article thumbnail

Eight common challenges of boutique consulting firms

StrategyU

People who were excellent at executing struggled to take a step back and be a thought partner with the client, helping design a longer more strategic approach to a problem. #7 7 No one is responsible for the process With almost everyone I’ve worked with, I ask them, “Who is responsible for obsessing over your internal process and performance?”

article thumbnail

How I’d Use AI Tools (If I Still Worked In Consulting)

StrategyU

Do you have a toolkit for business problem solving? This course teaches you how to synthesize information into compelling insights, structure your information in ways that help you solve problems, and develop presentations that resonate at the C-Level.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Issue Trees – What Are They and How Do You Use Them?

StrategyU

You might develop the next leg of your tree: This tree is not perfect and the answers at the lowest level are not collectively exhaustive for all the possibilities for increasing revenue and decreasing costs. How Issue Trees Are Linked With Problem Solving. Do you have a toolkit for business problem solving?

article thumbnail

The Ultimate Guide To “Scoping”: How Consultants Define Problems and Shape 

StrategyU

This is why consulting can feel more like therapy than business problem-solving. This is the value of a consultant, the ability to continue to search for the problem behind the problem. Do you have a toolkit for business problem solving? In consulting, things are always changing.

article thumbnail

The Magic Of Critical Thinking: How To Make Better Decisions

StrategyU

However, if you spend the time to develop a process for approaching problems that are beyond the capacity of your normal intuitions you will be able to move on to more challenging problems. This is the secret sauce of any high-performing organization but can be hard to recognize if you were not there at the beginning.

article thumbnail

A Brief History of Strategy Consulting: 100 years from Frederick Taylor to the “Next New Normal”

StrategyU

So in the last 1800s, Frederick Taylor and several others in the US started exploring new ways to think about running a business. Part of the toolkit McKinsey developed was a 30-page document called the “General Survey Outline” (GSO) and it stood out for how it was different than Taylor’s “how-to” approach.

article thumbnail

What are the career paths and titles at McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group?

StrategyU

As the scale and ambition of these firms increased, they needed more people to do the work and needed to develop internal pipelines of future partners. If you really wanted to jump from Business Analyst to Associate at McKinsey for example, that is definitely a possible path if you are a top performer. Watch The Video On This.