What BCG Taught Me!

and what it did not.

I spent some of my most formative years at BCG (Boston Consulting Group) across a couple of their offices in Asia and Europe. This was quite early on in my career and it definitely helped me become a better professional than I was before. Here are the top things my time at BCG taught me and what it did not.

Focus on few but impactful things

I recently came across feedback from one of my first projects at BCG (never knew I had saved it).

The partner on that project asked me one question - what are the 1 or 2 big things that you are driving?

When he asked me this question, I realised I was doing a lot of operational activities that were scattered but I was missing looking out for what 1 or 2 things will really move the needle. A lot of people call it 80-20, the pareto principle (which states that roughly 80% of outcomes (results) come from 20% of causes (inputs))

This is also what strategy is all about. Making tough choices and then executing on them with all intent.

I was grateful that I got this feedback very early on in my BCG career. It really changed my outlook on everything I have done ever since. I think this is also one of the reasons I got drawn towards strategy.

Make others shine, you will shine as a result

A lot of times (actually most of the time) the organization (or clients) in this case have the best ideas on how to solve the challenges that are plaguing it. It is just that some of those people are often not in influential enough positions to be heard or that they have tried it in the past but repeated rejections have made them cynical of what is possible.

One thing I learned very early on was how to find these people. It meant a lot of observation. Observing in meetings not necessarily who was talking the loudest but who had the sharpest insights or challenged the status quo.

Invariably I would strike a friendship with such individuals, to try and understand how they think, understand their world view, and share my perspectives. But then for me one thing that I learned to do very well was make sure the management understands how valuable these individuals are.

I would bring their ideas forward but via them. I would help put them on the stage, give them the confidence to present and make them shine. All success would be theirs, any failures I had to manage.

It did two things - 1) we always have more success than failures as organizations are better at owning ideas which it feels come from them 2) The ideas had a higher chance of sticking through even after we left as a consulting team, because of these champions.

For me, this still remains a core principle of how I work: find smart people, be friends with them, give them confidence and make them shine - repeat!

Celebrate milestones - big or small

The consulting world is a circle of CTMs (Case team meeting - internal with partners) and SCM (Steering committee meetings - external with clients). And this circle just keeps o loop.

What we did really well at BCG was Celebrate.

Work was always quite intense, long hours, short deadlines, high quality bar! But once the CTM or SCM was done, it was party time.

We would usually go out for a nice dinner (sometimes it was just a small team) and celebrate the small (or big milestone). A round of compliments would flow around the team and after a night out, everyone would be ready to go again the day after.

Not all CTMs or SCMs were let us say successful. Sometimes the idea did not land with a partner or client, but most of the time the team would still go out for a nice dinner. It was the effort that was being celebrated.

When you work in such intense conditions, you will always have failures but it is important to celebrate the effort that goes in and BCG has built a really good culture to celebrate this.

We also had case team outings (once every 6 months - a short stay at a nice location), country offsites (annual retreat) and connect days.

This has made me realize the importance of celebrating small wins. One can never go too wrong in doing this. It is continuous improvement for motivation.

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Well while my stint at BCG taught me a lot of things, just like every other place, there are some things that I only learnt as I moved to the corporate side of industry much later. Here are a couple of them.

Governance needs to stick around post you leave

A lot of focus on the projects we ran was on having a governance which would help us execute. That is to have a meeting structure where progress, support and escalations can be discussed.

While this usually worked very well when we were there, I do not think we were particularly very successful at making it stick once we left.

We would usually create a governance for post us leaving but I always felt that was kind of a rushed job. Only when I was on the other side of things, did I realize how much work it takes for such a governance structure to stick.

My learning was, you need a significant time in consulting assignment to observe as you transition to ensure that the governance mechanism sticks and is effective. This time should be built in much more concretely in project costing.

Organizational inertia comes back, sometimes very strongly

We often worked for large organizations and a lot of our effort was geared towards breaking the organizational inertia by introducing new ways of working or new ideas. While we were quite successful in doing so, when we were present, I do not know if we put in place strong enough mechanisms to stop this inertia from coming back.

The challenge with organizational inertia is not just breaking it once but to keep on doing that continually.

While the above mentioned meeting or governance structure is one way, a constant stream of continuous improvement or idea generation is another very important element of keeping it going.

We see, every day around us people getting settled in a process driven way of life and be content with letting things just be.

I wish we had spent more time in creating mechanisms, where this idea generation or continuous improvement could be ingrained much more deeply in teams (we did do some of it, but not enough I think)

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Well this is a snapshot of my learning from my time at BCG. I have many more learnings but I wanted to share some of them which are very close to my heart and which I use every day as I go about my work. I still recall my time at the organization very fondly (we do tend to romanticize the past much more by the way :)).

I would strongly recommend anyone to get a stint in this organization if possible, as the learnings are immense (obviously you can smell my bias here from a solar system away!)

Hope you had fun reading this. See you all next week then!