More on International Opportunities

After a year at BCG I wanted to spend some time working in a completely different culture, so I requested a case in the Mumbai office. The four months I spent there was a truly unique learning experience. On a day-to-day basis I interacted directly with the most senior management in one of the largest industrial goods companies in India. Working with clients in India was quite different from what I was used to in London. Their style was more direct and we would meet more frequently and less formally, often over a Chai. The flamboyant and sometimes chaotic Indian life also made everyday experiences very different from London, from my daily 'rollercoaster' taxi ride to the office, to Bollywood dancing with clients on a party boat in the bay. Based in Mumbai I was also able to travel around more exotic parts of India over long weekends, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. On occasion work and travel came together in a way that they only could in India—I once travelled for over 20 hours to run a meeting in a factory high in the Himalayas!

Even before my ambassadorship in the Sydney office, my case work offered opportunities to work abroad. One of my first projects involved BCG consultants in four different European countries and we would meet in Sweden to bring together our thinking and for client workshops (accompanied by midsummer dinners with a hundred varieties of herring on the islands outside Stockholm). During another London project with an international music company, we uncovered a recording studio in Germany which needed some attention and I spent a bit of time there. I always enjoyed the burst of adventure of these shorter trips! Having lived in four different countries when growing up, I personally wasn’t interested in doing a full project abroad, but I saw other people from my cohort spend longer periods of time in Paris, Toronto, Spain and Italy.

For me, one of the attractions of consulting is the flexibility it offers – not only in terms of the industries and topics that you work on, but also geographically. In my first two years at BCG I worked on a variety of industries including financial services, energy, and media. In my third year I began to focus more on media and then in 2007 I decided that getting some media experience internationally would be both good for my career and good fun. One of the benefits of media cases is that they tend to be in big, exciting cities. I had the option of working in LA or Sydney, and it finally worked out that I went to Sydney with my wife to work on two cases for two different TV companies. We finished off with a classic Aussie campervan trip – beaches, BBQs and surfing.