Last night was the Management Consulting Association industry reception.
It was actually really useful. I learned a lot about the different firms and gained a better understanding of the industry. I really enjoyed it and got to spend a few minutes talking to lots of consultants (usually recent grads) from each of the firms. I’ll save my impressions about the firms.
In addition to talking to the consultants I also talk to, *GASP*, the Dean. He is really smart. Did I say that already? 
The guest speaker, George Stalk (Senior Vice President and Director @ BCG), discussed a lot about the new problems they are tackling at BCG and opportunities they are seeing opening up. Some interesting topics included:
- Supply chain issues that will cause some interesting problems with shipping from China and present lots of opportunities for North American manufacturers.
- Technologies that allow for “instant pricing.”
- Biz finally figuring out some of the uses of “infinite bandwidth” and how they can exploit network technologies to gain competitive advantages and not just operational effectiveness.
- The reason why “networking” is important for an organization.
I’m not sure if I necessarily agree with some of the models he showed us to support his conclusions (they seemed somewhat magical and may have made assumptions that don’t hold but he never really went into the assumptions so I can’t say for sure), none the less, interesting presentation.
Aside: The workload this week has gone through the roof. It looks like I’ll have 0 free time this weekend. 
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