In consultanese, that phrase describes those of us stuck in the office and not actively assigned on any project.  I wish I were literally on a beach, perhaps one in Bali, or Phuket.  But I'm not complaining either, since I find myself typing this entry from our quiet lofty office here in NOHO.  And the weather in NY today is at an odd high of 68 degrees.

So you must wonder what I do all day to stay busy, or do I simply clock in and out at respectable hours?  Just to run off the list of things I've been working on the last 3 days, I would say helping a partner on a project proposal, wrapping up the documentation from the last project and sending it off to the client, and filling out annual review forms.  Sounds rather snoozy, and it kind of is.  I come in around 9 and leave around 7, which is way more time than necessary.  It's weird to just leave at 3pm when the normal staff and various partners are still in the office.  So while it's not intense work, it does leave me feeling a bit restless.  In the meanwhile, I'm catching up on some administrative stuff that I've been meaning to get to, such as making appointments, looking into annual charity donations, checking up online message boards - stuff one would normally do in the office.

I still haven't been staffed on a project yet, although early indications suggest something interesting looms.  I won't set myself up for disappointment by announcing it here.  Tomorrow will be a busy day of interviews, and then at night I'll be off to Europe for a week of training, with the obligatory pit stops to catch up with some INSEADers whom I dearly miss.

Back from Ukraine.  Other than some poor logistics planning, the trip went well.  The weather turned out much warmer than expected, around 40 degrees, 7-10 degrees Celsius, not much colder than NY.  However, fog loomed over the city during the whole time.  So without having adjusted to time, when walking around outside, my sense of time was limited to a binary day or night.  It could've been 4pm and I would've thought it time to have breakfast.


I took Sunday to do a walking tour by myself, and in the process, almost got conned twice, a la Nine Queens.  Walking around with a Lonely Planet book will paint that huge red target on your back.  While walking alongside the park, I was reading my guidebook and there were several passersby.  All of a sudden, one man stoops down, and picks up a ziplock bag full of greenbacks.  He stared at me with a shocked look, pointed up front to a group of people who walked by, and gestured at me the finger over the lip shush and says, "we'll share 50-50."  Then he slides behind the bus station right next to us and beckons me.  All of this happens in a split second; and seeing that amount of cash, a sudden wave of greed sweeps over.  He then opens the bag and counts his newly found fortune - a thick drug-dealer roll of benjies, a stack of 100-Euro bills, and a bunch of Grivnas in large currency.  Before I could even say, "why would anyone carry that amount of cash?" con-man #2 arrives, appearing convincingly flustered and worried.  He speaks to the first guy in Russian, and then to me in English, "I lost my money!  Oh no!  Did you see it?"  Con-man #1 says no and explains that we saw nothing.  #2, naturally skeptical, asks him to prove it, "show me what you have, I know my money if I see it."  The ever smooth #1 takes out his wallet, opens it up, and flips through it, revealing two 100-dollar bills along with 500 Grivnas (about 100 USD).  My gut reaction was this is all wrong, in a span of a minute, I'm seeing more cash in this country than I have the whole time here.  Then the person who supposedly lost money demands me to show him my money.  Feeling guilty for not being upfront, I grudgingly comply halfway.  Having only 60 dollars and some small Ukrainian bills, all in my money clip, I slowly flip through my bills while holding on tightly to everything.  He didn't seem convinced, so he asked both of us to show him what other money we had.  At this point, 2 minutes into the entire interaction, my nose recognized with certainly the stench of scam, so I just walked away.  When I looked back a moment later, neither of them were in sight.

I kept thinking about the incident.  The setup was pretty smart.  Quickly generate the emotions of greed and guilt, and somehow profit amid the chaos.  I also reflected, did I really intend to take money that didn't belong to me?  While my first reaction was, "hot damn that's a lotta monay!", I'm certain that I would have refused it, and perhaps even tried to look for the very, um, honest local police to report the incident.  But I am left with a curiosity as to how the scam would've concluded.  Would they have just grabbed my money in broad daylight if I flashed a thick stash?  Or perhaps eventually split the dough with me, and then shake me down later for being greedy or taking the wrong person's (aka mafioso) protection rent?  If you know the answer, let me know.  Or perhaps I should've grabbed their bag of money and started running like Forrest Gump?


Two hours later, as I was walking on a fairly wide sidewalk, someone brushed pass me on the right.  I was slightly annoyed, wondering why he had to squeeze through such a tight space with all that room on the other side.  All of a sudden, he crouches down and picks up, whadya know, a ziplock bag full of money.  This time, before even thinking, I just laughed out a huge "hahaha" and walked away.  Compared to the other two, his performance was horrible.  I saw him the whole time and there was no way he just picked up anything dropped.  Perhaps I should've played a long to figure out the entire scam.

So I spent quite the time walking around the city, listening to music and observing the architecture.  With the gray weather, everything felt so USSR.  On the weekends, the main street Khreshchatik was closed for traffic, allowing people to enjoy their city by foot.  Being there, soaking in the haze and pedestrian energy left me oddly temperamental.  It was a turkey-less holiday filled with single meal days and soviet style markets.  Kyiv stands in such sharp contrast to my sunny summer in Odessa.

I'm heading out to the airport in 30 minutes.  Destination: Kyiv, Ukraine.  I realized that the direct flight from NY is only a couple more hours than going to Cali, so I'll be visiting a good buddy who recently moved out there.  I wish you all a happy holiday.  Don't eat too much, and remember, take a moment to reflect and give thanks for all the positive people and things in your lives.  You'll appreciate them and yourself much more.  :)

Countless guidebooks, websites, blog entries, workshops, pdf's, and what not are floating out there on the subject of interviews, and yet I feel compelled to share my infinite consulting interview wisdom with the Wild Wild Web.  I'll keep this short and sweet, skipping over the basics normally covered.

- Be confident and energetic.  If you're not at ease talking about yourself and defending your ideas, how would you fare in front of clients?  Tons of candidates fail the "being presentable to clients" test.  Don't be one of them.
- Get your story straight.  Draw a convincing picture that ties your past experiences, CV, and future aspirations together in a believable story on why you really want to join the madness of consulting.  If interviewers catch a whiff of you not being sure consulting is for you, then chances are even if you do get in, you'll hate it, quickly leave, and nobody coming out for the better.
- Ask for feedback and advice.  After passing the first round, talk to the interviewers about your strengths and weaknesses.  Work on them and nail the second round.  Interviewers are more than happy to see people they passed in the first round come out prepared; it makes everyone look good.  Just don't bother them too much, 15 minutes or so seems realistic.  Anything more and you become an annoyance.

From what I've seen, if our candidates had followed these three simply rules, they would've greatly increased chances of receiving an offer (assuming they were intelligent enough to pass the case).  So what about the cases?  First of all, I don't think you can fake intelligence, no matter how well prepared you are.  But even for the bright people out there, a couple of things would help tremendously.

- Develop a good sense for business.  One could argue that this is part of intelligence, but I think the MBA program is there to help prepare for this.  Too many people are too focused on job search or partying that they forget to actually learn anything.  If you don't feel like you have a good common sense for doing business, or you haven't seen enough patterns in the real world, don't go into the case inventing new things on the spot.  It just makes you look naive and clueless.
- Learn and practice the case study structure.  This is so readily available in any MBA program.  If you're not a genius, don't come in and wing it.  Even if your excuse is to just use XYZ consultancy as practice, you're much better off being prepared on your own.  An extra offer or two never hurts.  There's nothing interviewers hate more than feeling like you're wasting their time.  You'll feel the same when/if it happens to you.

That's it, five simple steps to overcome the most common pitfalls I've seen so far.  Just remember, the firms don't enjoy rejecting people.  They would love it if they could give everyone an offer, but for the most part they can't because people don't pass some very basic hurdles, not because of a limited number of spots.

My first day in the office outside of a Friday and heading towards my desk...

In the spirit of premature declarations of victory, I will borrow the phrase from our fearless leader to commemorate the conclusion of my first project as a consultant.  To further my argument, I also conducted my first set of interviews today, contributing to the big recruiting machine.  Yes, despite being here for only 3 full months, I actually do feel comfortable in my role.

Allow me to share with you my dislikes and likes of this past quarter.  The top three things I hate about my job involve expense reports, the staffing process, and US airport security.  Two of the three are rather self-explanatory.  I'll take a stab at describing the third, how we get staffed, a process nobody seems to understand.  As of now, I still don't know the who, what, when, where, how of my next project.  The only thing the higher-ups can tell me is that I've been staffed.  The reason they cannot tell me is because it can change any minute, and most of the time it does.  So instead of having me feeling like a pinball, I just have to endure utter uncertainty until the very last moment.  From the surface, it seems like an optimization problem.  There exist a set of projects and a pool of consultants and project leaders that are available.  The question is how to arrange them to maximize utilization, as well as aligning interests and expertise.  Seems straight-forward enough for a group of relatively intelligent partners to figure out, no?  Turns out, many clients are indecisive about agreeing to projects, start-dates, and resources.  There's also politics involved in this secretive partners only staffing meeting.  The end result is a complete lack of transparency, and the feeling of being just a pawn on the big chess board of consulting checkers.  Today I asked one of the partners which project I'm on, and the answer was, "I can tell you which project you're not on."  Ugh.  I hate it.  Let me know what to do with my life already.

Enough carping.  What did I like and learn from this stint?  Some methodology, client-development, and storyboarding.  Skipping the first one, which isn't horribly exciting and would take 5000 words, I'll focus on the two latter skills.  Client-development is really the soft-skills side of things in the nebulous world of organizational behavior and psychology.  It's about encouraging, coaching, coaxing clients to become more effective in the context of the project.  While I didn't do too much of it, I can see quite clearly in them the areas that if improved upon, would make a big difference.  How to actually accomplish that is a different story.  Storyboarding is the fancy name I came up with for the only thing I like about PowerPoint slides.  It's the skill of building and telling a coherent and cohesive story within the limits of the dreaded Micro$oft software tool.  I can see it being compelling to me, because it's a form of story telling.  I try to see it in the light of improving my writing skills, albeit in a different medium.  Work in progress.

Takeaways - I'm feeling confident.  I received some good feedback from my very skilled project leader who happens to look out for me.  The bright side of all this is that all those long hours of work translated to just as much personal development as client contribution, if not more.  For all you potential INSEAD applicants, without a doubt, my MBA prepared me well for consulting. 

So to pat myself on the back for the past 3 months of hard work, I'm planning a stopover in London for a big birthday party on my way to Munich for training.  Knowing these two birthday stars, this is going to be one hell of a bash.  And if things work out ok, I'll make a pit stop in Frankfurt on the way back to visit some other INSEADers (assuming their staffing issues comes through ok),

Had two special visitors in town this weekend, one of my favorite December promotion peoples, and a we-go-back-before-the-dawn-of-time buddy.  What a treat, double treat at that.  As soon as I got home on Friday night, I shed my work clothes and flushed out all thoughts of work; just couldn't have the weekend tainted by thoughts of increasing profitability while avoiding office territorial disputes and no-nonsense methodology.  The task was clear: give our friends an authentic slice of our New York City lives.  It would have been a crime not to bring these out-of-towners to one of our favorite hang-outs, so we started right of the bat for some yummy Thai food, where we dined, Californian-wined, and practiced some rusty français before dissolving into the Friday night meat-packing district crowd.  Special thanks go to my white-jacket-styling colleague for making a normally amusing night a memorable one.

I always found the overlapping promotions idea at INSEAD a superb idea, and even better, I'm so glad I took out the time to get to know the younger promotion.  I caught updates on the latest whereabouts of some friends, current Montmelian generation, post-MBA job market situation, and even some juicy gossip.  Something extraordinarily precious about life's random blend of events, insomnia, spicy tuna rolls, uncertainties, and complications shared through a connection bridged by 2.5 academic institutions and 1+0.5+0.5 languages. 

One of my best buddies from INSEAD recently recounted to me a little story of being stranded in Paris at midnight, with no more trains to Fonty and bleak visions of sleazy French motels looming.  But what unfolded was a night of beers, pasta, and laughs with a few of our not-so-long-lost classmates.  At the end, softly landing on a comfortable extra bed, he concluded "this INSEAD network is no joke."  I second that, and I know that I should get my act together and reach out to our community in NY.  Foreseeing the words coming out of PGuy, I'll just pre-emptively respond, "I'm on it already."

Big day in the US, elections!  We had beers and pizza in my project leader's suite tonight, watching the early results from here in the East Coast.  It sure feels different compared to 2 years ago when Bush won his second term.  CNN already called the House for the Democrats, meaning the people are calling for change.  It's about time and I hope the new folks in Congress don't screw it up.

I've always made the claim that the notion of democracy hasn't bee proven to work.  Nonetheless, it's what we have here in the US, and more importantly, elections here have profound effects all over the world.  It's too late to preach now, but if you didn't vote, shame on you.  Even if you hate both sides, turn in a blank ballot to voice your displeasure.  Don't be a disinterested, non-active person when people are dying in the middle seas and the whole world is looking at the US, wondering and blaming it for making the world a worse place.