Word: client
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Conrad announces, to the team's surprise, that it is his 31st birthday today. To celebrate, he and Wang hold a meeting to discuss the results of survey research his sub-team has been conducting. Conrad is anxious about making his volumes of data relevant for the old-school client. Wang has been brought in to support Conrad's efforts by applying the fancy Excel tricks she has recently learned. Conrad is visibly relieved to have someone to bounce ideas off of and he insists that I call Wang "Powerhouse," a nickname she has earned for her ability to absorb...
...Wang returns to the team room, where Scott, a high-ranking member of PRTM, has arrived for a meeting with the client's top management. He and Tom set to work preparing for the meeting. A little bit later, Scott pulls out pictures of his young daughter--Tom assures Scott that he "looks better as a girl...
...Wang has people to see. She heads out into the sea of cubicles to meet with her contact in the client's finance department. At his desk, she doesn't sit down--but stands by the end of his desk and takes control of the meeting. Wang exhibits the same sensitivity to people's state of mind that she showed with Conrad--she asks the man about his daughter and about the progress of his new home. The unspoken message is that she understands how full his plate is. She leaves him with a so-called structured task, as planned...
...team room to get started on some of the work she has agreed to do in support of Mike and Conrad. This mainly consists of managing pieces of presentations, crunching numbers in Excel and producing visual depictions of data that are simple enough to be presented to the client. During the next two hours, Wang's job begins to look a lot like those of her friends in investment banking which she describes as a low-level information gathering exercise that consists of "sitting in front of a spreadsheet for 12 hours a day." Even with the daily doses...
...collegiate metaphors does not erase the fact that consulting firms are populated by extremely ambitious and "overachieving" people. During my visit, everyone was on good behavior. But management consultants do not always feel valued, projects that involve tremendous amounts of work may, in fact, have little effect on a client decision-making and sometimes, ambition can mar the ideal of harmonious teamwork...