!m Willemstyn Week 4

This was an interesting week, because my mentor revealed some interesting information about why we were here. For starters, I’ve felt very positively towards the entire higher level leadership team (like Senior VPs) and have been impressed by how brilliant they all are. However the reality has started to hit: the company is stagnating and was in a very poor financial place 6 months ago when my mentor was building this internship. Most of the deliverables we’ve been creating are resources that he knew the company needed, but nobody was taking the time to focus on. It’s weird to think that they could have just done this themselves 6 months ago, but instead it took an external group coming in, assembling all the data, and presenting it back as a pretty obvious solution. According to my mentor: that’s the entirety of consulting. Those operational issues led to poor communication across departments. That’s led to some interesting developments in the CEO search, since there’s a lot of frustration towards internal leadership, and it’s unlikely the board will select any current !m-ers. Although the interim CEO has assured everyone that the external candidates are all on board with the emphasis on values and collaboration at the company, he or she will definitely shake up the culture in some way when they enter in. I don’t think it would be my place to address any of these issues, but it’s been cool to pick up on these tensions and have my mentors to corroborate those feelings with. That’s another reason our Jepson alum was so intent on starting the internship program this summer. He admitted he could have created our deliverables, but he didn’t want to step on toes around the office by dredging up this information. For example, the sales guys are paid to be aggressive go-getters, so that we ultimately have client work; but they aren’t open to discussing their processes with the rest of the company. It’s clear to me that they’re just impatient, smart guys who don’t want to break it down and are possibly a bit secretive on purpose. Whatever the reason, it would have been awkward for anyone on the inside to point that out, and it was awkward enough for our intern group to try and do it. Luckily, we appropriately brought the tension to the attention of the senior leadership team, and they’re already creating a gameplan to address these issues.