Common consulting/business lingo

Hey there,

Daily reading of FT, WSJ, Economist helps in building business acumen. However, business acumen takes time to build especially if you don't have formal training like an MBA program where you have been exposed to a lot of business case studies. 

If you want to speed up the process, only read the headline and analyze why this might be happening before reading the article.

For example, lets take the FT article below. 

"Kellogg’s to split into three separate food businesses"

You read the headline message and before reading the article identify 3 reasons what prompted Kellogg management to make this decision. 

# 1: Kellogg might want to more optimally focus capital and resources on profitable and growing product categories and hive of rest of the product segments into a separate non-core business 

#2: Kellogg's non-core businesses could become attractive to be acquired by a PE firm or a larger consumer goods company 

#3: Positive market perception for a portfolio that is profitable and growing which could have a uptick in the stock price 

Once you have listed the three reasons , go ahead and read the article and check if your initial hypothesis was accurate 

Thanks

Ashwin 

Giving a list is dangerous (if you try to use a word without fully understanding it then it will show and be worse than if you didn't use the word).

Your best approach will be to focus on cases with a clear business angle (i.e. not brain teasers) and note the language used both in the question and the sample answers.

Hi there,

In my opinion, the best way is to download MBA case books (quick google search gives you tons of results) and just go through the cases. This will help you two-fold:

• Pick up standard business terminology in addition to some more functional terminology (e.g. finance, operations, digital, strategy) as well as different industries (automobile, chemistry, tech, pharma, O&G, etc.) → Make sure you take note of all the acronyms and understand what's behind it, which is especially important in Finance e.g. CAGR, EBIT, NPV, etc.
• Get a hang of case flow and different kinds of problems you may encounter - very straight forward

Hope this helps a bit. Best of luck!

Hi there,

A few things you can do:

1. Specifically research/learn key terminology (google, casebooks, etc.)
2. Do daily reading
   1. The FT
   2. The Economist
   3. BCG insights
   4. Robinhood Snacks
   5. Etc.

I would not worry so much about this. If you are a new graduate they do not expect you to already know the business language. For example, every industry has its own language (in pharma you talk about Rx, HCPs, Big Pharma vs Biotechs etc.) and this is something you will quickly pick up on the job.

I think if you can understand the Economist or Wall Street Journal you will be more than fine at the interview.