1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Management Consulting Casebook
3. by The Consulting Club at MIT
4. Edited by Jeremy David Curuksu
5. March 2015 Cambridge MA
6. Table of Contents
7. Contributions
8. 1. How to Develop a Tailored Case Structure?
9. 2. High Level Case structures
10. 2.1 Proposition for a “one-size-fits-all”
11. 2.2 The Profit framework
12. 2.3 Operations
13. 2.4 Growth
14. 2.5 Pricing
15. 2.6 Mergers & Acquisition
16. 2.7 New venture & Start-ups
17. 3. Practice Cases
18. 3.1 Lymphoma
19. 3.2 Coolarpess
20. 3.3 Travel Logistics
21. 3.4 Pharma+
22. 3.5 Video Interpreter
23. 3.6 Acquisition Railways
24. 3.7 Chemicals
25. 3.8 A Classic brainteaser
26. 3.9 Foodland Turnaround
27. 3.10 Coffee Shop
28. Pharmaceutical Operations Cost Reduction
29. Pharmaceutical Strategy Private Equity New Product Brainteaser Profit New Market
30. Difficult Difficult Difficult Medium Medium Medium Medium Easy Easy Easy
31. Contributions
32. This casebook and its 10 original cases were conceived and executed through the volunteer effort of a dedicated project team at CCM in Spring 2014. The generous fellows are listed below –JC
33. ! Jingnan Lu 2 cases
34. ! Benjamin Lai 1 case
35. ! Ayla Ergun 1 case
36. ! Ani Rajashekar 1 case
37. ! Hasan Celiker 1 case
38. ! Bangqi Yin 1 case
39. ! Patricia Egger 1 case
40. ! Jeremy Curuksu 2 cases + introduction (§1/§2)
41. 1. How to Develop a Tailored Case Structure?
42. The dilemma
43. A classic dilemma for consulting practitioners is how much to rely on pre-defined frameworks. When does a structure stop qualifying for “one size fits all” and start “reinventing the wheel”? How to strike a right balance?
44. Developing a tailored case structure is a frequent source of failure from candidates at case interviews because there is no clear consensus on what represents a good MECE (mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive) framework. Some consultants (hence interviewers) openly recommend never using preexisting frameworks yet developing multi-prong structured approaches. This was explicitly advised at a McKinsey social gathering (yours truly!). Other professionals consider reference structures and experience to be invaluable building blocks when developing a tailored case structure.
45. Who is to say who is right? Well in this casebook we will assume that reference frameworks such as the ones presented in section 2 should be leveraged when developing a tailored case structure. This is because we believe that the other type of discourse suffers from inconsistencies and learning issues: it is easy to recommend following your gut and being creative when you have worked in the industry for a few years but for a beginner to adopt best practices we recommend to leverage the widely popular frameworks.
46. The current section provides recommendations for tailoring and section 2 provides a set of tools and experiences that have proven successful in the past indeed.
47. Tailoring
48. The concept of inductive reasoning is key to develop a tailored case structure. A tailored structure represents an issue tree which can be constructed by following 5 steps:
49. Step 1: Define one key focal issue
50. This initial issue should be carefully designed with the client (a.k.a. the interviewer).
51. Step 2: Brainstorm key sub-issues
52. The second step is where tailoring already starts. A classic mistake is to skip steps 2-4 and directly use a popular framework in the lines of those suggested in section 2. Indeed all sub-issues should relate to the key focal issue in a way that the consultant (a.k.a. the interviewee) can easily articulate. But again one needs to strike the right balance: to efficiently brainstorm and navigate through relevant ideas the popular frameworks and your personal experiences will both be of assistance.
53. Step 3: Build an issue tree by clustering sub-issues into MECE categories
54. Step 3 consists in cleaning the set of issues gathered in step 2. Goal is to avoid redundancies and clarify meanings. Step 2 and 3 are recursive since step 3 might help detect missing issues and send back to step 2.
55. Step 4: Prioritize issues and sub-issues
56. Step 4 consists in re-arranging the set of issues selected in step 3. Goal is to prioritize the most important issues for which data can be gathered and analyzed within a reasonable time frame.
57. Step 5: Ask questions to validate / invalidate hypotheses and gather facts / figures
58. Step 5 is where the research and analysis part of the assignment really starts. In a real-life client assignment the structure provides pointers to delegate tasks in the team and to assess progress in the project.
59. Hypothesis generation
60. The key focal issue as well as the sub-issues are often called hypotheses which is a more direct form of inductive reasoning whereby the researcher starts with an intuitive answer based on its experience or expertise and gather facts to (in-) validate the hypothesis.
61. Hypothesis-generation is often used because it leads to more focused and thus potentially more efficient data gathering.
62. Client bias
63. When developing a structure it is also important to resist the temptation of following too closely the client’s suggestions. A key feature explaining why management consulting met so much success in the past is that diagnosing a problem and identifying root causes both require unbiased and analytical inquiries. Even if business experience and acumen can help prioritize some lines of inquiries a consulting diagnostic and prescription ultimately must rely on facts and figures.
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