Consulting

Being in the management consulting industry is exciting and perpetually stimulating. You never run out of opportunities to learn and be at the forefront of ground breaking insights. The works give you both the motivation and rewards to seek for new information and innovations so that you can add real value to clients.

However, it becomes tiring and draining once you stop learning new things and become stuck with intellectual masturbation. Well, some may argue that it depends on how you see learning and what sort of things define learning (pardon my self argumentation - it becomes a habit when you have stayed long enough in this industry).

I specialize in telecom and while I enjoy the constant search for new ideas in social media and perpetual distillation of emerging business models, I hate the part when you have to sit and create pre-sales decks to clients who never seem to get tired of asking for proposals. The hateful part of this process is when you keep on finding ways of saying the same thing in a different way to the same client who can't seem to figure out what he wants.

I miss the days when I use to do delivery. While it is tiring and pressure-packed to manage a project, it is fulfilling in a sense that there is real engagement and application of ideas. You may not be learning ground-breaking ideas but you do get to bring YOUR ideas to the table of those who can make them happen.

Today is just one of those days when consulting feels tiring and draining.