Deloitte – “Mostly operations consulting, highly political, still a good firm o start the career.”

Pros

- Nice place to start the career (post MBA). Staying at Deloitte for a few years helps you master the politics of consulting and client relationship management. Deloitte also works in a lot of industries and has a wide list of service offerings (except true strategy, especially growth strategy), which givens everyone an opportunity to work on projects within their area of interest - you do need to align yourself to the right partner. Work is mostly easy for any bright guy - you may have to pretend that you are working hard by staying at client site till late. Perks are good, vacation time manager onwards is 4.5 weeks / annual - Great.

Cons

There is hardly any true strategy work (Less than 20%), mostly its operations consulting, where any average management professional can get the job done - so what makes the difference between success and failure is politics and knowing the right partners - suck it up.

Be prepared to spend 70% of your time in making changed to the presentation deck based on personal taste of every partner/ sr. manager/ director involved in the project. The time spend on analysis and developing a solution is hardly 20-30% of the whole time - rest is politics management, validation and meaningless changed to slides. BTW: the firm still does not have a standard presentation format.

The firm is careless in hiring more than needed staff in good times and panicking and firing significant chunks during bad times. People are let go off - without merit analysis - its mainly politics (for above average performers). There is no single culture or intellectual level - IT side of things makes a lot of money for the company. however their mindset is completely different from Strategy & operations consulting people - that creates a lot of conflict.

Advice to Senior Management

Get more strategic projects, or declare that you are a operations consulting firm. Do not hire people with superior intellect if you don't have much work for them. Hire carefully in good times so that you don't have to fire in bulk during bad times.