Tag: consulting

Consulting Research and Google Senpai

When I first started out in consulting, I was usually tasked with conducting research. In a firm where native English speakers comprised of less than 1% of the total employee population, my command of the global business lingua franca stood out.

Occasionally, this entails conducting interviews costing upwards of US$1,000/hour to gather insights from industry veterans with decades of experience as a first-year analyst. One of my more harrowing experiences include reacting professionally in real-time to a German energy expert as he elaborated on the intricacies of VDE specifications and the policy decisions underpinning them over a phone call. All while my Japanese speaking-only manager looked helplessly at me while stealing quick glances at his watch. The only person who seemed blithely unaware of the time was the energy expert whose enthusiasm for the subject matter and extended compensation could not be told apart.

Most of the times however, research is a much less expensive affair that centers around entering search terms into Google. As much as my peers and I like to joke that we are paid to just Google (and create pretty powerpoint slides), timely and relevant consulting research is a lot more than that. Even though it is treated as a “basic” skill and often relegated to entry-level staff, doing it well requires the mastery of more sophisticated skills.

What is unfortunate is that this skill may not be well-imparted by seniors and managers who are busy fighting their own fires. The result for the poor first-year analyst is pent-up frustration spending needless hours of overtime trawling the web mindlessly for a usable statistical nugget which may or may not exist.

This is what I wish I could have told that first-year analyst.

1. Plan
Before blindly accepting a request to “provide an estimate for the size of XX industry”, or “create a list of top trends that competitors are capitalizing on”, always ask the manager what his/her hypothesis is and what the basis, if any, for coming up with that hypothesis is. Doing so would help you to understand how the research you will be doing can directly support that hypothesis. Not only does that give you a greater sense of purpose to your work, you will also be able to expand your search to include other types of research that can support the hypothesis.

In the course of research, it is always vital to remember who the stakeholders are. Even if the manager explicitly mentions that the research “is not meant to be seen” by the client, the findings (if useful) would eventually be adapted and appear in front of the client in some form. To that end, it is also important to acquire a good grasp of who the client actually is. “Client” is not just an amorphous concept; it refers to actual human beings with their own agenda and proclivities. Your research should always consider not just the direct stakeholder – your manager – but also the end stakeholders – the client. This helps to ensure that the research you do will be relevant to all the people who will be consuming it.

Before entering clicking on that search bar, understand exactly what kind of information you want to collect. If you are planning to collate the research on an Excel spreadsheet, this would mean figuring out what are the fields that you would have and what kind of information you are expecting to populate it with. They range from the factual and simple (“Country : Japan”) to inferential and complex (“Highly likely that Company A is planning such and such due to…”). This preparation will accelerate your work as you can target your search by simply focusing on filling up that spreadsheet based on whatever you can find on the web. Without creating a target beforehand, it is often easy to succumb to link surfing and ride on wave after wave of information that bring you no closer to your goal.

2. Prioritize
Now that your planning is done, it’s time to start relying on Google senpai. To that end, it may be a good idea to prioritize and allocate time to specific search terms. The amount of time your manager gives you to research is highly limited but the amount of content out there is not. Allocate that time to each segment of that research. Chances are, the segments may not be equal. For example, if you are planning to do a deep dive for 3 companies and are given 3 hours to do so, it may be wise to start with Company A (if it is a priority – e.g. has the biggest market share) and allocate it 1.5 hours. The extra time allocated here is to account for learning. After you have created precedence in the form of Company A, it would be much smoother to proceed to Company B and C.

On the world wide web, not all search results are made equal. In your research, you would do well to prioritize the ones that are more important and apply the CRAAP test, designed by Sarah Blakeslee at California State University-Chico in 2004:

  • Currency: Timeliness of the info
  • Relevance: How the info fits your needs
  • Authority: The source of the info
  • Accuracy: Reliability and correctness of the info
  • Purpose: The reason the info exists

Of the five criteria, Currency and Authority are amongst the easiest to apply at first glance. Specifically, Authority can serve as a good proxy for Accuracy and Purpose. At risk of sounding biased, Gartner is a convenient example in this regard. Known as a leading IT market research advisory, it sources its information from well-connected research analysts and is incentivized to produce high-quality research that it charges per subscription. Quoting Gartner research can take a consultant very far based on my experiences inside and outside of the paywall. But the final and perhaps most important test is still Relevance (touched on later).

Unless you are adept as a speed reader, it is unwise to scrutinize every word in every link that you click. In conducting research, visuals and “Crtl-F” are your best friends. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. The essence of a concept or of the entire article is usually contained within a visual and it is usually far more expeditious to fully understand that visual, be it a graph or schema, than to pore through all the text. In cases where the article is wall after wall of text, it is may be a good idea to do a first cut by reading only excerpts which contain your search term(s). Should an excerpt prove exceptionally interesting, proceed to read the surrounding text to glean for insights.

3. Present
After all that hard work that you have put into planning and prioritizing your research, it would be remiss of you (I would go as far as to call it an injustice), if this was not properly communicated to the stakeholders. Given that research tasks may come up with pressing deadlines, it may not be feasible or expected for you to come up with pretty slides. What is more important is that the research be presented in a structured manner and be easily-understandable. Should you have created a spreadsheet to collate your results beforehand, reusing the spreadsheet as the basis of explanation would often suffice. Other possible means of presentation could be a collection of bullet points on a word processing medium or a rudimentary schema on a sketching software.

Ultimately, the structure and ease of understanding of your work should seamlessly tie back to the original hypothesis and the mandate of the project. Your research should serve as the empirical foundation of whether the hypothesis is true or false, with bonus points for inspiring further discussion among your peers and fueling more hypotheses. In short, the presentation of your research findings should show how it is relevant to the project. It can be as simple as going “The reason why this finding matters is because it proves the hypothesis true and suggests that…[inserts new hypothesis]”. While this may not be expected of a first-year analyst, it is what you need to do well to go beyond being just someone who can type into a search bar and press enter.

While Google senpai traditionally referred to the search engine, in the future it could progressively refer to Google Bard, Google’s conversational GenAI chatbot and a contender to OpenAI’s more popular ChatGPT. Instead of search terms, whole questions can be input with well-formatted results spawned and integrated into productivity tools in seconds. For the same task, the first-year analyst would have to take hours to accomplish. Does this mean that the first-year analyst is no longer relevant?

I would look reassuringly into the frightened eyes of the first-year analyst and tell him that it’s not the case. These new fangled tools may be monopolizing the attention of the business world at the moment. But there will always be a place for the strategy consultant who can get to the heart of wicked problems and navigate the just-as-wicked political maelstroms at a client. And it all starts with knowing how to recognize and conduct good consulting research.

The Origin Story

This story was written in October 2019 on LinkedIn as an entry for a writing competition organized by someone I knew from school.

It has been weighing on me for quite some time to get back to writing for a general audience. And I cannot think of a more appropriate piece to inaugurate this blog than with one which was written in those relatively halcyon days.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its heels.

Before I took off the rose-tinted glasses that a foreigner inevitably wears to Japan at the start.

Before I started appreciating my time here and this place as what it is rather than what I thought it was.

“Are you sure that you didn’t get someone else to do up your online test for you?”

It was 4 a.m. in Philadelphia and I was dressed in a business shirt and track pants while being interviewed for a summer internship at BayCurrent Consulting, one of the largest general consulting firms in Japan. I was sluggish in tackling the math and case questions being hurled my way through Skype by my Singapore-based interviewer and it showed.

Truth be told, I was more appalled by the attack on my integrity rather than my intelligence with the lack of empathy ranking somewhere in between. In response, I apologised, clarified that my online test was truly my work and pointed out that it was still darkest before dawn where I was.

Thankfully, dawn came in time and I soon found myself a 3-full-week long internship (technically 18 working days) in Tokyo in the August of 2018.

I had three mentors whom I remember fondly from my internship days, all whom spoke fluent Japanese. The first was an ethnic Korean Australian. She was patient, stoical and brutally frank. I have lost count of the number of times I was chided for 1) not clarifying the requirements of the task before proceeding 2) using fanciful English which impeded understanding and 3) giving too many excuses. Yet she still made it a point to set aside an hour a day poring through my work with me, nudging me towards an insightful response each time and stressing the importance of formatting and presentability in everything that I offer as completed work.

The next was a US-educated Chinese. He was approachable, kind and responsible. I was assigned to his team to help with some research in my final week. I would have understood if he saw me as a temporary worker to be exploited and threw me the most mundane of tasks with little guidance. Instead, he treated me as a full member in his team and I was tasked with research that would eventually be presented to the client. Along the way, he gave me tips and tricks for being a more efficient and effective consultant and encouraged me to develop my own interpretation to the data.

The last was a fellow Singaporean. He was eloquent, generous and seemingly mercurial. On my very first day, I drank from a consulting fire hose he nonchalantly held. In subsequent days, I racked my brains to come up with data and syntheses within time constraints that felt impossible at times. At work, his standards were exacting, and he would not accept compromise. After work, he did a 180 and became a buddy. From him, I learnt that we each must make our own choices in separating work and play. But more importantly, I know now that a life without a hypothesis is not a life well-lived.

I embarked on the internship thinking that it would be a fun and enriching experience with no lasting consequences. After all, I could barely speak enough Japanese to get around the city, let alone engage in business discussions. The internship was supposed to be a serendipitous once-off occurrence which I could cherish as a memory. But I could not forget the excitement I felt during those interviews, the inspiration I felt from my mentors and the vibrancy of the city. And the three lessons of this unforgettable experience in my forgettable life.

First, we must recognise that our achievements are almost never only due to our merits. At first glance, it may seem that my grades and exhibited abilities got me through the door. But that would only be a very small part of the story. BayCurrent Consulting was actively looking for Singaporean interns in late 2017, motivated surely by the performance of our local universities in global rankings and the reputation of our people. Singapore was a brand that they could trust, and this was corroborated by the track record set by my pioneering Singaporean mentor. It was on the shoulders of these institutions and precedents that I stood that gave me the stature to reach for this opportunity. So now it is my turn to help pave the way for those who will come after me.  

Next, we must connect with one another. Nothing adds a feather to our career cap like an overseas work experience. It exudes desirability, intrepidity and adaptability in a resume for the most part. And of course, you get to tick off your fair share of tourist attractions while you’re in the area as well. But what I remember most from my time in Tokyo and other overseas stints which I’ve had the privilege to embark on are the connections, however fleeting, that I’ve made with people from diversely different backgrounds. A weekday lunch with an American colleague at an izakaya near the office. A weekend day trip to Kamakura with a fellow Chinese intern. A farewell dinner with Japanese supervisors. I may no longer be actively in contact with most of them but during the intersections where our paths crossed, we had more that we shared than otherwise.

Finally, we must each come up with the hypothesis to our lives. As Singaporeans, most of us grew up knowing (and needing to know) what our paths in life would be. It was a path that also came embedded with an implicit promise: study hard in school, get good grades and you will be able to finance a materially comfortable existence for you and your loved ones. You will be able to live the good life. The hypothesis is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps more than most others, I bought into that promise and certainty and I devoted most of my time and effort into my academics. For the most part I did well in school but as the years rolled by, I felt increasingly dissatisfied. I was studying with no direction and as thankful as I am for the support I had received for this journey, it did not feel like a journey which I had any agency in. But this couldn’t be any further from the truth. We have the freedom to choose; we just need to accept whatever consequences that stem from these choices, including consequences that we could never have imagined beforehand.

That is when given the opportunity to return, I seized it. And I haven’t looked back since.

Notes:

  • I was in Philadelphia as an exchange student when the intern recruiment process was ongoing and was thus unable to be interviewed in-person.
  • There was no requirement to speak Japanese for the internship; it was a different matter for the full-time offer as a graduate analyst and I was expected to speak business-level Japanese upon joining BayCurrent Consulting. That’s a different story for a different day.