Recommended reading

If you’re an aspiring consultant, you may be asking: do I need to start doing cases this summer?  The answer is probably not, however, you’ll want to be familiar with what cases are (our first selection), what consulting firms are like (our second selection), and how to ready yourself to actually BE a great consultant (our third selection, Power Questions).

• Case In Point: Complete Case Interview Preparation by Marc P. Cosentino: Thinking about consulting? Case In Point is a great piece to start to familiarize yourself with cases. You’ll want to get a head-start now so that you can establish your own approach to cases throughout the fall.
• The McKinsey Way by Ethan Rasiel: Before you start running around to presentations, getting to know the firms, this book offers a great perspective into the way consultants (and in particular, McKinsey consultants) think. It is designed to be a fun read, despite being full of content. Beach read anyone?
• Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others by Andrew Sobel: Do you have interviews in the coming months? Are you trying to launch a business? Want to convince a group to take a new direction? Need people to help with something? Power Questions will make you confident in your efforts to tackle any of the above.
• Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, 5th Edition by McKinsey & Company Inc.: This book (and the workbook) are a great way to get up to speed on valuation AND a great resource that regularly gets referred to at work – consultants use it as a reference book when they don’t need to do valuation as often.
• Profit from the Core by Chris Zook: There’s a whole series which includes some of Bain’s best thinking.
• Competitive Strategy by Michael E. Porter: This is considered the bible of strategy books from an HBS guru.
• HBR’s 10 Must-Reads on Strategy by Harvard Business Review

Finance and Investment Banking

If you don’t have much finance experience, one of the most important things you can do this summer is to get a general background on Wall Street and the ways in which finance has evolved. We reached out to a number of people who successfully transitioned into banking (with no prior finance background) and they suggested the following resources as a way to get up to speed.