Strategy consulting
Strategy consulting continues to be a top career choice for the most talented business graduates around the world. Yet, few students know precisely what the job is all about.
What makes strategy consulting so attractive to talented graduates? It offers dynamic challenges and compelling rewards. Strategy consulting:
- Confronts you with the key choices every organization must make, at the highest levels
- Exposes you quickly to a large variety of such choices, across many industries
- Trains you to work with multiple facts and uncertainty, and then structure your thoughts while under high-pressure deadlines
- Supports you with a team of some of the brightest people around—and gives your personal network a boost
What is business strategy?
Let's start with the business need for strategy. Imagine you are the CEO of this business.
- You are beginning to lose market share in your key product line
- Marketing urges you to increase advertising and reduce prices
- R&D has high hopes for a new product introduction and wants more money
- Finance is worried about your debt level
- Human Resources doesn't find enough qualified people to support your development efforts
- You also have been offered a recent opportunity to buy one of your competitors in the US
What do you do? You'll have to make choices and ensure they give you a competitive advantage. Maybe you need to trim costs or spend more to innovate. Maybe you need to expand to exploit economies of scale. Whatever you do, you have to do it better than the competition. Business strategy means making choices about trade-offs in scarce resources.
Bain's business is strategy consulting.
Our job is helping top executives make the best decisions about their most critical business issues:
- Corporate strategy—which businesses to be in and which to exit
- Business unit strategy—how to help a specific business reach its full economic potential
- Strategy across the organization, including sales and marketing, operations, IT, overall organizational effectiveness and change management
Strategy consulting often is a fast-track development path to high-level positions or a foundation for building your own business. It is both incredibly challenging and very rewarding.