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Do you always need an MBA to get into MBB?
McKinsey & Company Hey folks!
Was wondering what sort of life sciences projects does usually the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company take on?
Commercial, access and pricing, M&A, transformation, implementation? (all of them perhaps?)
Basically, what would someone with an LS background be mainly working on in these firms on a day-to-day basis?
Thanks!
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I worked with a senior partner at McKinsey who was on 3-4 continents every week (based in London with a long term client in Chile who insisted he be there every week and other clients in Africa, Asia, and the U.S.)
Massaging egos and managing stakeholders is actually adding a lot of value. Clients often know what they need to do, it just needs to get aggregated in one place or they need to have something that says McKinsey on it for the board or owners to believe it. There’s some truth to the joke that clients are paying consultants to look at the client’s watch and tell them the time—clients often just don’t know who has the watch or trust that it’s telling the correct time. I left consulting at one point and joined a client’s internal strategy team. The day I was to start a project, the CEO said he needed to have McKinsey do it instead because he needed to go to the board with something that said this was McKinsey’s recommendation. Never mind that I would have been leading the project for McKinsey had he hired McKinsey for it six months earlier, or that I knew McKinsey didn’t actually have experience in that area.
The jet setting partner also brought deep content experience. He’s worked in the industry a long time, knew best practices, and could recite cost structures, regulatory considerations, etc. from memory. And he has a certain gravitas. I learned a lot from him, both in content and communication.
There are times when things blow up (the senior partner sleeping on a table was when a client was really unhappy with us/him) or during DD when you do need to work crazy hours. It shouldn’t be the norm, but it happens in the client service business. I don’t love it, but I knew what I was getting into.
We view BCG Principal as a step above EM but not AP yet, since the McK Partner equivalent at BCG is MDP. Just wanted to level your expectations, we recently hired a principal as an EM in US and comped them as a third year EM with the idea that we will move them to AP in a year. To answer your question, the AP TC is ~ 400 - 450 including AA. The lifestyle is pretty grueling if you are on the OPs side since you could be doing as many as 10 flights a week to get to client sites. You typically ED 2-3 studies, 1-2 LOPs, and some office/practice stuff.
So many acronym
10 flights a week? Sounds very exaggerated
Which practices are the least demanding in terms of traveling and hours?