Friday, 22nd of april, I was invited to a McKinsey workshop. These workshops are for getting to know each other and asking a lot of questions to the consultants. We were going to do a case study, eat together and spend a whole day like this.

Me and 20 other students were brought to “Tropical island”, an artificial jungle, swimming pool or tourist attraction built in a huge hangar once used to build large air ships for transportation. Unfortunately, the company ran bankrupt before any ship could be manufactured..

Now there´s palm trees and beaches and lots of shops and restaurants and shows but overall it is a very sad place. It is in the middle of nowhere and the industrial past is obvious in every centimeter. Everything looks really artificial, fake wood, concrete floors and few plants. It seems that more people work there – very nice and courteous people – than tourists come to visit.

Everything is really loud and not at all relaxing because the big cupula is like an amplifier and every little sound is like boosted in this huge building. At the end of the day we tried to do little presentations for the rest of the group: Impossible to understand, the salsa band outside was just to loud. Closing all the windows: Impossible to see, impossible to breathe.

But that´s McKinsey: presentations in extreme situations..

Besides, the consultants were very nice, open and communicative. They were like evangelists for McKinsey, never hiding that they work inredibly much but for a very rewarding job. One even said, he wouldn´t do it for the money because compared to the time spend, it´s fairly poor..

I don´t know if I would want to work for them. Actually, if it´s not for the money, I can imagine
a) more rewarding things to do than calculating market shares
b) do all the work for myself.

Good luck, all you McKinsey consultants!