Welcome back!
Sign in with Google
Sign in with Linkedin
Or, sign in with your email
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
The season begins with a networking meeting were a partner, Kevin in that role, provides extensive resume feedback. Kevin explains who at McKinsey reviews resumes, how they conduct the review and what is sought in the review. He thereafter highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the resume and offers suggestions for improvement.
Alice & Michael take part in this formal closed-list dinner as they try to build a relationship with a partner. Dining etiquette, communication skills, body language and image management are all tested as Kevin probes their reasons for pursuing consulting, their life outside work and their ability to hold conversations with senior executives.
Kevin leads this group case examining the strategy used by Disney to manage their entertainment acts. It is a difficult case, done in the inference-style commonly used by senior partners in the final round, which tests the candidates’ abilities to move beyond stock standard frameworks taught in books, blogs and forums. One candidate, Alice, demonstrates the difficulties in solving a case when one lacks local pop-culture context.
Kevin quickly zooms into Alice’s Bain internship experience to understand what she did and why it may not have converted to a full-time offer. Alice demonstrates great skill on the leadership questions by having crisp and concise reasons for the actions she took in her various roles. She is able to apply numerical reasoning to answers, which typically do not require them.
Kevin tries to get Michael to convert a very scientific resume into language that can demonstrate Michael’s understanding of business. With strong grades and a track record of success in this field, Kevin wants to make sure Michael can extract and explain those lessons, which the consulting interviewer wants to hear.
This tough strategy case is based on a true story. It is done in the inference style and teaches Alice how to breakdown revenues and costs to understand if they have different drivers impacting them, and the profit impact of those drivers. The case solution is very different from the intuitive answer.
Kevin continues his inference-based approach to delivering case interviews. This strategy case examines the basis of Wal-Mart’s competitiveness; beyond the typically cited bargaining power it brings to suppliers. Michael needs to have a strong grasp of basic income statement analyses and core strategy concepts.
How do you behave if you spend an entire day interviewing and are invited by the consultants to lunch? This episode teaches subscribers how to handle this situation. Kevin provides more detailed feedback on the candidates’ performance and offers suggestions for improvement.
The cost-volume-profit analyses case tests this core skill required by all MBA applicants. While Alice intuitively understands the solution, she struggles to communicate this to Kevin. This case is another example where using frameworks will fail to generate a sutiable answer in a final round partner-led interview.
Kevin designed this case from his work experience at the US Treasury. This inference-type case requires Alice to examine the evolution in the manufacturing side of a market and understand how new technologies will change the basis of the supply structure. It is a difficult case requiring Alice to have a firm grasp of the basics of strategy and barriers to market entry.
In his final round case, Michael needs to prove he can both handle the strategy elements of a case and the numerical analyses. Kevin used the inference style to test Michael’s ability to understand how two players in a market will compete.
In Alice’s final round interview Kevin changes tactics by providing an extensive amount of information on a very technical subject. Alice needs to sift through the information by using an analyses structure. Alice struggles in this case because she fails to examine one important area.
Kevin provides extensive feedback on each candidate. He discusses their strengths, weaknesses, things that stood out, things that concerned him and more. He thereafter draws lessons for subscribers and offers suggestions on both how and when they should prepare, and steps to manage the over-reliance on frameworks. Kevin concludes the show by explaining who he would hire between Alice and Michael, his reasons and what they should do before their interviews in 31 days.
In a detailed set of pre-interviews 2 days before the case sessions with Kevin P. Coyne, Alice discusses her background, motivations and unique path to the McKinsey / BCG interviews. She explains the impact of her family, role models and career mentors. Alice discusses how she used TCO 1 to prepare for TCO 2, her strategy for interviewing with Kevin and the unique challenges foreign students face in the US. She discusses her case interview strengths, weaknesses and the preparation done for each type of case.
Michaels discusses his early experiences, decision to attend McGill and the influence of this older brother. He talks about preparing for TCO 2 and the challenges of applying within the US, particularly California. Michael elaborates on the differences between McKinsey and BCG cases, preparing for McKinsey inference-style cases and his unique journey to the McKinsey / BCG interviews.
In these detailed post-interviews, Alice is debriefed on each of the cases performed with Kevin. The interviews provide a clear understanding of why and how Alice chose to respond to the key areas of the case: Structuring her response, breaking down the issues, structuring her hypotheses, providing her recommendations, communication and much more.
Michael is debriefed on the cases performed with Kevin. Michael and Alice had different weaknesses and Michael explains his views from the perspective of someone who wanted to improve his technical case skills. We capture the reasons Michael responded as he did, how he interpreted Kevin’s feedback and how he tried to adjust his case approach, in real-time, based on the guidance he was receiving from Kevin.
“To choose is to renounce.” — André Gide Every time we decide to focus on something, we make a choice to ignore everything else. In management consulting, when you decide to get yourself onto a 3rd banking project that year, you know you are starting to go down the financial…
Over the weekend, we released the first part of Executive Update 1 for the Corporate Strategy for Asset/Wealth Management Study in the Strategy Control Room, Advanced Level. *** Every so often, we release a study that is so powerful, so fundamental, that if you take the time to read it multiple times…
The question is: Will You Rise to the Occasion? In this new Legacy program, we cover a critical mindset shift required to be considered CEO material within your organization. It's based on the work Michael and I have been doing with clients worldwide at a senior level, and even at not-so-senior…
