Something I am trying to do more of lately is keep an accounting of my daily activities and celebrate the little victories that we have in life. I had a buddy who is going to get sponsored for an internship at Johnson & Johnson. I had a roommate get a perfect score on our accounting test. I helped a girl I know talk through and practice a presentation that she needs to give. There are things every day where we make a difference or celebrate in the successes of others.
I am realizing that more and more my decision to pursue consulting is a huge fit for me. I resonate and am passionate with it. I feel like I have been doing it in small ways my whole life and now I finally know what it is and I have an opportunity to shoot for the stars. I keep getting new things suggested to me all the time. Whether it is a new book to read like the Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen or Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni (the second one is not as "exciting" as it sounds but I am still excited to put them on my booklist) or it is a new contact to tap into, there are opportunities all over the place. It isn't just who you know but who knows you.
Two great examples were first the lunch I had today with a possible mentor of mine. He is a local consultant with a practice built around Organizational Development. I can't really explain how great our meeting was except that I felt like I really was understood and that I could in turn understand. It has been hard at times with different settings I have been in to be lost in jargon or have some miscommunication but in this instance, I felt like I was on the same page and it was greatly reassuring. I feel like I have not just found my passion but it something I have unknowingly been preparing for and studying out my whole life. It is as Paulo Coelho wrote in his novel, The Alchemist, "People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of."
The other success I had which I can go into more detail about was a case competition that was recently held at the University of Utah. Kalypso is an innovation consulting firm with a virtual office who recruits heavily from Utah. We are 1 of 5 colleges that they go to for direct recruiting. I had been networking my tail off at all of their events and I connected with their business model and consulting process. It was fascinating. In their competition, they had us read a graph and provide a reason why and suggestions for how to fix a gap that was depicted between the forecast and the current revenues from NPD (new product development). My group had a variety of backgrounds and since I only had 20 minutes of experience to learn how to approach one of these cases, I was free to listen to everyone who had suggestions. I even had to swallow my pride a bit and let some of the undergrads take the spotlight during the presentation of our conclusions.
The important or best part for me wasn't the fact that we in the end won the competition and got to go to dinner with the Kalypso team, the director of the MBA program, and a few other individuals, but it was the things I learned. The winning answer we presented was a well constructed framework where we restated the problem, presented the conclusions, and then walked through our process and posed questions we would ask in the future. The format was constructed by one of the undergrads. The MBA2 in our group had a finance background so he thought to bring some of the marketing basics in such as to talk about price and the forecasting. I brought in experience of taking the core product and attempting to restructure it or apply it in a new innovative way to increase sales along with being able to talk about the graph itself and discuss exterior and interior forces like repositioning products to limit possible effects from cannibalization of market share.
The ideas that the Kalypsonians brought to the field though were things like tying promotions from the core product to new products similar to Starbucks Coffee same-day coupons. They talked about choosing to avoid to use exterior forces as reasons for failure and working to push for results within the organization. They talked about researching and making sure that more advertising and marketing was being pushed for the new products to broaden the success of the launch. They had so many simple but effective ideas and visiting with the team over dinner was invaluable as well. Everyone had pushed to sit around the hiring manager during the dinner but noting that some of the key individuals had yet to show up, I set myself up to the right of the head of the table on the other end. This got me into conversations with one of the founding partners, a senior manager, our director of our MBA program, and all I had to do was be strategic with where I chose to sit. Enough little wins can help you secure the war.
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