Soft skills are very important when evaluating likability or fit for a certain job. Unlike hard skills, which are about relevant skill set or particular abilities to carry out certain type of tasks, soft skills relate to one’s ability to interact effectively with people.

In consulting, it is extremely important to develop the following soft skills:

Charismatic and Sociable

Consultants need to interact with different types of people on a regular basis. That’s why being charming and likable will definitely do wonders for your career as a consultant. How people perceive you will have a direct effect on your consulting career. Apparently, if your clients perceive you as personable it will be easier for them to trust you. Also, if your team members find you approachable, it will be much easier to collaborate and achieve your goals. However, being highly sociable must not be confused with cockiness.

Strong Work Ethic

This skill is a major requirement perhaps for any kind of job. In consulting, it is imperative that you display this characteristic every single time. As you will be working with big, reputable companies as well as influential and intelligent people, it is only fit that you show professionalism. Also, strong work ethic means being willing to go the extra mile to help a client achieve its goals. Good consultants are ready to go beyond the call of duty just to get the job done.

Positive Attitude

Having a positive attitude towards work, and perhaps towards everything, would be beneficial to your career as a consultant. Go-getters are very much attractive to top firms. As a consultant you should be able to help improve employee morale or motivate team members. And you can only achieve this if you display a positive attitude. Even if you are not naturally bubbly and tend to be more low-key, there are many ways to exhibit positive energy, like always smiling or perhaps simply saying a few encouraging lines or giving compliments.

Oral and Written Communication Skills

The ability to communicate your ideas clearly is perhaps one of the most important skills you need as a consultant. You see, the main product that you are selling is your ideas or insights. And in order for your client to buy this idea from you, you need to let them know exactly what it is. You need to be able to express your thoughts in the simplest and clearest manner. Most tension and stressed are due to inability to communicate clearly. So it is extremely helpful if you have a way with words. That’s why excellent communicators generally do well in consulting.

Ability to Listen

Good consultants are good listeners. Why? Because listening takes more than hearing what the other person is saying, it requires understanding. You won’t be able to help any organization deal with their problem if you don’t fully understand what their needs and goals are. Many people tend to listen passively. If you want to succeed in consulting, effectively listening skill is a must have. This means being able to know what and when to ask questions and when to be quiet and simply listen to every word. Good communication is not just about expressing yourself, it is also about engaging and understanding the other party.

Leadership

Consultants are expected to have strong leadership skills. They are generally achievers and socially involved. While many say that some are born leaders, this skill can be developed. As a consultant you will manage different types of people so you need to possess the ability to lead and manage effectively. Remember, the mark of a true leader is not about the position held, it’s about taking responsibility and influencing your team towards achieving a common goal. Lead by example – motivate and show initiative.

Teamwork / Team Building

Consulting is not a job for someone who doesn’t want to collaborate with people on a daily basis. Yes, you need to have strong leadership skills to be a good consultant, but you also need to have a teamwork mindset. It’s not just about you making the big decisions. You must learn to acknowledge other people’s expertise and make time to help those people who are working with you on your project.

Conflict Resolution

As client and team interaction would be an integral part of your life as a consultant, it is important that you know how to resolve conflicts within the team and even more prevent them from happening. In fact, it is a vital trait for any leadership role. This skill is key to the longevity of any relationship. Conflicts generally arise from differing needs, ideas, values or opinions. When handled in a respectful manner, conflict may provide an opportunity to strengthen the bond between parties. Be patient and recognize the ways to come to a compromise.

Time Management

Many people tend to struggle in terms of managing their time, tasks and responsibilities effectively. As a consultant, you may need to juggle around multiple clients at certain times. With that, it is really important that you have efficient time management skill. Learn how to set priorities and stick to your schedule.

Self-confidence

As a consultant, you would be making big decisions and you should not be afraid to make them. You must then have confidence in your knowledge and skills. If you don’t seem look pretty confident, you won’t earn the trust of your clients, colleagues and team members. Speak, dress and act with confidence.

Work under Pressure

Every work has a deadline to meet. And you need to be pretty good at working under pressure in order to hit challenging deadlines in consulting. You must learn the art of achieving maximum results in a short amount of time. In order to do this you need to stay focused.

Persuading, Influencing and Negotiating Skills

Consultants also need to master the art of persuasion. It will be part of your daily consulting life to influence and negotiate with other people, particularly with your clients and team members. This is actually a primary skill for anyone in the business field. Influencing people in a positive way will greatly help an organization achieve its goals. However, this must not involve coercion in any form. Rather, it’s about acknowledging other opinions but being able to change their minds.

Adaptability

To succeed in the consulting world, you need to have a passion for constant learning. You should also have the ability to stretch your skills in order to adapt to the ever changing needs of your clients.

Source: ConsultingFact.com

Measurement and Management in the Information Age

In the information age, company’s success depends largely on its ability to invest and manage intellectual assets. Functional specialization must be integrated into customer-based business processes. Mass production and service delivery of standard products and services must be replaced by flexible, responsive, and high-quality delivery of innovative products and services that can be individualized to targeted customer segments. Innovation and improvement of products, services, and processes will be generated by skillful employees, superior information technology, and aligned organization procedures.

As organizations invest in acquiring these new capabilities, their success (or failure) cannot be motivated or measured in the short run by the traditional financial accounting model. This financial model, developed for trading companies and industrial age corporations, measures events of the past, not the investments in the capabilities that provide values for the future.

The Balances Scorecard is a new framework for integrating measures derived from strategy. While retaining financial measures of the past performance, the Balanced Scorecard introduces the drivers of future financial performance. The drivers, encompassing customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth perspectives, are derived from an explicit and rigorous translation of the organization’s strategy into tangible objectives and measures.

The Balances Scorecard, however, is more than a new measurement system. Innovative companies use the scorecard as the central, organizing framework for their management processes. The real power of the Balanced Scorecard, however, occurs when it is transformed from a measurement system to a management system. Companies see how it can be used to:

• clarify and gain consensus about strategy
• communicate strategy throughout the organization
• align departmental and personal goals to the strategy
• link the strategic objectives to long-term targets and annual budgets
• identify and align strategic initiatives
• perform periodic and systematic strategic reviews, and
• obtain feedback to learn about and improve strategy

Management processes built around the scorecard enable the organization to become aligned and focused on implementing the long term strategy. Used in this way, the Balanced Scorecard becomes the foundation for managing information age organizations.

Originated by Dr. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton, the innovation of the balanced scorecard is described as follow: “The balanced scorecard retains traditional financial measures. But financial measures tell the story of past events, an adequate story for industrial age companies for which investments in long-term capabilities and customer relationships were not critical for success. These financial measures are inadequate, however, for guiding and evaluating the journey that information age companies must make to create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation.”

Perspectives

The balanced scorecard suggests that we view the organization from four perspectives, and to develop metrics, collect data and analyze it relative to each of these perspectives:

The Learning & Growth Perspective
This perspective includes employee training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and corporate self-improvement. In a knowledge-worker organization, people – the only repository of knowledge – are the main resource. In the current climate of rapid technological change, it is becoming necessary for knowledge workers to be in a continuous learning mode. Metrics can be put into place to guide managers in focusing training funds where they can help the most. In any case, learning and growth constitute the essential foundation for success of any knowledge-worker organization.

Kaplan and Norton emphasize that ‘learning’ is more than ‘training’; it also includes things like mentors and tutors within the organization, as well as that ease of communication among workers that allows them to readily get help on a problem when it is needed. It also includes technological tools; what the Baldrige criteria call “high performance work systems.”

The Business Process Perspective
This perspective refers to internal business processes. Metrics based on this perspective allow the managers to know how well their business is running, and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements (the mission). These metrics have to be carefully designed by those who know these processes most intimately; with our unique missions these are not something that can be developed by outside consultants.

The Customer Perspective
Recent management philosophy has shown an increasing realization of the importance of customer focus and customer satisfaction in any business. These are leading indicators: if customers are not satisfied, they will eventually find other suppliers that will meet their needs. Poor performance from this perspective is thus a leading indicator of future decline, even though the current financial picture may look good.

In developing metrics for satisfaction, customers should be analyzed in terms of kinds of customers and the kinds of processes for which we are providing a product or service to those customer groups.

The Financial Perspective
Kaplan and Norton do not disregard the traditional need for financial data. Timely and accurate funding data will always be a priority, and managers will do whatever necessary to provide it. In fact, often there is more than enough handling and processing of financial data. With the implementation of a corporate database, it is hoped that more of the processing can be centralized and automated. But the point is that the current emphasis on financials leads to the “unbalanced” situation with regard to other perspectives. There is perhaps a need to include additional financial-related data, such as risk assessment and cost-benefit data, in this category.

Strategy Mapping

Strategy maps are communication tools used to tell a story of how value is created for the organization. They show a logical, step-by-step connection between strategic objectives (shown as ovals on the map) in the form of a cause-and-effect chain. Generally speaking, improving performance in the objectives found in the Learning & Growth perspective (the bottom row) enables the organization to improve its Internal Process perspective Objectives (the next row up), which in turn enables the organization to create desirable results in the Customer and Financial perspectives (the top two rows).

References:

1. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action by Robert S. Kaplan, David O. Norton.
2. https://balancedscorecard.org

See What’s Next in this series:

• Why Does Business Need a Balanced Scorecard?
• Financial Perspective
• Customer Perspective
• Internal Business Process Perspective
• Learning and Growth Perspective
• Strategy Map In the Balanced Scorecard
• Implementing a Balanced Scorecard Management Program

In the previous article, we knew the way McKinsey thinks about business problems and uses fact-based, structured analysis and hypothesis-driven to arrive at solution for the Firm’s clients. In this part, you will see how the Firm implements its problem-solving model on a day-to-day basis. The content is divided into the following parts:

• Selling a Study
• Assembling a Team
• Managing Hierarchy
• Doing Research
• Brainstorming

4. Selling a Study

About The Selling Process At McKinsey

The selling process at McKinsey differs from that of most organizations, because the Firm doesn’t sell. So, how to sell without selling?

Business problems are like mice. They go unnoticed until they start nibbling your cheese. Just building a better mouse trap will not make the world beat a path to your door. People who don’t have mice won’t be interested – until the mice show up; then they need to know you have the mouse trap. Sometimes the right way to sell your product or service is not to barge into your customer’s home with a bunch of free sample. Just be there, at the right time, and make sure the right people know who you are.

It may sound strange how could a company grow to the size of McKinsey without selling? But it is true. This curious aspect of McKinsey’s culture stems from the roots of the Firm’s founders. Times may have changed, but the no-selling legacy persists at McKinsey because it works very well in the consulting business. No senior McKinsey director make cold calls at the offices of Bill Gates and Ted Turner asking if they have problems they want solved. The Firm does not run ads in Forbes or Barron’s advertising 50 percent off telecommunications consulting. Actually, the Firm waits for the phone to ring.

It rings, not because McKinsey sells, but because McKinsey markets. It does this in several different ways. The Firms produces a steady stream of books and articles, some of them extremely influential. McKinsey also publishes its own scholarly journal, The McKinsey Quarterly, which it sends gratis to its clients, as well as to its former consultants, many of whom now occupy senior positions at potential clients. McKinsey maintains a vast network of informal contacts with potential clients as well. The Firm encourages its partners to participate in “extracurricular activities” such as siting on the boards of charities, museums, and cultural organizations. McKinsey consultants also address industry conferences. Occasional meetings with former clients allow partners not only to check up on the effects of past McKinsey projects, but to make sure the that the Firm maintains some “share of mind” should new problems arise at the client. The efforts could not be construed as selling, but they make sure that the right people know the Firm is there. That keeps the phones ringing.

Be Careful What You Promise: Structuring An Engagement

When structuring your project, whether you are selling your services as a consultant or have been picked by your organization to solve an internal problem, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Set definite milestones that you can meet. That way, you’ll have targets you can achieve and your clients will be satisfied.

When structuring an engagement, McKinsey faces a lot of pressure to deliver the maximum results in the minimum time. McKinsey bills by the hour, and those hours do not come cheap. A typical project contains a team of four to six consultants work together to produce tangible results in three to six months.

At an organization, McKinsey is extremely good at figuring out how much a team can do over the length of a typical study. The best EDs can balance the competing demands of clients and team to a nicety; they tell the client,” We’re going to do X and Y. We could do Z, but  it would kill the team,” while telling the team, “Look, we’re already promised the client that we would do Z, so we’ve got to deliver.” They then work the team to its limit while simultaneously making the client feel that he is getting value for money and exceeding his expectations.

What lessons does McKinsey experiece give for the way you should structure your problem-solving project? If you are a consultant putting together a proposal for an outside client, then the answer is simple” Don’t bite off more than you (or your team) can chew and know what your end products is going to be. Structuring your project properly at the beginning may not guarantee your success, but it at least gets you off to the right start.

5. Assembling A Team

At McKinsey, everything happens in teams. McKinsey relies on teams because they are the best way to solve the problems that the Firm’s clients face. More people mean more hands to gather and analyze data and, more important, more minds to figure out what the data really mean.

Getting The Mix Right

You can’t just throw four random people at a problem and expect them to solve it. Think about what sorts of skills and personalities will work best for your project. Then choose your teammates carefully.

McKinsey-ites subscribe to one of the two theories of team selection. The first theory states that intellectual horsepower is everything, then find the smartest people for your team regardless of their experience or personal hygience. The second theory says that what really matters is specific experience and skills; intelligence is a given within the Firm, every McKinsey consultant is smart or he wouldn’t be there. Neither of these theories is completely correct, but neither of them is completely wrong either. Proper team selection varies from problem to problem and client to client. Some problems will yield only to large amounts of analytical firepower.

Another important team selection lesson emerges from the McKinsey assignment process. When an engagement begins, the EM and ED pick their associates from the pool of available resources at the time. The “manager of associate development” or the office manager will tell them who is available and give them a sheet listing each associate’s experience and rating each one on analytical ability, client management skills, and so forth. The biggest mistake in team selection comes from taking those ratings at face value. A smart EM always talks to potential team members before taking them on.

By extension, if you are in a position to pick your team members before embarking on a project, never just accept people who are supposed to be good. Meet them face to face. Talk to them; see what’s behind the recommendations…Just remember, if you are lucky enough to be able to choose whom you will work with, choose wisely.

Take Your Team’s Temperature To Maintain Morale

Maintaining your team’s morale is an on-going responsibility. If you don’t do it, your team will not perform well. Make sure you know how your team feels.

What’s the secret to maintaining team morale? There isn’t one, just a few simple rules to remember.

• Take your team’s temperature. Talk to your teammates. Make sure they are happy with what they are doing. Find out if they have questions about what they are doing or why they are doing it, and answer them. If they are unhappy, take remedial action quickly.
• Steer a steady course. Know where you’re going and stay your course. If you need an extra day to figure it out, take it. If you need to make a big change, let your team know, explain why, and let people contribute to, or at least see your thought process.
• Let your teammates know why they are doing what they’re doing. People want to feel that what they are doing is adding value to the client. There are few things more demoralizing than doing something that you and your team leader know is valueless.
• Treat your teammates with respect. Respect doesn’t mean politeness. It means remembering that your teammates may have different priorities than you do, and that they have lives outside of work. Respect also means never asking someone to do something you wouldn’t do or haven’t done yourself…

6. Managing Hierarchy

Every organization has it own approach to hierarchy. Your own may look nothing at all like the Firm’s. Still, every McKinsey-ite has learned a few lessons about dealing with hierarchy that should work in any organization. They can help you stay out of trouble and get ahead.

Make Your Boss Look Good

If you make your boss look good, your boss will make you look good. That’s the quid pro quo of hierarchy. Making your boss look good means two things. Firstly, it means doing your job to the best of your ability. Clearly, if you produce high-quality work, it will make your boss’s job easier.  Second, make sure your boss knows everything you know when he/she needs to know it. Make sure your boss knows where are you, what are you doing, and what problems you may be having. At the same time, don’t overload with information. Think about what your boss needs or wants to know. Use well-structured email or voice mail to convey information.

An Aggressive Strategy For Managing Hierarchy

In a meritocratic organization at least, you can assert your equality until shown otherwise, until someone tell you ” No, you have to do what I tell you.” You’ll find it’s rare for that to happen. It sounds extreme, but in a way, to be a successful consultant, you have to assert your self. Very often, you will be in situation where you just have to assume that you can do something, or talk to someone, or get access to some bit of information, even though, you may not have the explicit authority to do so.

This is a risky strategy, and the more hierarchy an organization, the riskier it becomes. In a more rigid organization, be more sensitive of where the limits to others’ authority lie. And be ready to back down quickly; otherwise, someone will stomp on you.

7. Doing Research

The problem-solving process at the McKinsey begins with research. Before a team can construct an initial hypothesis, before it can divide a problem into its components and uncover the key drivers, it has to have information.At the start of a McKinsey-ite’s career, most of his time is spent gathering data, whether form one of the Firm’s libraries, from McKinsey’s databases, or from the internet. Gathering, filtering and analyzing data is the skill exercised most by new associates.
Here are some tips and tricks to help you to find the answer to your business problem.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

Maybe other people in your field, in another division or another company, have seen the same problem already. Find out who they are and get to know them. Do research and ask questions; you will save a lot of time and effort. Don’t waste your time to reinventing the wheel.

McKinsey keeps an electronic database called PDNet (Practice Development) containing reports from recent engagement and internal research. You may not have PDNet, but if you work in a large organization you probably have access to much of your company’s ” corporate memory”, databases, files, training manuals, ans coworkers. Even if you’re on your own, there is a huge stream of information out there for you to take advantage of – trade magazines, newspaper, data feeds, and the internet. How about your local library. You should find loads of information and valuable resources there with a few hours’ digging.

Get to know your competitors. Many businesspeople will share some information on the principle that “what goes around, comes around.” If you’re in, say, advertising, find the cafe in your city where other ad execs hang out. Tap into your industry’s “buzzz.”

Whatever you’re doing, chances are someone, somewhere has done something similar. Learn from others’ success and mistakes. Leverage your valuable time and don’t reinvent the wheel.

Specific Research Tips

Here is a grab bag of tips to make your research more efficient and effective.

• Start with the annual report.
• Look for outliers
• Look for best practice

8. Brainstorming

McKinsey offers a new mindset, an outsider’s view that is not locked into “the company way” of doing things. That’s what clients need when problems cannot be solved within the organization, and it starts in a meeting room with a table, some chairs, a bunch of pads, pen and pencils, some markers, and a clean “white board”.

Before the first brainstorming session, McKinsey consultant do their homework. Everyone on the team reads the results of the PDNet and library searches. The associates put together and distribute “fact packs” based on their preliminary research. The ED, the EM, and possibly the more senior associates on the team come up with initial hypotheses that the team will then test to destruction.

Proper Prior Preparation

Although brainstorming has an airy-fairy, college bull session connotation to some, in reality effective brainstorming requires some hard-nosed advance work.

In A White Room

The points of brainstorming is the generation of new ideas. When you get your team into the room, leave your preconceptions at the door. Bring the facts you know, but find the new ways of looking at them.

Here are a few more “rules of the road” for successful brainstorming.

• There is no bad ideas.
• There is no dumb questions.
• Know when to say when.
• Get it down on paper.

Some Brainstorming Exercises

The key to successful brainstorming is good preparation and proper frame of mind. Here are a few tricks that McKinsey-ites use to get the maximum benefit from brainstorming session.

• The Post-it exercise
• The flipchart exercise
• Bellyaches up front

Source: Ethan M. Rasiel (1999), The McKinsey Way, McGraw-Hill, The United States of America.

Foreword

Again, I am a person who has high passion on management consulting. On my own way to learn and experience, I have found and read a lot of books in this interesting area. One of those is The McKinsey Way by Ethan M. Rasiel. This book gives me a lot of practical and useful knowledge, and eventually, teaches me again how to think and solve a problem.

In the next series of articles, I am going to summarize the main points in the content of the book. This is just for personal use and definitely noncommercial. It has about three articles. The first is right after here named The McKinsey Way of Thinking About Business Problem.

McKinsey exists to solve business problems. The consultants who succeed at McKinsey love to solve problems. This article describes how McKinsey thinks about business problems. It shows what it means to be fact-based, structured, and hypothesis-driven. It will tell you the McKinsey way to approach a business problem, and offer you a few choice rules to live by when trying to solve them.The main content is divided into three parts:

• Building the Solution
• Developing an Approach
• 80/20 and Other Rules to Live By

1. Building the Solution

In McKinsey, the process of solving problems has three major attributes. The solution for their client’s problem wil be:

• Fact-based
• Rigidly structured
• Hypothesis-driven

Facts Are Friendly

Facts are the bricks with which you will lay a path to your solution and build pillars to support it. Don’t fear the facts.

Problem solving at the Firm begins with facts. On the first day of an engagement, all members of the team comb through stacks of articles and internal research documents to gather enough facts to illuminate their piece of the problem for the first team meeting. The team then have drawn up an initial hypothesis for the problem, and races to gather the facts necessary to support or refute it.

Facts are so important to the way McKinsey does business because of the following reasons. First, facts compensate for lack of gut instinct. And second, facts bridge the credibility gap. Despite the power of facts, many business people fear them. But, hiding from the facts is a prescription for failure, eventually, truth will out. You must not fear the facts. Hunt for them, use them, but don’t fear them.

Feel Free To Be MECE

To structure your thinking when solving business problems, you must be complete while avoiding confusion and overlap

MECE stands for “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” . MECE gets pounded into every new associate’s head from the moment of entering the Firm. Every document, every presentation, every e-mail and voice mail produced by a McKinsey-ite is supposed to be MECE. MECE starts at the top level of your solutions – the list of issues making up the problem you have to solve. When you think you have determined the issues, take a hard look at them and ask:

• Is each one a separate and distinct issues? If so, then your issue list is mutually exclusive.
• Does every aspect of the problem come under one ( and only one) of these issues – that is, have  you thought of everything? If so, then your issues are collectively exhaustive.

A good McKinsey issue list contains neither fewer than two nor more than five top-line issues (of course, three is the best).

Solve The Business Problem At The First Meeting: The Initial Hypothesis

Solving a complex problem is like embarking on a long journey. The initial hypothesis is your problem-solving map.

The third pillar of the McKinsey problem-solving process, the Initial Hypothesis (IH) can be seen into three parts:

• Defining the IH
• Generating the IH
• And, testing the IH

The essence if the initial hypothesis is ” Figure out the solution to the problem before you start”. It is like finding a way when you go to a place. Solving business problem, of course, is more complicated than finding a way to a place, but the IH works the same way. It is the road map to take you from problem to solution.

A hypothesis is merely a theory to be proved or disproved. It is not the answer. If your IH is correct, then, a few months down the road, it will be the first slide in your presentation. If it turns out to be wrong, then, by proving it wrong, you will have enough information to move toward the right answer. By that way, you have set up a road map that you can follow to an eventual proved solution.

2. Developing an Approach

Just knowing the essence of the McKinsey problem-solving process does not mean you can now go forth and conquer the business world by being fact-based, structured, and hypothesis-driven.  No two business problems are identical; you must figure out how to approach each problem in order to devise the best solution for it. Here is the way how McKinsey-ites approach a business problem and apply the Firm’s problem-solving process to maximum effect.

The Problem Is Not Always The Problem

Sometimes a business problem will land on your desk and you will be told to solve it. Fair enough. But before you go rushing off any particular direction, make sure you’re solving the right problem – it may not the one you were given.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

Most business problems resemble each other more than they differ. This means that with a small number of problem-solving techniques, you can answer a broad range of questions. These techniques may be somewhere in your organization, either written down or in the heads of your fellow employees. If not, use your experience to develop your own tool kit. For examples, McKinsey has developed a number of problem-solving methods and give them fancy name: Analysis of Value Added, Business Process Redesign, Product-Market Scan, etc…

…But Every Client if Unique (There Is No Cookie-Cutter Solutions)

That there are many similarities between business problems does not mean that similar problems have similar solutions. You have to validate your initial hypothesis with fact-based analysis. This will put you in a much better position to get your ideas accepted.

Don’t Make The Facts Fit Your Solution

Avoid the temptation to view your initial hypothesis as the answer and the problem-solving process as an exercise in proving the IH. Keep an open and flexible mind. Don’t let a strong IH become an excuse for mental inflexiblity.

Make Sure Your Solution Fits Your Client

The most brilliant solutions, backed up by libraries of data and promising billions in extra profits, is useless if your client or business can’t implement it. Know your client. Know the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities – what management can and cannot do. Tailor your solutions with these factors in mind.

Sometimes You Have To Let The Solution Come To You

The McKinsey rules of problem solving, like all rules, have their exceptions. You will not be able to form an IH everytime. Sometimes, the client will not know what the problem is, just that there is a problem. Other times, the scope of your project will be so large – or so vague – that starting with an IH will be worthless. Still, other times, you will be breaking new ground and nothing in your experience will point to a solution. Don’t panic! If you get your facts together and do your analyses, the solution will come to you.

Some Problems You Just Can’t Solve…Solve Them Anyway

Eventually, you will run into a brick wall that is tougher than your head. Don’t keep pounding; it has no effect on the wall and does your head no good.

3. 80/20 And Other Rules To Live By

Here are a number of rules that McKinsey consultants have found useful when trying to solve problems.

80/20

The 80/20 rule is one of the great truths of management consulting and, by extension, of business. It doesn’t always work, but if you keep your eyes peeled for examples of 80/20 in your business, you will come up with ways to improve it.

Don’t Boil The Ocean

Work smarter, not harder. There’s a lot of data out there relating to your problem, and a lot of analyses you could do. Ignore most of them. McKinsey gathers enough facts to prove or disprove a hypothesis or support or refute an analysis –  and only enough. Anything more is a waste of time and effort when both are precious commodities.

Find The Key Drivers

Many factors affect your business. Focus on the most important ones – the key drivers. It saves you time. It saves you effort. It keeps you from boil the ocean.

The Elevator Test

Know your solution so thoroughly that you can explain it clearly and precisely to your client (or customer or investor) in 30 seconds. If you can do that, then you understand what you’re doing well enough to sell your solution.

Pluck The Low-Hanging Fruit

Sometimes in the middle of the problem-solving process, opportunities arise to get an easy win, to make immediate improvements, even before the overall problem has been solved. Seize the opportunities! They create little victories for you and your team. They boost morale and give you added credibility by showing anybody who may be watching that you’re on the ball and mean business.

Make A Chart Every Day

During the problem-solving process, you learn something new every day. Put it down on paper. It will help you push your thinking. You may use it, or you may not use, but once you have written it on the page, you won’t forget it.

Hit Singles

You can’t do everything, so don’t try, Just do what you’re supposed to do and get it right. It’s much better to get to first base consistently than to try to hit a home run – and strike out 9 times out of 10.

Look At The Big Picture

Every now and then, take a mental step back from whatever you’re doing. Ask yourself some basic questions: How does what you’re doing solve the problem? How does it advance your thinking? Is it the most important thing you could be doing right now? If it’s not helping, why are you doing it?

Just Say, ” I Don’t Know”

The Firm pounds the concept of professional integrity into its associates from their first day on the job, and rightly so. One important aspect of professional integrity is honesty – with your client, your team members, and yourself. Honesty includes recognizing when you haven’t got a clue. Admitting that is a lot less costly than bluffing

Don’t Accept ” I Have No Idea”

People always have an idea if you probe just a bit. Ask a few pointed questions – you’ll be amazed at what they know. Combine that with some educated guessing, and you can be well along the road to the solution.

Source: Ethan M. Rasiel (1999), The McKinsey Way, McGraw-Hill, The United States of America.