What would a consultant say to the Corp?

So I just spent the last few hours studying for case interviews at consulting firms. A case interview contains one or more business problems that the interviewee has to analyze and recommend a solution for. The Corp has plenty of business problems, like the ones we worked through at the last Managerial Training Seminar. Taking an example from MTS, we talked about a marketing response to a new competitor in our core market. That is, Starbucks getting all up in our [Center] grill.

Corp leaders often approach their jobs like consultants. What's the situation? Student-run business. $4 mil annual sales. At this point, the new service director or officer has a pretty good idea of what the Corp is all about and can state the situation, but what are the problems? What's the complication? One of our struggles in transition is going to be communicating exactly what the top problems are, what we've done, what hasn't worked, and what they might try. When we came into our jobs, we had a list of priorities, which was helpful, but the temptation is to take a complex issue ("DPAC") and start digging around for problems. Not everything is a problem worth tackling, and the problems we can identify aren't all the problems that exist from year to year!

I doubt the Corp will be hiring a consulting firm any time soon. But we can pay more attention to keeping some sort of coherence in our focus from year to year so that more progress, meaningful progress, can be made on a few key issues (see: vendor negotiations, internal service integration).

Back to the preparations!