McKinsey

Tonight I was invited to a McKinsey Israel recruitment event. It was an open invite to the Biz School and Econ School students, and then special invites from other faculties. My friend Inbar, who studies linguistics, was invited from her department. Interestingly, she didn't even know the company, but her curiosity was piqued. I agreed to go because of my curiosity (I already have a job for the summer!). It was an interesting affair to say the least...

First, the strategy/management consulting industry as a whole is very nascent in Israel. In the early 90's a number of the major American players opened offices in Israel, but ultimately they all closed their doors. McKinsey always had a presence in Israel throughout the 90's, but they only opened an office in 2000, after the others left. In addition, over the past 10 years a number of much smaller Israeli firms have emerged as well, but they cater to much smaller companies, so don't really even compete in the same ballpark as McKinsey.

The overwhelming amount of people in the crowd were Biz school people. Of the 200 people in the crowd, 10 were Econ (only 2 from graduate school. Me and my German pal Jorn), and 3 others (Inbar and her two friends).

Here is my beef with McKinsey... They are generalists. I'm actually a big fan of consulting as a career. You get to work in a project settings with a team, you get to work with really interesting companies on fantastically tangible issues. I actually have a lot of respect for specialists when it comes to consulting. Econ consulting, Finance Consulting, Energy, whatever. These firms, like NERA, LECG, FTI, EMC, whatever.
When it comes to generalists, there are those firms that I do like, like Monitor, Navigant, and Huron. These are firms that either have a great boutique-like reputation for work/life balance, or they have a distinct appreciation for academia.
McKinsey, on the other hand, is neither of any of these things. First, they are generalists (the guy even said: we look for generalists), and second, they are so institutionalized that they don't have the quality of life like others.
On the plus side, I had like 6 of their roast beef finger sandwiches. On the minus side, I felt a little sick after that on the bus home.

In other news, I am busy converting Bellman equations to general Euler equations. What fun!