Making the Most of Your First Year on the Job

After completing my undergraduate career in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, I earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Since joining BCG in 1988, I've held many roles. Though my title today is Chief Executive Officer, I still remember my first year on the job as a consultant. There is no "one size fits all" formula to making a good impression in your first year, but I hope my experience will give you some insight as to what may set you up for success.

First off, I did get a little lucky. My first case was supposed to be done by a second-year consultant. We were to benchmark Japanese and Korean companies for a leading American company that was struggling against them. The other consultant decided to go work in the ’88 Presidential campaign, so he took an unexpected leave. They needed someone who understood technology and could go to Korea and Japan to do all this benchmarking work, and I just happened to be the right guy at the right time. So I got a really unique opportunity to learn a lot and play a role that maybe I wouldn’t normally have had the opportunity to play.

I think the biggest choice that I made was something that was completely counter to what I had expected to do. When I joined BCG, I thought because I loved the problem-solving part, I’d work every three to four months for a couple different clients and then I’d change all the time. It would almost be a replica of business school where you constantly have new clients, new industries, and new situations. That was mostly the model of consulting back then. It was a very generalist sort of era. What I found early on through some good fortune was that, though I loved the problem-solving aspect, I actually far more liked the ability to have impact and drive change in clients. The way to do that was to build real depth, to understand the client and build real trust and relationships in the client.

Counter to my expectations, I ended up doing my first couple of years mostly with a single client, where I worked for multiple divisions and on different kinds of topics. I really got to know them well and I developed a lot of trust relative to people with my tenure with a number of the leaders there. That allowed me to take on more responsibility earlier and it taught me why I was in this profession, which I hadn’t realized until I was immersed in it. It was the opportunity to just have enormous impact, drive change, and know you are leaving things different than how you found them. That ended up being the touchstone, literally, for the rest of my career as a consultant.

It was crucial for me to invest in building relationships with key clients who were leading the work I was doing. I was obviously very young at the time as a consultant. There were always more senior people on the client team. In my first 18 months, I had three or four different settings where I was able to build a relationship with the person who was leading the effort in that particular part of the business. They could see that I was good at what I was doing, but also that I was more concerned about the work I was doing having a meaningful impact than even they were; they could see that I wasn’t there to just produce nice charts. I was there to really help them. They saw I was genuinely committed to them and the success of the company and didn’t have other agendas beyond that.

I think this combination — trust plus relationships, good skills, and the ability to really add value — meant that we were actually taking on hard issues, such as how to reset the cost structure of one business; how to re-shape the international strategy in the other parts of that business; and how to accelerate time-to-market on the product development side. There were different kinds of issues, but understanding the company and its situation and its competitive environment helped me find ways to have impact in different areas.

The above is an excerpt from my recent interview with Poets & Quants, shared with their permission.