Build Your Business Intuition

If you want to understand how businesses really work, get this book! It was originally designed for management consulting but it is also useful prep for those who plan to go the VC-route or just curious about businesses. Below is the management consulting blurb:

These days, management consulting companies hire people from all backgrounds. On the same day, a single office of a consulting might be interviewing a 19-year old recent bachelor's graduate of chemistry, a master's degree holder in history, a practicing engineer who is seven years out of undergrad, a recent MBA graduate or a thirty-five year old post-doctoral associate in physics who has had no work experience outside academia.

All of these people will be given the exact same kind of interviews and will be judged at the same standard. And if they are able to get offers from the firm, their pre-consulting backgrounds will have no bearing on how their client impact will be judged. As far as the consulting firm is concerned, the chemistry graduate, the post-doctoral associate and the MBA graduate should all have cutting-edge business intuition. Where do they get that from?

A lot of candidates do not have the right business experiences to be able to compete with the MBA student. This is why this book exists. I hope to give you a crash course in all of the different terms, technologies and concepts that you need to understand in order to be a good consultant - before and after your interviews.

Here are some common question I often hear from non-MBA candidates a few days or weeks to their interviews:

- Is having ten competitors in a market a good or bad thing for our client who wants to enter the market?

- When a product can be used by multiple customers at presumably different price points, what should the company do?

- I struggle with coming up with creative ideas to solve the client's problems. How can I get better at this without having any experience in those industries?

The answers to these questions are not straightforward and there is a surprising lack of material to help non-business students get up to speed. This book is a condensed starting point for anyone who wants to get the basic business knowledge and the framework for extending that knowledge towards better performance in cases and on the job.

For the MBA graduate, some of what will be covered in this book have already been taught during the one or two years of her program. She has seen lots of business cases, has formally evaluated pricing strategies, has become comfortable with reading and interpreting company financial statements and knows all the theories of company valuation. These will certainly provide an edge. However, all of those materials will be covered in way more depth than is needed in consulting. She may therefore find this book useful as a revision material for the concepts that actually matter.

In addition, she may have some blind spots - e.g how to demonstrate business intuition in cases covering industries she is not currently familiar with. This book will therefore be useful as she prepares for the interview and job.