The Management Consultant

Management consulting is a $200 billion global industry of analyzing problems and developing plans for better performance. It’s about determining which business models to follow, products to build, investments to grow, and how to structure management when an organization undergoes change.

And it’s in the middle of a transformation.

Digital technology has disrupted the status quo of businesses everywhere, and changed the paradigm for how the management consultant delivers solutions. The shift to a data-driven economy, led by the rise of cheap, powerful cloud computing, has clients demanding new answers for increasingly complex, technology-centric problems.

The management consultant understands their client’s mission as their clients do. They frame problems correctly (and frame correct problems), gather valuable data, and synthesize a practical answer. Their recommendations are born of knowledge and experience, not intuition. They’re the ultimate change agent, committed to helping clients win support and institute the transformations they need.

These characteristics have always defined the management consultant. Challenges excite them, and fitting pieces together to solve a client’s puzzle is what they savor most. Since 1914, the Booz Allen management consultant has devised business and IT strategies, implemented organizational redesigns and developments, reengineered business processes, and managed change for some of the world’s biggest and most dynamic organizations.

The challenges these dynamic organizations face require equally dynamic individuals focused on solving them. The management consultant is just that—a creative, collaborative, business-savvy connector who moves fast, yet stays grounded in economics and business operations.

Traditionally, the management consultant has been seen as a generalist: a voracious learner who can add value to just about everything. While they may not know the single answer to a problem, they do know the dozen analyses that need to be performed to find it.

Tomorrow’s management consultant, however, won’t settle for generalities.

For much of the last 50 years, consultants created value through clever financial restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic positioning recommendations delivered to a client in a final presentation after a few months of work. Most, but not all, graduated from top-tier MBA programs and deployed generalist business strategy skills to solve client problems.

Today’s clients have been to business school, have a CPA, or have been consultants themselves. They are increasingly asking outside experts to bring non-traditional solutions to address their top priorities.

Whether it’s “Uber-fying” a mobile app to create a frictionless customer experience, deploying data scientists and enterprise architects to build a new financial product platform, or creating an IT strategy that works with existing clouds and sales tools, the problems have changed. Traditional generalists simply aren’t equipped to solve them.

n a world where business value is increasingly created on software platforms, the Booz Allen management consultant will be a strategist who can also program in Python, or an engineer who can pragmatically explain new business models enabled by distributed ledgers.

Tomorrow’s biggest challenges chiefly include growth, digital transformation and user experience, cost cutting, environmental and social responsibility, security and risk, and change management. And the management consultant creates value by coupling business insights with knowledge of technology, analytics, and service design to solve those challenges. They fall into one of three types.

Tech-savvy strategists are classic generalists who “minor” in a technology or information disciplines like analytics, digital UI/UX, or DevOps. They work to identify technological ways to increase revenues, cut costs, or outmaneuver competitors. They join Booz Allen from top-tier programs, and look to invigorate clients with modern spins on traditional consulting approaches.

Business-savvy technologists speak in business language and have experience in designing, testing, and launching new services and products. They embrace a lean startup mindset and believe in prototyping with real clients and customers. Whether you’re from Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley, you can help introduce leading technology platforms to some of the biggest federal and commercial clients out there.

Industry-savvy quants have backgrounds in research, analytics, and core mission-oriented functions and have a sixth sense for what it takes to drive change within a client’s organization. We love evolving them into light data scientists, schooled in emerging modeling techniques and technologies to inform problem-solving.

These new pioneers are user-centered, digital, and diverse. They never stop learning and stay one step ahead of their clients. They are management consultants, after all.