Course content
Making Better Bets: An Introduction to Management Consulting
This is a practical course, where you will imagine that you are a management consultant. Your client is a large European bank who is realizing that they are facing a new generation of customers, who have been raised for a very different world – one that is completely unlike the one that your client is used to navigate. They are struggling with what meaningful services they can offer in the future to attract, support, and retain this new generation of customers. Your role will be to help solve this puzzle for them.
In order to solve this puzzle, you will have to explore and uncover questions: How do kids really navigate money? What really informs parental decisions? And what really defines which novel technologies households will trust and buy into? Going beyond conventional sit-down interviews, surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, quantitative methods and Big Data, the methods of ethnography often more accurately capture the answers to such questions.
When we are in the realm of values and valuations of people, we cannot assume them to be utility maximizing agents. In such spaces, human behavior often turns out to be unexpected, paradoxical and illogical. This course will teach you how to use ethnography as a human-centered approach to gain novel insights that may disrupt markets, transform companies and shape the products of tomorrow.
From plotting consumer navigation and mapping user experience (UX) to more holistic understandings of complex organizations and markets, fieldwork based ethnography is on the rise in the private sector. Currently, leading consulting agencies apply such ethnographic methods to get inside the real desires and decisions of consumers, to unravel the trust barometers of end-users subject to new technologies, to uncover the blind spots of complex organizations and to forecast the next mega trend. What this means is that corporate ethnography is currently used to make better bets in business and for business.
The purpose of this course is to learn how to plan and conduct fieldwork based ethnography and translate it into commercial opportunities and human centered innovation. In collaboration with a leading consultancy agency, you will learn how to plan and conduct fieldwork and translate your findings and insights into strategy formulation and actionable recommendations. You will develop a practical understanding of what it takes to work closely with different clients: From C-suite executives in global corporations to grassroots organizations.
You will work in teams towards a final presentation for the client, which is due in the penultimate class entitled Engaging the Client. Your final presentation will take the shape of a slide deck, which builds on three preceding exercises: (1) Framing of the Social Phenomenon; (2) Postcard from the Field; (3) Insights from the Field. Ultimately, this course will prepare you to question everything, even your own biases. Our only expection is that you enroll in the class with an open mind and a will to explore the real world and your own assumptions about it with genuine curiosity.
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