The firm cares about our personal interests and constraints, and has launched numerous awareness campaigns to promote balanced lifestyle.
What made you choose McKinsey?
Through my engineering education, I took a couple of internships at software companies. Time and again, I would find it striking how at those companies we would spend a lot of time developing state-of-the-art solutions that nobody would use due to a lack of support from the end users and their management. Thus I became eager to learn how to project manage rather than to develop and how to drive for impact. I found McKinsey offers an end-to-end value proposition for clients, so it became an obvious choice to me.
Is life at McKinsey what you expected?
No, it’s better. The problem-solving, the driving for impact, ongoing support, numerous resources, it’s all there. Before starting, I had some doubts about consultants’ work-life balance, but I have never had lifestyle problems since I joined. The firm cares about our personal interests and constraints, and has launched numerous awareness campaigns to promote balanced lifestyle. Most—if not all—people at the firm have shifted the paradigm to one where optimizing for lifestyle is not only generally accepted, but also encouraged on a daily basis.
What new skills have you developed?
There are three areas I would like to share. One is the ability to articulate insights from data not as a sum-up of findings, but as a set of actions to change the as-is. Second one is the ability to navigate a complex organization with many different stakeholders, leveraging their respective points of view and influences at just the right time to make the bigger scheme of things happen. Third is having fun with the team—from carting in Morocco, to giggles at the yearly ski trip, to dressing up as turkeys for Christmas lunch.
What has been your most memorable project?
I’ll always remember that day on a manufacturing engagement in a factory where a client took me inside a 500-cubic chemical reactor to verify a hypothesis as to why the reactor’s yield was so low. It was an action suggested by big data coming from the reactor, to change the as-is.