While the examples come from consulting, these lessons are applicable to any career.
*Brief consulting dictionary: Partners are the most senior members of the firm and interact with clients directly. They are part-owners of the firm and have developed industry specialties. Managers report to the partners and oversee teams of consultants. Consulting projects are called cases.
Questions are integral to consulting. They guide the direction of your case and are a necessary step before research and analysis. Your questions demonstrate how you problem solve. Does the client have any objectives other than profit maximization? How concentrated is the Brazilian toothbrush market? What industries does the client compete in other than luxury dog collars and enterprise software? These questions lead to next steps and a more complete understanding of the problem. This is why the case interview (an essential element of the consultant application process), tests your question-asking ability.
That said, there is a specific type of question which is prevalent and counter productive: "What should I do next?"
Managers are overburdened. They liase between clients, managing partners, and their consulting team -- three groups who have varied and conflicting needs. Managers work longer hours than anyone else at Bain. Handling individuals' questions like "What should I do next?" is an additional cognitive burden for these managers. Good coworkers absorb their colleague's stress rather than amplify it. Bain consultants learn how to become better coworkers by working "Answer First."
Answer First's approach is exactly what it sounds like: begin your problem with an answer. Rather than asking your manager for next steps, come up with the next steps on your own and propose them to your manager. Now they have material to react to.
It is much easier to react to an idea than to generate an original one. Try planning a weekend trip with your family. Without prompting, it is difficult to know what to do. But if someone suggests a museum visit, that stirs a discussion which will lead to a decision. Answer First helps us face the paradox of choice -- where the abundance of options leads to indecision.
Many times, your Answer First will be wrong. That is okay. You free up burden from your manager and demonstrate that you've thought critically about your work. At best, you suggest something useful. You are much closer to your research than your manager is. You are quite likely to bring up something your manager (or supervisor) hasn't accounted for.
This approach might not sound scientific. Perhaps, we should spend more time in contemplation before proposing a decision. But Answer First is scientific. Answer First is a null hypothesis. It is overcoming your inner critic. It is willing to be wrong so that you can be right sooner.
When you "Answer First," you anchor your team to that answer. Even if they disagree with your interpretation, their disagreement will be, in some ways, modified by what you said. In auctions, the starting bid affects future bids.
Knowing this, you should speak positively about your own work performance.
Bain encourages their employees to have frequent Professional Development (PD) chats. Each week at Bain, I took part in numerous PD chats with colleagues and former team members. In PD chats with peers, I learned about other cases, how to navigate the company, or just had a friendly catch up. In ones with supervisors and managers, part of the discussion was dedicated to my performance. My supervisors told me what actions on the case I should start, stop and continue.
My original approach to these conversations was to name everything I did wrong throughout the week. I wanted to appear humble. I wanted to show that I was acutely aware of my flaws and that I would work on them. In all honesty, I did this to dissipate any critiques I might later receive. I wanted my supervisors to argue with me and say that I was, in fact, doing a great job.
This is a terrible way to approach PD chats. As mentioned in part [1], managers (and supervisors) are very busy. They won't remember how you are doing. If you begin your PD chat with every mistake you make, you will convince them that you are incompetent. You need to anchor them on what you have done exceptionally well. It's like Star Wars -- tell them "These are not the droids you're looking for."
Great novelists read thousands of books. Star athletes spend hours watching game tape. Successful consultants collect and review slide decks. After all, how do you know if your work is good if you don't know what good looks like?
When I began at Bain, I created a repository of the best slides I could find. If I was stuck on a project or didn't know how to visualize my expert call findings, I would review these exceptional templates. They provided me a starting point to work from.
This approach is appropriate for any output: draft emails to clients, interview guides, excel models, surveys, etc. Make sure to strip all sensitive information from these materials!
Side note: defining "Good" is important outside of work. At Bain, I outlined my ideal week: in hours of sleep, exercise, reading and time with friends. These definitions helped me understand what I cared about and whether Bain was able to make time for my needs. My Bain teams would regularly assess our personal goals as a proxy for whether we were thriving in or surviving our case.
People spend too much time rounding out their weaknesses. This has an opportunity cost.
It's ironic -- I buried the lesson here! Honestly 80/20 (spending 20% of your time to complete 80% of the deliverable) is opaque and over-used. Here are my 3 concrete recommendations for 80/20.
A) Order everything by importance or how quickly a response is required. Order key takeaways by importance. Order emails by importance. Order to-do lists by importance. Anything that has bullets or numbers should be ordered by importance. Pro tip: most written communication in consulting should be in list form.
B) Timebox. Set a time limit to your task. When the time is up, stop your task. It is easy to waffle and waste time on things.
C) Know when to cut off a call. If you achieve everything you need in a meeting, let it end early. If you are on an expert call and the expert has nothing left to say, end the call.
A) Spend extra time clarifying at the beginning of a project
This is time well spent. The goal here is to invest upfront time understanding the purpose of the project. Write out slide mockups. Draft out how you would approach the problem. Have team members react to your output early in the process. These techniques minimize yield loss. Yield loss is business speech for wasted time. It's the worst! It's when a partner requests a complete change to your slide deck the night before a SteerCo (an important meeting with your clients). Upfront communication saves heartbreak in the long run.
B) Ensure your work is "Zero Defect" (ZD)
This suggestion is for the final stages of a project. At Bain, "Zero Defect" (or "ZD") means that you've made zero mistakes. Mistakes can be as simple as adding the wrong quantities in an excel model or typing the wrong font for a single page in an 80-paged slide deck.
A few tips for being ZD:
1) Make time for ZD. If you scope a project, add a few hours/days to the timeline for ZD.
2) If you are reviewing a model, test your assumptions. Plug in extreme cases and check whether your results are as expected. Figure out new ways to calculate the same output. Graph your data to see if outliers appear. Don't just rewrite your model. The 80/20 way to ZD is to start with the most generalizable checks and then dig deeper if errors appear.
3) If you are reviewing a slide deck, present it on a large screen where it is easier to identify formatting errors. Write up a list of errors you can search for: font, color, alignment, footnotes, spelling, facts, outline, etc. Start with a game plan and be explicit in what you are checking.
When I was working in consulting, 80% of my performance review boiled down to how much people liked me. Bain hires bright and motivated individuals. You can be taught anything you need to learn on the job. Bain won't want to teach you, however, if you are difficult to work with.
This isn't a suggestion to be superficial, it is a suggestion to be empathetic. Think about consulting for a moment. Your team is working awfully long hours (for Bain, it was ~60 hours a week). You might as well make sure your team is having a good experience during this time. After all, your team is stuck with you.
Here are a few things you can do:
A) Make your boss look good to their bosses. If you can do this right, there's almost nothing you can do wrong.
Bain-specific recommendations:
B) When you are new to Bain, it is the expectation that you are the team fun captain. In the additional hours the rest of your team works, your job is to plan case team events. Oftentimes, these are dinners, but I know folks who have planned birthday celebrations, escape rooms, group cooking classes, and more. Importantly, partners attend case team events (it's rare for them to attend normal team meetings). These activities are your only contribution which partners experience directly -- everything else you do will be revised by a supervisor or manager. This is a great chance to impress partners.
C) Take Professional Development chats seriously. As mentioned in section [2], PD chats are a way to keep in touch with mentors across the firm. Find people who will advocate for you. This is important for staffing, promotions and generally feeling appreciated. Pro tip on PD chats: when you discuss your own performance (or how others can improve), use tangible examples. Don't say "I feel". Instead, reference a specific project/action.
A) Ethos
Why does Bain spend so many hours formatting slides? Well, if the slides have errors, it is only natural to suspect errors in the model. In client services, delivery matters at least as much as content. Trust is at a premium. How you present yourself is incredibly important.
Consulting is a luxury service. No one wraps an expensive good in cheap packaging.
B) Pathos
People hire consulting firms for change and change is very scary. As consultants, we don't deal with the consequences of those changes. We make suggestions and then move on. It is important to emphasize with your clients even in times when they are difficult to work with. You are there to comfort your clients and to make them look good in front of their bosses/shareholders. Analysis is one small portion of the job. Sometimes you need to be the bearer of bad news and to do so in a way that won't hurt your client's feelings.
Consulting doesn't recruit for specialized knowledge. Partners fill the role of industry expert, but they are a minority on the team (teams often have a single manager, multiple consultants, and a partner who is split between multiple cases). If you can learn more than your team, even by the slightest margin, you will become immensely valuable.
I know an AC1 (Associate Consultant in his first year) who, in his case, learned 40+ stages of a highly scientific chemical manufacturing process. The manager asked for this AC1's advice more often than any of the senior consultants on the team.
Here are some tips for note-taking:
A) Don't delete notes
If you are considering deleting content, duplicate your work and create an updated version. Notes can come in many forms: OneNote entries, draft emails, slides, and models. In slide decks, create an ending section called a "Graveyard" -- that's where old slides go to die. You never know when you will need to revert to old versions. Again, yield loss is the worst!
B) Develop a filing system early on
I usually label documents as YY-MM-DD "name of activity" v-"version number"
At Bain, every few months you are staffed to a new case. While most careers don't hold this extreme cadence, the broad recommendations here can be applied to any job hunt.
Staffing is difficult. While Bain allows you to rank the available cases, there are many dimensions to evaluate: people (manager, partners), time horizon, industry, service provided (M&A, strategy, operations, etc.), team size, travel, client (pro tip: returning clients often have better hours). While these decisions are ultimately up to the individual, I would recommend selecting for people above all else. Note: the most miserable consultants I see are the ones who chose their case because they wanted to work for a famous client brand. Don't be those people!
Look for an all-star manager. A good manager will protect you from unreasonable client and partner demands. They will advocate for your sustainability needs. They will mentor and inspire you. They will teach you how to be a great leader. It's like how a good professor can make the most niche subject areas worth learning or how a good coach can instill a positive team culture.
Managing is a tough job. There are many exceptional people who become managers but few exceptional managers. This is because the role is nearly impossible to do well (see section [1] on the difficulties managers deal with). When provided with a list of cases, reach out to folks who have worked with your prospective manager. Ask about their strengths and weaknesses.
Most importantly, ask questions that have a numerical response. If you ask, "How sustainable was it working with this person?" the response may be vague. People don't want to be heard complaining. Instead, if you ask, "On average, what time did you finish work each night when you were on this manager's team?" you get a constructive response.
Due diligence is incredibly important. Bain classifies customers as either Net Promoters, Net Neutral, or Net Detractors. Net Promoters are customers who actively introduce others to the product. They are the 5-star reviews on Amazon. Net Detractors are the 1-star reviews while Net Neutral folks often won't care enough to review the product at all. Bain listens to each one of these groups before developing a thesis on the customer experience. If you are on the job hunt, don't merely reach out to the people who love their employer -- the kinds of people who volunteer in recruiting, etc. Reach out to the people who left. Net Detractors offer invaluable insights.
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This article sums much of what I learned at Bain. Please share this article if you learned something new.
I've come to believe that work is less about what I'm doing and more about who I'm with. I learned these lessons and many more (MECE deserves its own article) from my intelligent, generous and inspiring work colleagues. Hopefully these lessons can help you in whichever career you find yourself in. In the end, the best way to learn these lessons is through experience.