Booz & Company Reviews

Pros

Good environment for learning and acquiring marketable skills, as long as you have professional experience from outside consulting to complement this somewhat academic exposure. Great reputation among employers across the Middle East. Some of the leaders are of outstanding caliber. This is a very good place for learning, growing, and preparing yourself for other things.

Cons

Your colleagues are smart but typically inexperienced and often a bit too full of themselves. Some are outright rude, if being civil does not serve them any other purpose. Intellectual capital is sophisticated, diversified, and widely applicable, but sometime a bit academic. If running companies is your objective, there are several areas for which you have to pick up learnings elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work. Try to grow more two-way loyalty - in spite of the premises of the HR and operating model. Give a bit more room for passion; a good leader needs analytics and passion alike. Leadership is a people issue foremost, and most of us need to learn that.

Pros

- In the right pockets, competes with the very best management consulting firms (energy, health come to mind, but highly region-dependent)
- Entrepreneurial, if you are adept at cutting through red tape or getting what you want
- Senior leaders looking for ideas from junior ranks for "how to make it better"
- Trying to take our own medicine
- global brand; even if brand still lags mckinsey, bcg, in some regions this is not a huge drop, and in some industries, not a drop at all
- willingness and eagerness to improve culture, work-life balance, etc

Cons

- lots of legacy problems from "old days" of BAH and/or partners and internal staff set in their ways
- questionably competent senior/internal leadership decision-making in some regions
- brand in the "real world" is variable; sometimes as strong as anyone, other times "Ops/analyst wonk" bias
- discombobulated strategy; still trying to find its way in terms of market-facing and internal investment, focus after the BAH spin-off
- At junior level (e.g. below principal/partner), globality of firm is hardly tangible, not a mobile place
- Culture inconsistent, with some champions of change and others who just want to punch a card and make their money, "stop whining and get to work"
- culture of feedback highly inconsistent; "direct, honest feedback" is rare, you either get negative feedback indirectly and without details, or you get sugar coated nonsense because many people don't know how to deliver constructive criticism and/or are afraid to do it to your face, which is silly

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you're doing re: self-examination, but follow through on the navel gazing. Time to shake up the internal decision-making methods, take some risky moves. Be leaders! Take risks! You're finally getting better at talking the game, now walk it! And realize that your people management is pretty poor - strategic shifts = new investments, internal and market-facing!

Pros

Intelligent teams, good value for clients, work at the top of companies, learn a lot on the job, vastly experienced network

Cons

No structure to management approach, unknown direction, long hours, little reward unless at the top, difficult to find thought leadership

Pros

- Highly interesting questions at large clients
- Very bright colleagues
- Compensation in line with McK
- Very generous sponsorship package to b-school
- General sense of excitement and desire for improvement at Booz, we truly are a "2 year old start up" -- we have the stability of a 90 year old company's CEO relationships with an entrepreneurial feel not seen at our competitors, its highly unique

Cons

- While some significant effort has been put towards knowledge sharing, it still doesn't culturally pervade the organization. I really believe it will, but until it does, lets keep working on it.
- We can be less risk averse in promoting people to partner. Our competitors are a bit faster than us here despite our generally nimbler feel. Probably best to fix this.

Advice to Senior Management

- Put more spend towards recruiting, we are under-regognized - given the work we do, our pay, our opportunities, there is no reason we shouldn't be equal in brand recognition with say Bain
- Continue to foster a culture of knowledge sharing
- Be less risk averse in general, finalize some of the exciting initiatives we've been hearing about

Pros

Smart People with a well diversified backgrounds
Good brand recognized among top consulting firms
interesting project work covering high value consulting

Cons

Work life balance is non-exsitent
People are not failry recognized for their efforts
Expert Track offers second class citizenship treatment

Advice to Senior Management

You need to correct the Expert Track inequalities, otherwise cease this career option

Pros

- True strategy projects with very senior audience
- Partners and job managers ready to place lots of trust in junior staff
- Constant travel, if you like it
- Practice alignment model gives junior staff focused attention from management
- Mentorship model works; great sponsorship package for those considering b-school
- Lots of discussion on solving gaps in culture

Cons

- Little choice in picking your projects
- Constant travel, if you don't like it
- Can quickly get pulled into single partner's pyramid, turns political if you want to work for others

Advice to Senior Management

- Keep culture discussions going
- Need to improve career path and project staffing discussions, rarely happen well

Pros

I am motivated by the '2 year start-up' phase that we are in and I can see changes that we are making to make Booz & Company and even bigger player than we are today. We are committed to creating impact with our clients as well - really partnering with them. It is exciting!

Cons

We can be a little slow to implement change internally and I don't think that we have figured out a way to effectively communicate all that is going on sometimes. We need to celebrate a little more!

Advice to Senior Management

Goes with my 'con' comment, but we need to celebrate more as a firm. And not just partners, but people at all levels of the firm.

Pros

Smart people. Great experience. High visibility projects.

Cons

Work not always well scoped. Long work hours. Work life balance policies in place, but exceptions to policies made too often.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop your people. Recognize their contributions. Provide more constructive feedback

Pros

Fair, transparent, and objective promotions

Cons

Work-life balance difficult to manage for some

Pros

Great skills to learn at Booz

Cons

Government, government, government, government, government

Advice to Senior Management

Equal opportunity