Driving Strategic Impact: Mastering Management Consulting Skills

Driving Strategic Impact is organized around the core skill of structured problem-solving, which takes participants through five phases of a strategy project: defining the problem, structuring the problem, conducting analysis, developing recommendations, and communicating for impact.

These core skills are supplemented with additional sessions on managing strategy projects, working with diverse teams, and influencing skills. In this way, Driving Strategic Impact offers an effective and multi-faceted approach that can be implemented as soon as participants return to work.

Our approach is built on the following building blocks:

• Strategy consulting toolkit: A set of tools, frameworks and best practices laid out in easily usable formats, such as checklists, templates, or step-by-step approaches that you take back with you for future use.
• Real-life case study: Lee will present a sanitized case study of a real strategy consulting project she led while at McKinsey. You will be asked to solve this client’s problem using the consulting toolkit. At each stage, you will be able to compare your solution with other participants, and then compare with the outcome of the real project. This exercise allows participants a hands-on view of the end-to-end process of strategic problem-solving.
• Consulting scenarios: Specific consulting situations where you will be asked for ideas on how you would approach these situations. We have especially designed these to challenge your thinking and make you see how our instinctive approaches to solving problems often lead us down wrong paths. Discussions will follow each scenario and reveal specific tools that you can use to address similar situations in real life. This will allow you to gain tangible, hands-on understanding, and key insights in an experiential manner.
• Role-plays: Exposure to consulting scenarios that simulate typical client-consultant interactions. These role-plays allow you to test your own understanding of situations and to learn ways to prepare for these situations with clients where your credibility and impact is at stake.
• Consulting stories: True-to-life stories to effectively understand and internalize a point. Associate Dean Angela Lee, faculty director of the program, will share candid stories from her consulting experience to bring the learnings from the program to life. Rich insights and inspiration can be gained from these real world informal recollections of the high and low points in a consultant's journey.