Hello, my name is John Kim and I'm full-time faculty at Emory University at Goizueta Business School here in Atlanta Georgia in the United States. I have 20 years of work experience in corporate America and the last 12 prior to teaching in management consulting. I am a huge believer in consulting, not just in terms of the industry or the famous companies with the fact that it has great jobs, but even more around the mindset. What's the mindset of a consultant as a professional? What are the tools that you can use to really do the work you want to do? For me, what I planned to do and what I planned to share is what I've learned over the last five years. I do blog at consultantsmind.com. It's consultant S mind, consultants mind. Over the last 10 years, there are 600 blog posts. Feel free to take look, it's stuff like how do I case interview, how do I network? How do I do informational interviews, how do I interview clients, how do I have critical conversations with my clients and my boss? Since 2017, I've spent the last several years teaching about 200 students every semester in the topics of strategy, consulting, and health care. If you visit my classroom, it's very discussion-oriented, so what I'd like to do is to explain things very simply and hopefully just have a little bit of fun also. On the left, bottom side, what you'll see is that this specialization, it's several hours, so it's a little bit of a commitment, but I think it's going to be really worth your time for three reasons. What is it exactly that consultants know that's so special? Also, in terms of the heart, there's something around being client service, whether you're in tax or audit, or you're in marketing or banking or financial. If there's a client who's paying you money to worry about their problems for them, there's something around an attitude that you need to have that really differentiates good from great. Then finally, you wouldn't be watching this if you didn't feel like there's some real tools that I can use and I can implement tomorrow. Here's a picture of our campus. What I would say is that I got my MBA here 15 years ago. It's only gotten better, and so from that, I'd really encourage you next time you're in Atlanta, call us ahead of time, sit in on class and get to know not only the school, the campus, the culture, but also the professors themselves. You can see that we are located in Georgia, so we do have quite a few sunny days as well. You might be wondering, what's this weird thing on the side? What swept these icons? One thing as we're thinking about this course, how can we make it super relevant and also make sure that we're scratching the itch that you have? What is it that you want to learn and let's make sure that we give that to you? What we found is that there are basically three big buckets of people who might wander into this course. The first graduates, so you're graduating or recently graduated from undergraduate or maybe a master's program. Two, you're a manager. You've done this before, you've been promoted before, you're pretty good. But just perhaps you've met a consultant at your work, and you want to understand a little bit about what is it that they do that makes them so effective. Then finally, you see a plane. It looks like a single-engine plane. As a solo, as an entrepreneur, maybe you're in the business of creating a business for yourself, and what are some of the tools that you might want to know? Let's dig into the first group, so graduates. You can see that I put a tassel and a graduation cap there. If this is you, you're recently graduating from undergrad or MBA, and you just want to jump-start your career, You don't know what it's about. You want to make sure that you are as prepared as possible for day 1. Frankly, part of the goal of this whole thing is for you to get the job offer. When I have students who say, "Hey professor, I'm going to be missing class because I have an interview". I say, hey, as long as you get the job offer, everything is forgiven. Now you may also be a manager. You've been at work for 5-10 years, you know the basics. But you also know that for you to get to the next level, let's say you're a manager and you want to be a senior manager, or senior manager and be a director, a director, and a senior director. It's a different set of skills. I think early in your career, as long as you're good at your thing, no problem. But what happens over time is a lot of your job is influencing other people in other departments to also play nice with you. That takes some savvy and some business acumen. It's not a simple thing to do but it's not impossible. Consultants do this every day. I listed a couple of things in the PowerPoint, you can read them for yourself. You want to be able to persuade with data. You don't want to just have an opinion, hey boss I think we should do that. Why do you think that John? It's just an opinion. Bad idea. You also want to run projects with different kinds of people and new teams of people with no drama. We have way too much drama in our life already and so with your work you want to basically here at the very bottom get more done probably with the same number of people and the same number of resources. You need to influence people and basically get them to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. A very famous quote from Colin Powell, defining leadership as really being able to influence people for what you think is the right thing to do. Entrepreneurs. From my experience, this probably comes in two different shapes and flavors and sizes. One shape is that you worked in the corporate world for a couple years and frankly it wasn't for you. You want to go out on your own and so with that at the end of the day when you run your own consulting business, I mean, the chef and the dishwasher is you, you do everything. A lot of this is really making sure that you know who you are, you know who your clients are. You get so good that clients actually call you. You want your clients to have your cell phone number on their phone and they call you when they need help. A lot of the focus here is on the business part of this. If you've ever watched Shark Tank, one of the first questions they always ask entrepreneurs is do you have sales? Because if you don't have a customer, this is a hobby. For solos and entrepreneurs a lot of the focus is can you write proposals and win business? But not any business. You want to make sure it's business that you can actually over-deliver on and do a good job and it's got to be profitable. Also, you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time. If there are best practices out there, are there things that I can do that had been proven to work and not suffer. If there's a smart way to do these five things make sure that we do those. Finally, the goal at the very bottom you can see for yourself. Just like in Shark Tank the goal is to grow, grow, grow. The icons here on the top right of this PowerPoint presentation is for you. I really feel like there's a lot to learn across all of these. If you're curious, if you want to be able to work with executives and make a difference and use your influence. I would recommend watching it all. That said there are going to be times where there's something that's really focused on the green and I'm a red and I might not need that. Don't be afraid to fast-forward or just watch parts of it that really matter to you. I think the most important thing is in this specialization there's a lot of really good stuff all throughout it. Don't be like most people and you just watch the first 30 minutes and throw it away. That's not how you get really good at something. Here you can see we're going to talk about core consulting skills and approaches, case interview tips on how to get hired. Can you get that good paying job? Also, getting promoted and doing well within this corporate hierarchy. Then finally, everything's persuasion. Me talking to you right now is all persuasion. Can you sell all the work that you've already done? Finally here at the bottom, maybe this is a little bit provocative but I think you need to be pretty selfish with your learning. There are a lot of courses out there but your time is super valuable. Always be asking yourself like so what? Okay, John you taught me that, so what? Always be asking yourself so what? Then also perhaps more importantly how do I apply this to my job? My life? How does this make my life better? A very famous quote that I love is from Albert Einstein and he said that if you cannot explain it simply, you actually don't understand it very well. What I would say is there's a lot of experiences that I've had in consulting and I don't know everything but what I do know I plan to share it with you as simply as humanly possible, knowing that there's only so many things that we can actually fit in our head. Finally, I'd like to share with you my e-mail address. At anytime feel free to send me an e-mail at jksstrategy@consultantsmind.com and that's my blog post www.consultantsMind.com. Look forward to learning together.
