Kris Safarova

Written for business leaders and consultants who are trying to solve significant problems and create measurable value. Readers can view the templates used in consulting studies and how they are used. All the foundational strategy and business analyses tools are taught along with the soft skills and practical tools to solve any business problem. This is the only book of its kind walking the reader step-by-step through a complete consulting study. This book follows an engagement team as they assist a large company in diagnosing and fixing deep and persistent organizational issues over an 8-week assignment. Readers will learn how they successfully navigate a challenging client environment, frame the problem and limit the scope, develop hypotheses, build the analyses and provide the final recommendations. We have placed the explanation of management consulting techniques within a lively and engaging storyline, which allows the reader to truly understand the challenges faced on consulting engagements, connect with the characters, and understand both how and why they debated elements of the study. It is written so that the reader may follow, understand, and replicate a strategic engagement using the same techniques used by the leading firms, such as McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. To make the story realistic and useful, we have worked with one client engagement throughout the book. Using different examples and different clients to explain concepts would have made it difficult for readers to see the data linkages and development of the final recommendations. The client and engagement are fictitious. The data presented are also fictitious, but they are based on actual consulting engagements and the experiences of the author and the contributing McKinsey, BCG, et. al. partners at FIRMSconsulting.com & StrategyTraining.com. RESERVE YOUR SPOT FOR FREE EPISODES FROM EX-MCK ET AL. PARTNERS AT FIRMSCONSULTING.COM/PROMO FREE EPISODE FROM THIS BOOKS COMPANION COURSE AT FIRMSCONSULTING.COM/SAAMC

Learn the skills used by the leading management consulting firms, such as McKinsey, BCG, et al.

Succeeding as a Management Consultant

The heart of this Workbook revolves around the pages to plan your study: from clarifying the problem statement all the way to developing the presentation and quantifying the benefits case in $.The Workbook is divided into 3 parts: Overview, Guided Example, and Your Study.The Overview offers you a 1-page guide to the entire process we will use to create a highly customized solution for your client.In the Guided Example, we will work together through a study/project to show you how each page will be used.Thereafter, we create blank templates and guides for you to use on your own study.The Daily Pages are split into 8 weeks with a page for Monday to Friday. The pages help you understand your goals each day with a timeline reminder of the deliverables before each client update. Reminders for the client updates are built into the sheets for you to complete.The Workbook helps identify, measure, and bank the dollar value for your client (or employer) through prompts, templates, and steps to follow. If you are unsure of the process, we have built-in checks and balances so that you can go back and make corrections to any gaps in your earlier thinking. As the study begins to wrap up, we move to implementation. We show you what needs to be done to begin discussing implementation, what to implement, and how to measure and track the implementation benefits, including the sale of the implementation program.The Workbook can replace your primary planning and project management tools. By moving everything to one document that you can use every day and all the time, it allows you to better track and manage the engagement. Slides and updates can be prepared in the workbook and shared with your team and clients. By moving from laptop and slide-based discussions with clients, the Workbook increases the level of professional intimacy with a client. The Workbook is designed to be stored forever. This will contain your best thinking and should serve as a library for future studies.

The Strategy Journal

Vincent Samat

Alice Qinhua Zhou

Amish Thakkar

Kenneth R. Bertrand

Michael S. Tiu

Do you want to learn from leaders in the trenches or leaders on the benches?

Most leadership books are written after the fact. A leader achieves great success, then retires and looks back on their career, trying to piece together from memory what worked for them.

While that’s useful, what if you could read a book from leaders in the trenches rather than leaders on the benches? Leaders who are currently going through their leadership journey, and sharing what is working for them right now.

That’s what this book is. You’re going to get perspectives from six different leaders. The authors' combined backgrounds include Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain, PwC, E&Y, Bank of Montreal, Yale, Ivey, Kellogg, GE Healthcare, Infosys, Capgemini, and Sonics (now Facebook). You will explore how to build a high-performing team, cultivate relationships with senior clients, and optimize the value your team can deliver for internal and external clients.

Leadership Tools and Tactics for Navigating Growth and Change

How Leaders Get Things Done

MAVIS is a dystopian novel inspired by historical events. The technology at the heart of the novel is a real commercial process used around the world. Everything discussed about the process from the pipelines to the reactors to the mining process is based on the actual operations of these facilities. This novel is about raising the productivity of a chemical plant.

Mavis

Turquoise Eyes started off the groundbreaking new genre developed by FIRMSconsulting that combines compelling narrative while teaching problem solving and critical thinking skills. Set after a bank begins implementing a new retail banking strategy, we follow Teresa García Ramírez de Arroyo, a director general in the Mexican government, who has received some disturbing news. A whistleblower has emailed Teresa with troubling news about a mistake in the loan default calculations and reserve ratios. The numbers do not add up. The book loosely uses the logic and financial analyses in A Typical McKinsey Engagement, >270 videos: https://www.strategytraining.com/market-entry-strategy-program Our business books are different. Most people learn business because they are forced to, for their careers or to earn a larger salary. Most business books are, consequently, boring and dense. They have little incentive to be interesting because they have a captive market. Many avoid a business career because the books are presented as a hurdle to be overcome. We wondered what would happen if we made business books interesting, so people chose to read them? Would we draw more people into business? Would we generate more enthusiasm and excitement for business at a younger age? This book teaches advanced business concepts through a compelling storyline. This new genre of our books is written not only for people already interested in business but also for people who may not realize they have an interest or talent for business. Clients always request gift ideas for their children, spouses, friends, and families to get them interested in business and critical thinking. In part, this is our response to those requests. We want you to learn advanced critical thinking without realizing you are learning. We hope you will enjoy it, too. We believe the more people who find business interesting and choose to learn business, the better it is for everyone. Businesses will have a larger pool of employees from whom to select and more of the right people will be choosing the discipline to improve humanity versus simply to make more money. Imagine the advantage your children will have if they learned critical thinking in high school, or even before high school? Imagine if you had that advantage? Imagine if you had learned strategy alongside science and math in high school? The possibilities would be endless. It all starts with the right books. And it’s never too late to start. If learning is engaging, it will stop being a chore. RESERVE YOUR SPOT FOR FREE EPISODES FROM EX-MCK ET AL. PARTNERS AT FIRMSCONSULTING.COM/PROMO FREE EPISODE FROM THIS BOOKS COMPANION COURSE AT FIRMSCONSULTING.COM/SAAMC

Turquoise Eyes

HE MOST COMMON QUESTIONS we receive from our members are: a) how do we lead, and b) how do we achieve results? They are linked. We often think about words like inspiring, charismatic, motivational, energizing and visionary when we think of effective leaders. A leader who is all of the above but does not lead their teams to success will not be a leader for long. A new leader who can fire up their employees and make them feel like they are part of a world- defining journey to save mankind will soon meet the inertia of failure, without results. No matter how inspiring a leader may appear to be, if they do not get results soon, the failure of the team and/or employees in the marketplace will erase all enthusiasm. Inspiration, charisma, motivation, energy and vision are often, but not always, lead indicators of a successful leader. Yet, they are only a means to the end--and the end is always being successful in achieving a business goal.

Solve Problems Like the Leading Management Consulting Firms, Such As Mckinsey, BCG, Et Al

The Leadership Handbook

The goal of this book is to help you think like a strategy partner and, more important, develop insights like a strategy partner.Almost every management or strategy book is written after the fact. They are written years or months after the situation described. They are written after the authors have had time to sift through their extensive work and piece together a cohesive story. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.Those types of books are valuable because they eliminate the noise; the authors sift out the dead ends they encountered, and the wasteful tasks and unproductive administrative nightmares they had to endure to, for example, obtain a key piece of data.You will not see the numerous iterations before the authors arrived at their final framework. You will not know the piece of data, off-hand comment, article or client quote that sparked the evolution of the second, third, fourth and final iteration of the framework.You will not see how the hypotheses evolve as vital information and clues are unearthed in conversations with the client, from analyses and team discussions.You will not observe the choppy nature of how an insight develops. You will not see how an early version of an insight is discussed, dismissed, and sometimes forgotten until a key piece of new data makes it relevant again.You will not see the numerous discussions to tweak and adjust hypotheses, insights, and the final messaging to the client.Those books provide valuable lessons and observations. Yet the experience is what shapes a leader.This book is different and attempts to give you that experience. To see the messy steps involved. It was written in real time. The notes were written hours before an event happened or hours afterward, usually on the same day.

Learn the Skills Used by the Leading Management Consulting Firms, Such As Mckinsey, BCG Et Al

The Strategy Engagement. Part 2

The Strategy Engagement. Part 1

You need to develop a digital and information technology management strategy and want a guide to do so. What if you had one tool that you could carry into meetings and write inside, that guided you step-by-step to set out the steps of the strategy, generate the size-of-the-prize, guide your team, design the tests for the hypotheses, conduct focus interviews, develop the vision, develop the strategy, set the scope of the function, identify the needed competencies and rank them, develop a governance model, develop the governing architecture, develop the implementation plan, develop the transformation plan, be guided on service level agreements, set up a budgeting process to prioritize investments, lay the foundation for a pilot implementation, track your daily and weekly tasks, plan each major meeting, plan the message for your team and manager, manage the project and guide you through critical update meetings? Now you do. The Digital & Information Management Journal is the companion guide to our popular books like Succeeding as a Management Consultant, The Operations Management Journal, The Investment Journal, The Leadership Journal, and The Strategy Journal, an Amazon bestseller. This journal is not an encyclopedia of every consideration in developing a strategy. Our readers told us they wanted to see a best-practice guide that is practical and works. They wanted to know how to start, develop and execute on a digital and information management strategy. They wanted to create a strategy that led to action. They wanted to know how to determine what analysis to perform. They wanted to know how to manage the rollout. They wanted a guide to help them on Monday Morning 8am at the office. We meet this need with the 100-page step-by-step visual guide to a digital and information management strategy. This journal helps readers walk into any situation in any organization anywhere in the world and understand how to develop a digital and information management strategy via to-do list prompts, self-assessments, and strategy calendars. All based on the combined best-practices of the author and the ex-McKinsey, BCG, et al. partners who produce all the strategy training programs on StrategyTraining.com. On StrategyTraining.com/FIRMSconsulting.com, you have seen us over the last 10 years help numerous clients solve complex business problems: postal turnaround, merge tech giants, help a bank enter the US Market, etc. Among other tools, this journal contains a 120-page visual guide to developing a digital and information management plan to guide the reader. The Digital & Information Management Strategy Journal was used by many of our very successful clients and summarizes the approach we used to help them increase their productivity, transform their careers, set daunting career goals, outperform peers, and measure the value they create. Through daily and weekly prompts, to-do list guides, client reminders, end-of-day scorecards, templates, completed examples, checklists and reminders, the journal takes the best practices from ex-McKinsey, BCG, et al., partners and our most successful clients to help you solve mankind’s most pressing problems. The journal helps you learn the routine to solve information management and business problems like a partner. As you follow the guide, you will learn the habits of the highest-performing information management strategy thinkers. The greatest value of a Journal is that you write in them. They are not typically published in digital format. We published the digital edition of The Journal for those clients who found great value in always having a reference version with them. The digital format is therefore best purchased along with the print version. The digital format is not intended to be a substitute for the print format.

Digital & Information Technology Strategy Journal

Are you overwhelmed by intellectual noise—news, reports and social media—and just want the distilled strategy insights that most of your peers may not possess? Over the past 10 years on StrategyTraining.com and FIRMSconsulting.com, you have seen us help numerous clients solve complex business problems: developing a big data strategy, a digital & IT strategy, a pandemic & disaster strategy, a luxury brands strategy, a corporate strategy & transformation program, and much more. You have seen us use strategy tools, engagement management best practices, strategy maps, client management tools and more, summarizing the best practices from the ex-McKinsey, BCG et al., partners who produce the training programs on our platforms, and from our most successful clients, to help you solve mankind’s most pressing problems. We bring that level of thinking to our weekly insights shared in this series. Every Monday morning at 8 a.m., we send out a note and podcast to our members, offering powerful bite-sized insights from the 4-5 major business topics of the week. We don’t focus on the news or trends. We focus on the implications and how our readers and their organizations should think about these events to gain a competitive advantage in the world. Our readers consider these insights crucial to start their week strong and help move their careers forward. “I want to say thank you for putting this week’s Monday Morning 8 a.m. together. It’s very profound and has saved me from making some important decisions out of fear.” – Claire This book contains the edited version of those Monday morning insights. Our readers found it so valuable that they wanted it published in a book format for easy reference. Here it is. This book will make you a deeper thinker, a better professional and a more valued member of your organization. If you pay attention and take action, it could change your career—and your life. Most members have had to work their way through all the notes week by week. Now, it is all in one place, containing timeless lessons on strategy, leadership, competition, business and risk. Our insights help our readers step out of the noise and focus on questions like: What is the unique advantage I am developing? What is the unique insight that I can uncover in my industry/space that most others are not seeing? What are the strategy implications? What am I missing in a business trend? How do I compete? Where do I compete? How do I reach my highest potential? How do the highest-performing professionals manage their careers? How do I lead my team to maximize the results we deliver? The insights are summarized in an easy-to-read format. It would take you many hours of listening to get the same material you will get in this book. And it could very well be the information you need to achieve the results you most need and desire now. Get it, read it and take action. Be part of our movement to solve mankind’s toughest problems. Since our Monday Morning 8 a.m. insights go out weekly, we will periodically update this book with the latest insights, subject to Amazon's terms and conditions. Although we make these insights available to everyone, it is developed for our most loyal members, FIRMSconsulting Insiders and SLIDES members. At times you will see references to additional resources that our most loyal members have access to should they need to dive deeper into a specific topic (e.g., competitive strategy, digital & IT strategy, implementation, problem-solving, etc.).

Kris Safarova

About

Books

Join the club