BCG - looking to hire 6% of LBS MBAs again this year, or even more?

BCG presented yesterday evening at LBS to MBA students seeking summer internships – this post attempts to capture the essence of what was said. As always, they didn’t talk about how they are structured, how smart and fun their people are, how they only work on the most important issues in organisations or that they are all about delivering results, not reports. Of course, they are all these things, but instead they choose to share some of their recent thinking and work – in this case the work they have been doing as strategy consulting partners to LOCOG – the London Olympics Organising Committee.

Application details
For those of you wanting just the hard facts:

• Apply online by 10 January to apply.bcg.com/LBSsummer
• First round interviews (2 x case interviews) will be on campus on 6 February
• Decision round (2-3 more interviews) will be from 10 February onwards for London, possibly later for overseas offices

PLEASE PLEASE only apply for office you want to work in – BCG (and Career Services – J-P) will not be sympathetic towards applicants securing a summer internship in one country but trying to ‘convert’ that to a permanent position in another. We have seen regular instances of this behaviour, usually with students trying to ‘switch’ from an offer in their home country to London – this jeopardises long-standing and valuable recruiter relationships for the School. If you think you may need to do this for reasons outside of your control, please come and talk to Career Services first! J-P

Recent hiring

Year     Permanent MBA Hires      Summer Internships     Permanent MiF Hries

2006                   2                                   6                              0

2007                   6                                   5                              1

2008                 11                                   7                              0

2009                 10                                   6                              1 (at least)

2010                 10                                 14                              0

2011                 21                                 16                           TBA

Source: Published LBS employment data only

Warmup

A travel glitch meant that their main presenter was considerably late for the event – bad news for a few reasons, but on the plus side we were treated to an impromptu discourse from LBS alumnus and BCG partner Sukand Ramachandran.

Acting as warmup act, and with little idea how long he needed to talk for, Sukand kept students captivated (or at least captive!) by sharing his model for thinking about the audience – there being only three kinds of people in the world:

• Colleagues
• Clients
• Friends

His simple, structured approach was this: everyone, certainly at B-School, should either be a potential colleague or client, but for those that weren’t, then at least they should be treated as a friend.

And so he shared three messages to address those audiences:

1. As potential colleagues: We are hiring from LBS for summer interns for pretty much every BCG office worldwide. For the London office, LBS represents the single biggest hiring pool. The previous class (MBA2012) was so good that BCG hired 6% of them – your challenge is to live up to that class? Can you beat them?
2. As potential clients: More students this year have signed up for presentations from Google than Goldman Sachs; more for Facebook than McKinsey. So for those of you that don’t want to be bankers or consultants – BCG is working for a lot of the sorts of companies that you want to work for – we look forward to working with you one day.
3. And as potential friends: BCG is actively involved with the biggest show in town this summer – the Olympics. We think you’ll be interested, at least in what we have to say this evening!

BCG and the Olympics

By this stage partner and MD James Platt had arrived, together with a box of prizes for quiz questions, and proceeded to give us an entertaining view of some aspects of the work BCG has done with LOCOG. I first worked with James as a client – I was with Rio Tinto – he was a rising manager in a large and very smart London-based team struggling to get Rio's dysfunctional senior team to enact one a highly ambitious transformational change programme. Senior management divided, with a McKinsey-loyal camp in the ascendancy pursuing an ill-thought through growth and acquisition strategy, which ultimately concluded in a disastrous acquisition and Rio very nearly going under. BCG palyed no part in those events, and James was clearly a star then, able to navigate a very complex set of organisational politics and relationships in order to achieve all the ambitious goals we set for the team. He has evidently gone from strength to strength… J-P

BCG has had a long-term relationship with the London Olympics over the last 4-5 years. BCG were chosen to be LOCOG’s strategy consulting partners in competition with the other two strategy firms - and the arrangement in as exclusive, no-fee one (I presume Bain and McKinsey were in mind here – BCG’s view of who their competitors are remains as focused as ever? – J-P). We believe the London Games will be different for reasons including

• London and the UK’s large, sport-s aware and relatively affluent population
• Infrastructure constraints in the UK
• Consequential practical difficulties around issues such as ticketing, transport, security etc
• Extreme funding challenges in a period of austerity

BCG has worked on several key projects over that time, including the following key ones:

• Merchandising
• Ticketing & hospitality (especially pricing)
• Client experience
• Organisation design

Merchandising

James shared some of the high level and surprising insights the merchandising team had come up with – especially the top 6 categories of merchandising by value (to LOCOG) – including the amazingly high margins on pins (sold for pounds, produced for pence, in vast numbers) and the relatively high value of slapping the Olympic logo on a plain T-shirt rather than an Adidas-badged one.

Ticket Pricing

James described what sounded like a very large model. Ticket pricing should be a function of

• Supply – details of venues, capacities, event scheduling etc
• Demand – popularity of events
• Benchmark prices – what people pay for similar or analogous events
• Bottom-up review – ensuring utilisation targets are met

Each of these was broken down, giving a total of 14 factors that were scored for each Olympic event. The pricing model was then iterated to allow for constraints (eg commitments given by LOCOG to the IOC), and then events grouped into price bands to simplify as much as possible.

While distancing BCG from the ticket allocation process (I couldn’t detect whether their was guilt or just embarrassment on this subject J-P), James felt the pricing scheme had been incredibly successful with almost all events already sold out and final rounds of allocating contingency tickets still to go, and financial targets well on their way to being met.

Customer Experience

The customer experience project started out with the aim of ensuring commitments were met and expectations exceeded for each of the IOC’s 9 defined ‘customer’ groups. These could essentially be regrouped into 3:

1. People such as the ‘Olympic Family’ who want the greatest ever Games
2. Those such as athletes and media who simply want the whole thing to function effectively and efficiently
3. Spectators and others who are hoping for a really magical experience

With great complexity and tight finances, this sounds like it turned into a complex prioritisation exercise, constantly trading off who to disappoint buy how to ensure the best possible Games for the money. We’ll have to wait till summer to see the effects, but I can imagine that without such a rigorous modelling process all sorts of different trade-offs would have been made. Perhaps a little deflating for some of those involved – J-P?

Defining these requirements in detail took years (definition being down to the level of whether athletes would have televisions in their rooms, and what food would be served, when and where…)

Results

BCG and LOCOG are confident that London will be

• The biggest commercial success of any Olympics ever
• One of the best organised
• A great spectacle, albeit not on the scale of Beijing

Well, I guess we only have a few months now before we find out! J-P