Recommended Reading

These are the books I recommend most often to associates and mentees. They are grouped by when they are most useful, from interview prep to your first two years. You don’t need to read all of them. Start with the section that matches where you are, or with the topic you are working on right now. Books marked Top read are the ones I would pick if you only have time for a few.

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While you prep for interviews

• Case in Point by Marc P. Cosentino. The standard preparation book for case interviews, with frameworks for profitability, market entry and M&A questions. Keep it after you start: it is a quick refresher when you need a first structure for a new problem.
• Case Interview Secrets by Victor Cheng. A former McKinsey consultant explains what interviewers are testing for and how to show structured thinking under pressure. It pairs well with Case in Point because it spends more time on how to think through a case and less on memorizing frameworks.

Before your first day

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Top read. The best book on nonfiction writing: simplicity, clarity, rewriting and cutting clutter. Much of an associate’s day is writing, from slide taglines to emails, and this book teaches you to get to the point without detours.
• The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. The foundation of structured communication in consulting: start with the answer, then group the supporting arguments logically. Read it early and come back to it, because every email, slide and storyline you write will be judged on this structure.
• Quality Investing by Lawrence A. Cunningham, Torkell T. Eide and Patrick Hargreaves. Top read. Explains what makes a good company from an investor’s perspective: strong competitive positions, sustainable growth and sound capital allocation. It gives you a lens for judging any business you are asked to assess, which is the question behind most strategy and due diligence cases.
• Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight. Written for non-finance managers, it explains how to read financial statements and what the numbers actually say. Read it before you start if your finance background is thin, because you will meet a P&L in your first week.
• How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen. Top read. Christensen applies his theories of corporate disruption to careers and relationships, and shows how people drift into lives they never chose by putting their time into whatever gives the fastest visible return. Worth reading before consulting starts making that trade-off for you.

In your first two years

Problem solving and communication

• Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn and Robert McLean. Two former McKinsey partners walk through a seven-step problem-solving method with worked examples. Good for learning to break a problem down and decide what is worth analyzing.
• The McKinsey Way by Ethan M. Rasiel. A short insider account of how McKinsey approaches problem solving, teams and clients, including hypothesis-driven work, the 80/20 rule and pre-wiring stakeholders. Useful context for why your case team works the way it does.
• Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. A practical guide to removing clutter from charts and pointing the reader to the one thing that matters. It complements Zelazny with more recent examples.
• Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. Covers visual design for presentations: layout, typography, color and simplicity. It trains your eye for what makes a slide look finished.
• Consulting Fundamentals: Skills, Tools, and Tips by John Kim. A former Deloitte consultant who now teaches strategy at Emory collects practical advice on scoping problems, working with messy data, surveys, benchmarking and presentations. It works well as a quick-reference book to keep next to this blog.

Strategy

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Defines what a real strategy contains: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent actions. It sharpens your judgment of client strategies, and of your own recommendations.
• Competitive Strategy by Michael E. Porter. The academic foundation of modern strategy: five forces, generic strategies and industry analysis. Dense, but you should know these frameworks well enough to use them fluently.
• 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer. Describes seven sources of lasting competitive advantage, such as scale economies, network effects and switching costs. A compact framework for the question every due diligence asks: why will this business stay profitable?
• Good to Great by Jim Collins. Top read. Compares companies that made a lasting jump in performance with similar companies that did not, and identifies what set them apart. It gives you a vocabulary that many executives know and use.
• The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor. Top read. Builds on The Innovator’s Dilemma to explain how companies create and sustain new growth. Essential reading for technology and disruption cases.
• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Introduces the idea of creating uncontested market space instead of fighting over an existing one. Useful for growth strategy and market entry discussions.
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. A novel about a plant manager that teaches the theory of constraints: find the bottleneck and fix that first. Indispensable for operations cases, and it applies just as well to your own workflow.

Finance and valuation

• Valuation by Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart and David Wessels (McKinsey & Company). Top read. The reference work on corporate valuation: DCF, multiples, cost of capital and value creation. Too long to read cover to cover, so keep it on your desk for when a case turns to value.
• The Little Book of Valuation by Aswath Damodaran. A concise introduction to valuation in plain language. It pairs well with Damodaran’s free online lectures at NYU Stern.

Leading people and building things

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Top read. Essential reading on leadership under pressure: making hard decisions, managing through crisis and building organizations. The mindset translates directly to senior consulting roles and to the executives you advise.
• Build by Tony Fadell. Top read. The engineer who led the iPod team at Apple and founded Nest writes about building products, teams and a career. Practical advice on working with difficult people, making decisions and knowing when to move on.
• High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove. The former Intel CEO on how managers create output through meetings, one-on-ones and delegation. It reads as if written for the moment you start leading your first workstream.
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott. A method for giving feedback that is direct and caring at the same time. Relevant from day one, because you will give and receive feedback constantly.

Every day and every week

• The Financial Times. Reading the business section daily sharpens your sense of how companies, markets and industries behave. A subscription is one of the best small investments you can make.
• The Economist. Weekly coverage of global economics, politics and business. It builds the context that helps you connect a client’s problem to the broader trends behind it.