Ten years a consultant: what I took, what I left

For over a decade, I walked the long corridors of strategy consulting - first at Booz Allen & Hamilton, as it then was, and then through its rebrandings and rebirths.

I shaped strategy for those who traded in billions. Helped giants learn how to turn. Advised boards, built decks, landed in cities I can’t spell, solving problems older than I was.

It was exacting. Exhilarating. Profoundly formative.

But not final.

Because consulting teaches you how to advise.

It does not teach you how to decide.

And at some point, that gap is not academic.

It’s personal. It’s moral. It’s real.

What I Took

• The 80/20 instinct. A razor for the irrelevant. Booz trained us to hunt the node - the pressure point where action could ripple through the system.

• Narrative as weapon. A Booz deck wasn’t a report. It was a verdict. A logic bomb. Ten slides tighter than a sonnet, where every chart had to earn its breath.

• Pattern recognition. Once you’ve diagnosed fifty flailing giants, the symptoms stop being mysterious. You don’t guess. You see - root causes, second-order effects, resistance before it shows.

• Detachment under fire. We weren’t consultants in cardigans. We were marines in suits. We landed where the politics were thick and the answers thin. And we got to work anyway.

• The team. Brilliant, bloody-minded, beautifully unsentimental people. The kind who’d rewrite the whole strategy on no sleep if that’s what the client needed. We weren’t just smart. We were relentless. And we knew how to laugh in the dark.

• Leadership in the trenches. Not pep talks. Presence. The best partners didn’t lead from the lectern - they led from the front row, sleeves rolled, hands dirty, right beside you when the draft was due and the client was circling.

What I Left

• The illusion of altitude. From a distance, problems behave. Up close, they bleed. And real change doesn’t live in decks - it lives in calendars, in costs, in conflict.

• The safety of abstraction. Strategy is seductive. It hovers. But unless someone owns it, sweats it, fights for it - it evaporates.

• The genius game. Booz prized sharpness. But sharpness without ownership is sterile. In the real world, execution eats IQ for breakfast.

• The myth of the perfect answer. There is no such thing. The best strategy, if it never ships, is still a failure. Truth must walk the floor, not just live on the slide.

What I Learned

That leadership isn’t a keynote.

That decks don’t deliver.

That strategy, done properly, is just commitment - dressed as logic.

Booz gave me the tools.

But leaving gave me the weight. The ownership. The bruises.

And that’s the difference between drawing the map…

And carrying the pack.