Throw a tough set of problems at a talented group of consultants, ask them to devise the best solution, and you’ve got quite a serious competition that we call the Management Consulting (MC) Games.
This 3-month, voluntary Olympics of Consulting competition is designed to simulate a real-world consulting engagement. During the most recent MC Games, held in 2015, multi-level, interdisciplinary teams were pitted against each other to solve one of 13 large-scale, strategy-level client challenges presented by a Booz Allen leader. More than 350 team members came from 44 Booz Allen office locations around the world—from Washington, DC, to the United Arab Emirates and Korea—and were coached by 95 Booz Allen leaders.
Seven of the problems tackled by the 52 teams came from inside the firm, like “how to build a better career manager,” while the remaining six were market facing, including how to manage gender equality in the military and looking for the “next big thing” in our health service offerings. All of the challenges tackled real-world issues offered to the players by the leaders who face them; the winning solutions were considered for implementation, and in many cases were implemented.
