Siliceous and Delicious

Finally got out of the house early enough to fit in a swim, then met Michael Lesley for a brief breakfast chat, and eventually settled down to work. It was a pretty nervous morning, as the impending titular event of the day approached, and I didn’t have much of a brain for my morphospace work.

An email came in about next weeks’ career events, and I got very distracted doing a bit of background research on the companies attending the Consulting Boutique Night—an opportunity, I thought, to meet some people who were not part of the Fortune 500/big 5 consulting world. Found it pretty interesting to see the stark differences in language used on their websites among the 17 firms listed as attending. The “about us” descriptions were almost non-overlapping—for some, it’s all about value maximization and other finance/management-speak garbage, others seemed to focus on totally different things in their self-descriptions. Altman-Vilandrie focuses on just a few industries, that happen to be ones that sound kind of interesting: communications, media, clean tech and related technology. Dalberg says their goal is to raise living standards in developing countries and solve global challenges. Innosight seems to be all about innovation, based on the “disruptive technology” idea from HBS prof Clay Christensen, who founded the company (their employee profiles were definitely more interesting than just B-school types—they seem to have a lot of interesting people on their staff with a variety of backgrounds); best of all, they’re in Boston. The others were obviously not for me—any firm that lists “financial services”, “business services”, or “private equity” under their specialties is automatically off the list for me. The Greatest Good sounded like they might be cool, from their name, but turned out to be an economist-haven. No, thanks. I don’t think I’d be happy working for the author of Freakonomics (literally), throwing rational utility-maximization dogma at any and every problem in the world.