Deadly “pressure-to-perform” claims another life

A 25 year old with technical and business degrees from IIT and IIM, the top Indian colleges and working for McKinsey, the world’s best consulting company. Everyone would say what an amazing guy. The mental pressure around the two statements is in itself unimaginable.

It is generally accepted that at least 3 years of work experience is required to take up an advanced or Master’s degree and in the case of an advanced business degree more experience is preferred. Academic institutions should assess the work experience and the candidate’s exposure and knowledge of the business side of things before granting admission for business degrees. The guy came straight out of IIT at 22 years and landed at IIM. What exposure does someone at 22 have of business and the ones who have will definitely not take up a business degree, not at 22 for sure. Out of IIM and straight into McKinsey. It is nothing less than maniacal.

It is clearly not just the work pressure that drove him to take his life. The deadly “pressure-to-perform” comes from downstream a long way back. Suicides among students preparing for entrance exam to get into the IITs and among students studying at IITs have been rising alarmingly over the years. That is 5 years of academic mental stress with the added stress of cracking the CAT exam to get into the IIMs and then 2 years of even more academic stress during the MBA program. When he joined for work, he had already spent 7 years of his life in the pressure cooker of intense academic stress.

Work pressure and micromanagement are common in most companies now but would depend largely on the ones managing the projects. Companies like McKinsey hire the best graduates from the top colleges and then the pressure to perform and the toxicity in the work culture is thrust upon them. Now the question everyone would have asked is, why didn’t he just quit and move on rather than drown himself in the mire? Because of social and peer pressure. Can’t someone who has gone through the grind of JEE, IIT, CAT and IIM absorb work pressure and continue performing at his peak? No one would have understood, not even his family. The problem with peak performance is, no one can stay at the peak forever and down the peak could become a free fall very easily and quickly. He was way too young to manage work pressure, push back micromanagement and survive office politics and toxicity.

It took me 10 years and enough exposure of working with international clients to understand how a MBA can add value to my profile and MBA from an international college would be the best to prop up my international work experience. With age and experience comes maturity and the ability to work smarter and manage all kinds of stress. Consulting is no easy job and consulting with McKinsey means working with the top companies in the world. It is impossible for anyone to live in sustained mental stress for a long time and the younger one is the more vulnerable they are to capitulating sooner.

From the time I heard the Dire Straits classic “Private Investigations”, a narrative of the daily life of the not so scrupulous private investigators, two lines have stuck with me.

“What have you got, at the end of the day

What have you got, to take away”

What we will all eventually take with us is knowledge and experiences and not the names of academic institutions where we studied, the names of companies where we worked and the expectations of people around us. Our well being is something only we understand the best. The stress and suicides created by pressure to perform will stop when we realize these simple facts.

Evolution of consulting industry and takeaways from the world of medicine

There is a popular perception and people have told me that the consulting industry is in regression and getting jobs as consultant has become very difficult. I agree to the second part but I can never agree with the first. Consulting for me is a form of art and an art form will die out only if all the proponents of the art either stop practicing it or if their population becomes extinct.

According to dictionary, consult means to “seek information or advice from (someone, especially an expert or professional)”. This has existed for ages, from the time we became intelligent and moved out of stone age and into agriculture. The best example of this is in the caste based society of India. Each caste is created based on the occupation each person chose and certain number of occupations are grouped under the umbrella of a caste. It’s a completely different aspect that this was used to elevate certain class of people and trod upon the other classes of people to create division in the society, but irrespective of all that, if the services of a blacksmith is needed, only a blacksmith can solve the problem. This is good age-old consulting. The best example though, is that of doctors. Forget caste, creed, religion, skin color, doctors are universally believed to be the Gods on the planet, the ones who can heal the world. If consulting has to die, the entire doctor fraternity has to die and if that happens humanity will become extinct in no time.

So what has changed in consulting? People have become smarter because their knowledge has increased and also because we are becoming more sensible. Someone I know told me that she is constructing a new single storeyed house. I know she has two children so I asked her why and she said they both have grown up and will leave home soon. If they come back to stay at any point in time, let them make the house bigger. This is called being wise and people don’t need someone with the tag of a consultant to advise commonsense. Take the case of the field of medicine and how it has evolved. Natural treatment methods are traditionally based on diagnosing the diseases using the 5 senses of the doctors. But that has evolved considerably with the advances in technology. Diagnosis in any form of treatment is based on X-ray, scan and blood test reports among a slew of methods that exist now. Natural remedies work at the root of diseases to pry them out and it is a time intensive process. It does not make sense to tell someone suffering from severe migraine to keep suffering and wait for natural remedies to start taking effect, now that immediate relief for pain can be found through tablets. So natural treatment methods have changed to the point where the patients are first asked to seek immediate relief through allopathy and then switch to natural remedies for rooting out the problem. So, as a normal person I have also become smarter. First, I get the disease diagnosed that I (or my parents) have, take allopathic medication for immediate relief, look up on the internet to understand the root cause of the disease and then decide on the best course of treatment. Consulting in medicine has evolved. Why? Because there are more options for treatment, more knowledge is available and people have become smarter. This is what has happened in the consulting industry as well.

We can equate doctors with business or IT consultants but how would it be like to equate a consulting company to a hospital? We go to hospitals for diagnosis and treatment. In the world of consulting industry, there are companies that do the diagnosis and companies that do the treatment. Here, diagnosis is done on the basis of business models and the constraints they impose. Then the diagnostic report and their recommendations goes to the companies that do the treatment. If the constraints in the recommendations are not or cannot be imposed correctly, the treatment methods will also not bring the desired results. This is the disease that has been plaguing the consulting industry for a long time. The industry had evolved into two streams, companies that develop strategies and companies that implement strategies. There is a world of difference between conception and implementation. For every construction that is done, be it for house or office space, capital costs shoot up by atleast 20%. It is similar to the difference in book value and market value of a property. This is the area where the consulting industry has taken the hit. The financial meltdown of 2008 and it’s ripple effect in the financial market through the subsequent years has forced companies to go into consolidation mode, which in turn have made them smarter. They have started identifying the problems in their business themselves rather than seek outside help. What they don’t need now is someone doing playback of their problems to them and what they need are 1) Solutions to their problems 2) Successful implementation of those solutions and most importantly they need the execution to be done by a single entity. This means, for example that IT consulting companies can no longer hope to sit back and solve IT related problems only. They have to provide and implement solutions that solve business problems.

This effect has cascaded downstream to the individual level as well. Prospective employees should no longer look at completing under graduation, working for 2 years, taking up a management program and hope to become consultants. Theoretical knowledge will have to be backed up by hard core work experience with proof of contribution at the business level. Even programmers will be expected to demonstrate how the work they are doing has improved the business environment of the clients they are working for. Consultants working for the top consulting companies still have the pedigree but I believe it will not last long. Agile methodology has taken over the world, companies are streamlining their structure and operations and management levels are becoming leaner. Consultants will be expected to build strategies and create plans to implement their strategies and execute them. This is where the role of Consulting Managers will become more prominent in the times to come.

I believe consulting is not just the game about identifying problems and solving them. This can be best exemplified by how natural treatment methods work. The fundamental insight natural treatment methods have is that medicines alone cannot cure diseases. That is why they impose changes in food and lifestyle during the course of the treatment. The keyword here is change. Secondly, how the doctor bonds with the patients actually complements and enhances the effects of the medicines. The keywords here are understanding, empathy and compassion. These doctors become famous by word of mouth alone and the ones who exhibit these critical qualities become more renowned. This is what the consulting industry needs to take away and imbibe from the world of medicine. But now, the situation is at the opposite side of the spectrum. Allopathic treatment does not cure but only suppress diseases. Fever is a sign of the body immunity acting against a foreign substance that has entered our body. Paracetamol tablets only suppress the fever but does nothing against the actual cause of the fever. We live in a world where suppressing a symptom is more important than curing the disease. Patients flock to allopathic doctors who charge more consulting fee under the assumption that more money means better treatment. This is exactly similar to how top consulting companies charge more to provide solutions to clients. I have never understood the logic of more money translating into better or improved results. The business world has started awakening to this absurdity, I don’t know when people will start seeing this for medical treatment. But change is on the way. Information is out that chemotherapy does not cure cancer, chemotherapy doses are made from mustard gas and what can really cure cancer is cannabis. The world is evolving and so will consulting, but there is no cause for alarm, it is not going anywhere.