Before joining McKinsey, David, a data scientist in Waltham, relied on his leadership and communication skills to navigate challenges. While that part of his job has remained similar, his colleagues and clients have not. David worked almost exclusively with monkeys prior to joining the firm.
After his year as a Fulbright Scholar conducting research on male social bonds among gelada monkeys, David got a tattoo as a reminder of his experience. It reads “Anbessa,” written in Fidel–Amharic script, literally translating to “Lion.”
“It’s a piece of the phrase my scout called back to me as we trucked up inclines in Ethiopia’s Semien Mountains to remind me to be strong,” he says. The phrase still guides David in his day-to-day work though now he focuses on strengthening clients by addressing their talent questions though analytics.
We sat down David, via Zoom, to chat about his experience with the geladas and how his it relates to working at McKinsey.
Interviewer: I see you’ve brought a friend.
David: Yes! This guy behind me is a gelada–the only grass eating primate in the world. Most monkeys eat fruit, and a run-of-the-mill baboon would eat the contents of your backpack if you’d let him. Geladas unique diet has pushed them into higher elevations, where protein-rich pastures still exist.
Where they live has influenced how they live. They’re remote and they live in the largest social groups of any nonhuman primates. When I was younger, I studied how they interacted and how male geladas establish themselves as leaders. Turns out, cooperation doesn’t matter so much in becoming the dominant leader within a social group; but cooperation is important for males who want to remain leaders in the face of challenges from younger bachelors.
Interviewer: What was your monkey to human ratio on a given day?
David: 700 to one. Over the course of a year, I probably worked closely with five to 10 people—mainly the research team and the rangers who would accompany us through the park. Trekkers and tourists would come through the park during the dry season, but we’d rarely interact with each other. The geladas, though, came by the thousands, traveling in massive herds.
Interviewer: Monkeys aside, it seems fieldwork prepared you well for 2020 social distancing.
David: To the extreme. It also made me appreciate the value of digital communication. We didn’t have Zoom in the field. While I was out there, my now-wife was a graduate student in Michigan. To speak with her I relied on a satellite modem through which I could only send and receive an email once a day. We were planning our wedding, yet I’d be replying to her emails with a day or two delay.
Fieldwork isn’t glamorous. You have limited resources. No running water or power. You really have to consider the optimal time to make a four-hour run to town to get groceries. You’re also working with the people who you’re living with for long periods of time, and you need to manage expectations and relationships accordingly.
So really, team management, time management, and leadership are important whether you are living in a national park in Ethiopia and working at McKinsey. In both environments, you learn there are things under your control and things that are not. You can’t control whether or not a pandemic’s going to force you to work from home for months, but you can control whether or not you eat breakfast and get a workout in to feel good. That’s a big lesson in maintaining mental strength that I’ve taken from fieldwork, COVID, and the firm.
Interviewer: How did you make the switch from fieldwork to McKinsey?
David: When I was in Ethiopia, during the rainy season we might go weeks and weeks with no monkeys in sight. We’d have to find ways to be productive. I used that time to teach myself how to code so I could edit our data collection program.
There was no internet to teach me. I’d open up the source code, read through it line by line, and try to figure out what it did. That’s how I started thinking about programming. With a stop in between as a data scientist for a media company, I joined McKinsey.
Interviewer: How has your time among monkeys been a source of strength for you?
David: I’m part of the Organization practice, so I think through how organizations structure themselves and develop custom analytical solutions related to talent management. I have worked primarily on People Analytics, and also built much of our analysis for Influencer, our organizational network analysis solution.
My work is not directly analogous to field research on primates, but some of the methods I use are similar. Some of my current analyses rely on the same math using different inputs. For example, when I was helping a client understand how to reskill individuals within organizations, I used metrics commonly used in measuring biodiversity. Here, two roles can be thought of as being more similar if they share the same mix of skills in the same proportions. An ecologist might compare forest ecosystems in a similar way. When undergoing a digital transformation, skill depth and breadth are as important to an organization’s performance as biodiversity is to a forest’s health.
It’s exciting to apply familiar metrics to help clients build new solutions.
Interviewer: As we end, what do you really want readers to know about monkeys?
David: Curious George is not a monkey. He does not have a tail and is therefore almost certainly an ape. Nearly all monkeys have tails, but no apes have tails.
About David
David is a data science specialist in Waltham, Massachusetts. He specializes in using advanced analytics to help clients create data-driven strategies to recruit, develop, and retain talent. David is an expert in network analysis and machine learning, and has served a range of industries, from heavy manufacturing to telecommunications. He earned his bachelor's in anthropology from Wake Forest University, and his master's and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan.
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