“Dude, you know what is going on in consulting right now?”

The three of us were sitting in an Irish pub in New Jersey. We worked together more than twenty-five years ago at Gemini** Consulting, the predecessor to Cap Gemini. We remain friends, getting together once or twice a year for dinner. One went into private equity; one is in the wine business. I stayed in consulting, but retired in 2018.

“Your field, Dude. The people stuff, it’s the differentiator now.”

My private equity friend shares an office with a small consulting firm.

“No really, with AI doing all the analysis and slide production, it’s all about who can align teams and talk to senior management.”

“It always was, man.”

“I can see that now, but no one ever told me that.”

And so we embarked on a conversation of the stuff “no on ever told us” about consulting.

Remember that we are all old. Of course, that’s relative. They’re late fifties and early sixties; I’m seventy-eight. But we all went into consulting before the emergence of the Internet. Today there is a lot of information about the consulting industry available online. Then you would have had to spend time in libraries and talking to people. Who did that?

“You know what I didn’t get? The guys who got staffed regularly, the ones most likely to be promoted, all had a mentor, a partner or a project manager, who asked for them repeatedly.”

“I know. I don’t know when I realized when I showed up on Bob’s Analysis and Design all the same people were already there and they’d worked together probably twenty times in the last two years.” (A&D was a short project that analyzed the problem and designed an implementation project.)

“I always wondered how that happened.”

“I saw it in action. Remember Sheryl?”

“Oh yeah, the process map queen.”

“I was on her first project. She busted hump – over delivered. Then she started catching Charles at off moments, asking questions. You’d see the two of them at breakfast. There was nothing going on between them, but she was making sure she learned from Charles. Suddenly she was on a lot of his projects, over and over again.”

“I saw the same thing with Amit and Bob. Interest and learning led to staffing.”

“We were always told ‘don’t do your own staffing.’”

“Was that BS then?”

“No, not really. What the staffing office was trying to avoid was consultants going around them, refusing work because they were looking for the next big thing. That had nothing to do with project manager or partner preference.”

“You know what took me a really long time to get – the story.”

“Storyboarding, man. The good ones started the deck before they had any data. Nothing but headlines in PowerPoint, and those were hypotheses. It drove data collection. The fun projects were those where the story surprised you.”

“Culler, Dude. That’s what I mean. The people stuff. I see kids in the office, whizzes in AI assisted data collection and analysis, I mean far better than I ever was with pivot tables on Excel, and one of them just reports out, and one can explain the data in a story. You know who is going to see the client.”

“You know what else I had no clue about?”

“Where should I begin?”

“Ha. I have a favorite finger for you. No, really. Sales, selling. I thought the BDE sold the project. Then I thought it was the A&D lead. Everybody sells. It is what sets you apart.”

“Yeah, but the Gemini model Business Development Executive to A&D to Results Delivery isn’t everywhere. In a standard firm there are Rainmakers like BDEs and Thought Leaders. Different kinds of selling, one calls on clients directly the other attracts by research and publishing.”

“Gemini had that – Francis.” (Referring to Francis Gouillart who wrote the book Transforming the Organization.)

“That Dude was so far ahead of his time.”

We talked about how if we were going into consulting today, we’d start with one of two plans:

1. Becoming a Rainmaker: Start building client relationships at the level you were working, and one level above and below. Track your connections over time. Read everything about your vertical (industry) you can get your hands on.
2. Becoming a Thought Leader: Start building relationships with business school faculty, move on to other researchers inside of universities. Read everything.

“Remember David? The Dude had virtually every project Gemini ever did on his hard drive. You were kind of like that too, Culler, but David, he had you beat.”

“Yeah, people wanted him on their projects for his hard drive.”

“Well they used to have libraries and librarians in consulting firms when I started.”

“Whoa Dude, ancient history.”

“You know, that may be the most important thing that no one ever told me.”

“What, libraries?”

“No, learning. You know, what we loved about the work was the fast pace and the learning curve?”

“Yeah, and the team culture. You could show up anywhere in the world with people you’d never met and within a day feel like you’d worked with them your whole life.” (This observation comes up every time Gemini ** alumni get together.)

“Yeah, that was part of it. We were learning so much, so fast, on client site.”

“Drinking from the firehose.”

“Yeah, and learning at Gemini University.  It made you want to keep up. I was reading HBR and all the business magazines and the WSJ every day, but I knew people that were reading a lot more than me, scientific journals, university publications. And they often had big networks of previous clients or at the universities.”

“Those were the people who either rose as BDEs or thought leaders like Francis or left into big jobs.”

“Yeah, but no one ever told me that learning, beyond drinking from the firehose on a project, was a key to success.”

“Speaking of drinking, does anyone want another beer?”

“Nah, I’m driving.”

“Me neither.”

“Dude, we are so old.”

“Let’s not wait a year to do this again.”

“Right.”

Squinting through the glare of the headlights on the drive home, I mentally summarized “stuff they never told us about consulting:”

• Get a mentor
• Manage your own staffing.
• Things that never go out of style:
  • Aligning teams
  • Distilling a story from data
  • Communicating simply with senior management
• Everybody sells
• Pick your partner path early-Rainmaker or Thought Leader
• Learning, growing your capability, is the secret to success in consulting, no matter how much the field changes.