The Associates Handbook

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Concept

Posts on broader work concepts to think about and implement in your way of working.

The back of the envelope

One of the most underrated skills in consulting Five minutes of estimation tells you whether four hours of modelling is worth it. Can you quickly say whether something is worth millions or tens of millions? Whether an opportunity is worth pursuing or clearly too small to bother with? That is

How to write an email people can act on

Email is your central communicatrion medium. If you nail them you increase your efficiency significantly. And, never write anything in an email that you would not want everybody to read The goal: make the message as readable and as fast to act on as possible. The recipient should understand what

One slide, one message

Slides in consulting are for reading, not presenting. The client will read your deck, forward it internally, and pull it up again nine months later. Nobody will be in the room to explain it. Every page has to stand on its own. Which puts an enormous amount of weight on

What your supervisor doesn't see

Under-communicating is the number one mistake new hires make. Here is what your silence looks like from the other side of the table, and the system that fixes it. New hires assume the supervisor sees everything. They do not. Your supervisor has their own workload, their own manager to

Ownership means it gets done, not that you do it alone

Owning a workstream means you are responsible for making sure the work gets done. Doing all of it yourself is a different obligation entirely, and high performers reliably confuse the two. An Engagement Manager at McKinsey put it better than I can: “What I didn’t understand in the beginning

Effectiveness before efficiency, and the four traps that eat your week

Every productivity technique assumes you already know what you should be working on. That assumption is usually wrong. All productivity is useless unless it aims at the right goal. Speed without direction gets you lost faster, and consulting is very good at generating direction-free urgency. So the first job

You cannot judge your own performance

The profile that gets hired into consulting is the profile least able to assess itself. Here is the instrument set that compensates, and how to install it. Most consultants are insecure overachievers. That is why we are here: smart, driven and highly self-critical. It is a productive combination, and

How to get better at your job fast

Most people improve on exactly what they are told and plateau anyway. Here is why that happens, and the complete method that replaces it. Watch how most people handle feedback. It looks responsible and it is almost useless. Feedback: “Your bullets need to be shorter.” Reaction: you add a proof-

The three levels of errors, and the three layers that catch them

A complete system for producing clean work. Three kinds of mistake, three lines of defence, and the habits that make both run without thinking about them. Errors creep into everything: PowerPoint, spreadsheets, meetings, the handover between case teams, a late-night version mix-up, or simply the hour when you

Be correct first, then be correct fast

It feels like a trade-off in your first months. It is a sequence, it only runs in one direction, and getting the order wrong will cost you a year. Clients pay somewhere between hundreds and thousands per consultant per day. A normal project runs into the millions. For that