industry, to find a way for the client to translate its considerable strength into new, high tech businesses. Like most jobs that PRTM takes, this one involves sending a small group of consultants to work at the client's location for several months. At PRTM, they believe in working at the client's location and getting the client's staff deeply involved in the project. Tom (the fearless leader) proudly told me that PRTM has been called "the hands-on consulting firm" and Wang cited the firm's "roll-up-our-sleeves" style as one of its most attractive features.
Wang leads me through the cubicles into a conference room. It's called "the team room"--the hub of any consulting project. It is sparsely furnished with chairs and folding tables, an easel with newsprint and a wipeboard on one wall. The tables are covered with piles of paper, technical manuals (including Presentations for Dummies) and cables from the team's numerous laptops and cellular phones. The whole set-up is remarkably impermanent--the team could pack up and leave in about 20 minutes without leaving a trace.
Wang starts her day with a conference call to the Asia Marketing Group, a PRTM team working to refine the firm's strategy in that region. These "firm development" teams serve quickly to integrate the new recruits into planning for PRTM's future and recruiting new clients. Including new hires in important firm decision-making is one example of the peculiar organization of consulting firms. There is a sense of rank and hierarchy within the firm that seems unrelated to the way people interact, but everyone's still conscious of it. Throughout the day, there were only a few moments when it was very clear that one person had more authority than another. Most interaction was informal and collaborative.
After her conference call, Wang meets with Mike to discuss, among other things, how to boost the interest and engagement of the client's employees. Wang and Mike decide that, in order to keep a particular staff member connected with the project, it is necessary to give him something to do.
Tom intervenes occasionally from his corner perch in front of his laptop. Tom is well-liked as a project director--he is an extremely hard worker, a prime example of the overachieving, self-confident and macho personality that seems to serve you well in consulting. He has a reputation for working very long hours and pushing his people hard. In the middle of Wang's meeting with Mike, Tom whips out a draft document that he thinks will help their planning--surprised, Mike asks when such a plan was created. Tom replies that he wrote the plan "between 1 and 2:30 yesterday. You'd be afraid if you knew what went on inside my head everyday," he tells them.
After her meeting with Mike, Wang has breakfast. It is 10:04 a.m.; perhaps she hasn't completely shaken off her undergraduate schedule.
Conrad announces, to the team's surprise, that it is his 31st birthday today. To celebrate, he and Wang hold a meeting to discuss the results of survey research his sub-team has been conducting. Conrad is anxious about making his volumes of data relevant for the old-school client. Wang has been brought in to support Conrad's efforts by applying the fancy Excel tricks she has recently learned. Conrad is visibly relieved to have someone to bounce ideas off of and he insists that I call Wang "Powerhouse," a nickname she has earned for her ability to absorb skills and produce results when the team is in a pinch.
Consultants frequently refer to a person's "skill set," that is, a rapidly evolving set of abilities that allow people like "Powerhouse" Wang to address a variety of challenges. The chance to expand this "skill set" is supposed to be one of the most attractive aspects of working in consulting right out of college. "Consultants learn as much in their first two years of work as they would in the first four years of any other job," Tom explains. Wang likens it to "a mathematical problem, when you define the boundaries first and then think creatively within those boundaries." So, when Conrad's approach to the data analysis problem is scattered, insists that he describe exactly what he needs her to produce. But when Conrad tries to plan "work for the plane ride home," Wang asks, "What else can I do to make your job easier? Because I know that you're under a lot of pressure."
Wang returns to the team room, where Scott, a high-ranking member of PRTM, has arrived for a meeting with the client's top management. He and Tom set to work preparing for the meeting. A little bit later, Scott pulls out pictures of his young daughter--Tom assures Scott that he "looks better as a girl."
Family is a complicated question for a consultant. When a parent/spouse is out of town for an average of four days and three nights per week, they must make some pretty significant compromises. Tom, who has a daughter, and Mike, who is married, both assure me that happy families and management consulting are not mutually exclusive. Mike says that it has always been challenging for him and his wife but that her recent return to school has made it less difficult. "She has class at night on each of the days that I'm out of town, so she doesn't even notice I'm gone," he tells me. Tom says that he and his family work around his absence by scheduling separate time for him and his wife, time for him and his daughter and time for family activities. He praises "outsourcing"--hiring people to do most things that would limit his ability to spend time with his family, like housecleaning, lawn mowing and snow shoveling. The key to keeping involved in your children's lives, says Tom, is never letting work get in the way of your participation. He tells stories of flying home to Chicago one night and flying back the next morning in time for work, all so he could attend his daughter's school performance. He listens in to parent-teacher conferences and doctor visits over the speakerphone. The implication is that, if you are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to succeed in your career, why wouldn't you apply that kind of motivation to your family life?
All of the team members see PRTM's "sunny days" policy as an important counterweight to their demanding travel schedules. This policy allows firm employees who are away from home an average of four days a week to take every other Friday off. It's an important tool for recruiting and retention; as Tom puts it, "the choice between family and work is a no-brainer--so why make people choose?" When I say that four days of travel per week still doesn't seem normal, they argue that they "don't work on weekends" as do many consultants and most investment bankers. "Wherever you go from a place like Harvard, you are going to work very hard because you are going to be among the best--even if you don't travel, you are going to work very long hours," Tom says. I get the sense, as I do many times throughout my time with the PRTM team, that I am being recruited.
Wang has people to see. She heads out into the sea of cubicles to meet with her contact in the client's finance department. At his desk, she doesn't sit down--but stands by the end of his desk and takes control of the meeting. Wang exhibits the same sensitivity to people's state of mind that she showed with Conrad--she asks the man about his daughter and about the progress of his new home. The unspoken message is that she understands how full his plate is. She leaves him with a so-called structured task, as planned. It is important, she tells me, not to "outshine the client" by "being a superstar"--again, remaining apolitical is the consultant's key to helping client staff change things.
After lunch in the company cafeteria, Wang returns to the team room to get started on some of the work she has agreed to do in support of Mike and Conrad. This mainly consists of managing pieces of presentations, crunching numbers in Excel and producing visual depictions of data that are simple enough to be presented to the client. During the next two hours, Wang's job begins to look a lot like those of her friends in investment banking which she describes as a low-level information gathering exercise that consists of "sitting in front of a spreadsheet for 12 hours a day." Even with the daily doses of what could very well be called scut work, Wang feels that she is still able to "see the whole picture," that is, relate her number-crunching to the overall progress of the project.
Still, it is important not to paint consulting with over-broad brush strokes. Whil firm policies and cultures exist that encourage recent college graduates to feel more valued and involved than their entry-level counterparts in other professions, the abundance of teams, mentors and collegiate metaphors does not erase the fact that consulting firms are populated by extremely ambitious and "overachieving" people. During my visit, everyone was on good behavior. But management consultants do not always feel valued, projects that involve tremendous amounts of work may, in fact, have little effect on a client decision-making and sometimes, ambition can mar the ideal of harmonious teamwork.
The afternoon picks up for Wang when she and Mike hold a meeting with their main "contact" in the client's product engineering department. This meeting gives me a view of the working relationship between client and consultant that I haven't had all day. Even though some important issues are being discussed, the atmosphere is very informal and relaxed; the client contact seems to trust Mike and Wang to be on his team. The meeting wanders from a demonstration of a nifty PowerPoint presentation tool (a hallmark of consulting) to a discussion of engineering challenges (in which both Wang and Mike demonstrate their engineering expertise). They discuss the recurring subject of the client's political dynamics and the tendency of the sub-teams to be unproductive. The client contact expresses his feeling that he is unable to change certain areas of the company because of the different cultures, and he looks to the consultants as advocates for change. In a very short period of time, the PRTM team has won the support of the forward-thinking client staff-members. You can feel how relieved they are to have a group of outsiders to support the need for change in this venerable old company.
As the day winds down, the team members begin discussing their flights home--Wang will return to Boston, Tom to Chicago, Mike and Conrad to Washington, D.C. They are relieved to end the week but a little frantic about what they have yet to accomplish. Tom and Scott return from their meeting with the executives, flush with that I-just-gave-a-damn-good-presentation glow.
Wang announces that she is ready to get going. We pack up in about three minutes and are on our way to the airport. She has apparently had a number of travel mishaps during her short time as a business analyst, one of which left her no option but the very undergraduate Greyhound bus. As she steps out of the cab, there is no doubt that the bus is fresh in her mind.
Still running on consultant time, Wang arrives at her gate five minutes before boarding begins. She picks up a magazine for the flight and joins the pack of weary business travelers. Tomorrow, she'll be back in PRTM's office in Waltham, working on non-client business and tidying loose ends. On Monday, she'll board another plane and return to the client, the team room and the scramble to prepare a "major, major" presentation only five weeks away. But Wang can't be bothered with any of that now; she has a plane to catch.
PRTM
Pittiglio Rabin
Todd & McGrath
Telephone: (781) 647-2800
Web site: www.prtm.com
PRTM helps technology companies structure their strategies, their organizations and their core business processes for competitiveness, profitability and growth. Since its inception in 1976, the firm has worked with over 1,000 technology companies in over 5,000 engagements worldwide. The firm now employs 350 consultants worldwide.
PRTM operates 14 offices around the world. U.S. offices are in Costa Mesa, Calif; Mountain View, Calif; Irving, Tex.; Rosemont, Ill.; Southfield, Mich;
Stamford, Conn., Waltham, Mass.; and Washington, D.C. European offices are in Oxford, Glasgow, Paris, and Frankfurt. PRTM's Asian offices are in Toyko and Hong Kong.