The email below came in from a reader way back during the Fall and I’m just now having a chance to respond to her message. At the time, she was a little more than a year into her time as an Analyst at Bain & Company and was asking for my advice on whether moving on from there to join Google’s Business Operations Strategy team could be a good move. Unfortunately, because of my delay in responding, this reply will have absolutely no value to her because she would have made that decision long ago. Hopefully, this can be useful to someone else who might be faced with a similar decision later on.

By the way, before I jump into the response, I want to send a big shout to my fellow blogger Jeremy, who I just met in person for the first time today. Jeremy is a Stanford undergrad alum and current JD/MBA student at Northwestern University. Jeremy and I have been following each other’s blogs and referring traffic to each other for a while now, but, although we’ve lived in the same city for almost a year now, we’d never met face-to-face. We’ve now taken care of that and he’s a really cool cat. He’s got a lot of insights about business and education and, if you have some free time, I’d highly recommend checking out his website.

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HL wrote:

Hi Marquis,

I started following your blog about 2 years ago when I was considering management consulting for a career out of college. I graduated with a Chemical Engineering and Business degree from a top tech school, and was pretty estatic when I got the offer from Bain for the summer internship (and then the full time position).

It’s been about 1.25 years since I started full time with the firm, and have been doing a lot of research and consideration into next opportunities – including a position at Google’s Businss Operations Strategy team. My question is…how do you weight the options between staying with a top management consulting firm versus moving on to a more corporate environment? I always hear that Google is an awesome company to work for (everyone seems to want to work there) — but is that true for just the engineers/technical people, or does it permeate the entire company?

I’ve been trying to search for more information on the position, what people think about the job, and also how to ‘ace the case interviews’ with google (I hear they’re tough! Maybe even tougher than management consulting interviews)…but haven’t had too much luck with internet searches. I was hoping you might have advice on where to turn to (or who to turn to) for more information and advice.

Thanks so much,
-h

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My video response:

Moving from Consulting to Strategy at Google from Marquis Parker on Vimeo.

Key points:
- I apologize for taking so long to respond to this email; By now, the impact of this response will likely be nil, but I wanted to get back to you anyway

- Thoughts on staying with a management consulting firm vs. moving into a more corporate environment
-> There are people on both sides of this issue and I fall somewhere in the middle on it:

– Being in consulting is a great way to develop and strengthen one’s analytical toolkit while working in a variety of industry and functional settings

– Going corporate offers the opportunity to apply one’s overal business acumen and abilities in strategic analysis to a single organization to drive impact and performance.
-> Thinking about the long-term goal of being a well-rounded and effective business leader, I believe that one would benefit greatly from a combination of management consulting and corporate experiences and the most important consideration is the timing and duration of each (specifically the risk of being branded as a “Consultant”)
-> The great thing about the standard Analyst programs at big consulting firms is that they’re expected to last two years and offer the opportunity for outgoing Analysts to gain years of experience doing something else in order to make a more informed decision about whether to return to the firm
-> I would highly advise that all Analysts take advantage of the opportunity to move into a more corporate environment following a couple of years at a management consulting firm to gain an insider’s perspective on business

- Perspectives on Google
-> I have several friends who work for Google (most of which are non-technical) and I’ve heard nothing but great things about working there; Specific areas of praise that I’ve involve the company’s culture, the intelligence of the members of the Googler community, the coolness of the work, and the benefits of being part of a company that is changing the business game before our eyes
-> I’ve heard that the Business Operations Strategy team is a fantastic and well-revered group within Google that works on some very mission-critical problems

– The interview process is supposed to be very rigorous and they only bring in the best and brightest from top consulting firms, so the environment would be similar to that of a M/B/B firm

– I don’t know anything specific about how to best prepare for their case interviews except for doing lots of mock cases as one would to get a position at a management consulting firm

– One option for getting more information is to search for people in your alumni network who work at Google and asking for their insider perspective on the group and how to best position yourself for its recruiting process
-> Bain + Google = RIDICULOUSLY GREAT PROFESSIONAL PROFILE –> There is really no downside for moving from a M/B/B consulting firm to a place like Google because of the challenging nature of the work, the high profile of the company, and the opportunity to work on some really ground-breaking efforts

- My high-level perspective on the overall issue is that one can always go back into management consulting, especially with experience from a M/B/B firm, but an opportunity to win a spot at Google may not come around too often; Plus, the combination of big firm strategy consulting experience and corporate strategy experience at a highly innovative company would set you up for almost any job that you could want in the future