#123 McKinsey Partner to Indie Freelancer - Adam Braff on writing online, the gig economy, consulting skills, consulting

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I'm talking with Adam Braff. He runs his own consulting firm now as a freelancer, Braff and Company, and focuses on data analytics, forecasting, customer experience, a bunch of other things. He's also a former strategy consultant like myself. He writes a lot on the internet and one of his articles recently jumped out for its creativity, talking about a recent controversy with McKinsey.

I'm excited to dive into all of that today. Welcome to the conversation, Adam.

[01:44] Adam Braff: Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me on.

[01:46] Paul: Yeah, excited to dive in. I think, It's always fun to connect with people who are writing actively and exploring these unconventional paths. It seems like the people who end up writing have this sort of hyper-curiosity, which has now found a home in the world with being able to share and reach so many people online. So excited to dive into that. The first question I do start with people though is, What are the stories and scripts you grew up with that were the form of, these are the things I need to do as an adult to be seen as a successful person?

[02:28] Adam Braff: It's funny that you started by talking about writing because writing, writing was a part of that. And I grew up in a house where everybody was writing all the time. Wow. And, uh, and you know, my mom, I, I have been publishing a newsletter to my friends, uh, called The Narcissist, which is a, uh, a very small circulation that's kind of imposed upon people. You don't really subscribe to it. It just shows up.

And I've been writing that for a long time now. And I just found an old trove of newsletters that my mother was writing for effectively like the local parent-teacher organization. And I think I was subconsciously copying the style of writing that she was doing and the full layout with the funny clip art and everything she was doing. I had sort of imitated that. So I think that's one of the stories. Was always be writing, always be editing.

There was another story in parallel, which for lack of a better word, I guess I'd call it marketing analytics. My father, who's now retired, was basically a data analytics consultant slash marketing analytics guy before his time and did a number of jobs. But the main one that I remember was running a mail order catalog mail order business where he was selling jewelry through direct marketing and doing just a ton of data analytics and A/B testing and concepts that were reinvented probably 5 times between then and when you and I were doing similar stuff at a consulting firm.

[04:03] Paul: Wow. He, yeah, he was definitely ahead of his time, right? There wasn't, there wasn't like paths and fields mapped out for people like that. That's amazing.

[04:13] Adam Braff: Yeah. What he, what he said at the time was that the idea of sending out a direct mail piece, like a catalog to one group of people and holding out a control group to another group of people that existed as a concept and it was being taught in business schools, but to actually do it in the real world was unusual. And they would rigorously test the layout of the catalog and pricing and which pieces to promote and the quality of different lists. So, I just grew up with that kind of in the water, and I figured it was how everybody runs their businesses in a very analytical and data-driven way. And then as I got older and got into business and consulting myself, I saw that there's much more intuition going on as well. Yeah.

[04:55] Paul: What I thought one interesting thing in your bio, you sort of mentioned this offhand, you shifted from MIT to Brown in undergrad, which I mean, knowing these two schools, very different cultures, how did you decide to go from Cambridge down to Rhode Island?

[05:16] Adam Braff: Yeah, which is where I am now. I'm back in Providence, Rhode Island, it turns out. The short answer to the question is that I was the only linguistics major in my class at MIT. Linguistics exists there, and you've heard of Noam Chomsky, and he was there at the time. And it was something that I knew I wanted to study even from the first day that I started college, even before I applied. But when I got there, almost all of my friends, who are lovely people, are engineers.

They were engineers, they were scientists. They were— it was not the kind of school where you would go and be surrounded by people doing something that resembled liberal arts, even though linguistics is itself kind of a science. With its own, you know, rigorous way of forming and testing hypotheses. So linguistics, you know, all the majors at MIT are numbered as different concentrations, right? So, you know, sorry. So if you're econ, you're Course 14 or whatever.

And linguistics is the last of these. Course 24 is linguistics and philosophy. So I was really the only Course 24 linguistics major out of all the, you know, 1,000+ students there. And I, figured I would be better off at a school that had a little more social sciences going on. So that's why I transferred.

[06:31] Paul: Yeah. How did you first become interested in consulting?

[06:36] Adam Braff: I became interested in consulting during the first dot-com boom era. I was a lawyer in Washington, DC due to a wrong turn I made in my career, my professional life coming right out of undergraduate school. Where I had to have—

[06:52] Paul: Many such cases.

[06:53] Adam Braff: Yes. You know, there wasn't much better to do in that recessionary era than go to law school with my then girlfriend, now wife. So we became lawyers. I figured out pretty quickly that I didn't want to be a lawyer. And in Washington, D.C. at the time, if you were a lawyer who could do math, you were in the sweet spot of targeting for professional hires into McKinsey, BCG, and the like.

That was the population they were fishing in. Because there aren't a lot of other professionals hanging around Washington, D.C. other than lawyers. And the subset of those that can do math and have some interest in business are exactly the people who get recruited into consulting firms. So that's how I got kind of snapped up.

[07:38] Paul: Yeah. And it's an interesting time. I think the '99 from 2001 period, I actually started at McKinsey in 2008 and I joined in their knowledge practice. And our office was an abandoned— or it was basically a false start to enter the tech industry in the early 2000s. It was— I forget the original name of it, but it was like The Accelerator. Yeah, they, they were trying to do something there and they just had the space.

So we had this legacy of like this weird creative start, which really was injected into the culture, into the office, and led to me having such a good experience there. But yeah, what, what was it like from '99 to 2002? Because that's such an interesting time because also so many of the things that failed then are now just like part of our lives now.

[08:36] Adam Braff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there were the ones that failed, the Pets.com, you know, and Webvan and stuff that we make fun of. But it was also the era of the earliest days of Amazon and Google. And, you know, you never really knew what was going to hit. So what did it feel like?

Well, there was an overwhelming focus on what was then called e-commerce, right? Which would now be like a subset of digital and kind of just the fabric of the universe that everyone's working on. Everybody wanted to work on e-commerce studies, and there was just a lot of ferment going on. There were even games we were playing. We did a virtual stock exchange competition where we all pretended to buy and sell stocks. I actually won the competition.

I am going to humble brag a little bit here. So I won this competition to basically day trade stocks with paper money on McKinsey's time for something like a year-long period during the dot-com boom. And it got me thinking as much as anyone else about, oh, should I really be sitting here in this chair or should I be out there starting a restaurant reservation? Business. And I decided to stick around. So everybody was facing that choice, right?

Do you stick around and try to do e-commerce projects and become a, like a, you know, a leading light in that world of consulting to digital businesses? Or do you go into the entrepreneurial side? I've never been a tremendously entrepreneurial guy until the day that I left consulting and did a couple of jobs that we'll talk about and became an independent consultant. So at the time I decided to stick it out and become a manager basically at McKinsey all the way up through to partner.

[10:23] Paul: Yeah. What, what was that journey like? I mean, I know given your bio, you founded the customer experience practice and that, that must have been a good path for you to kind of make it to partner, which is a Pretty challenging thing to do. Most people end up leaving. But was that a big part of kind of your trajectory there, helping to build that and shape that new space?

[10:50] Adam Braff: Doing a functional thing at McKinsey is both a headwind and a tailwind. It's something that's distinctive. It's a way to serve clients. It's a way to create knowledge. It's a way to develop people. The traditional program at McKinsey, I think you know, is much more industry-focused, much more maybe geographically centered within your office area.

So the traditional program is like two giant clients in a specific industry that are directly competing with each other, and you are somehow stewarding a bunch of different functional projects for those clients. And that wasn't at all what my program looked like. I was very much a functional guy. I was a creature of both kind of the marketing function and the operations. Function. So in some sense, I had made my journey probably as difficult as possible for getting elected partner there.

But it paid off and I was able to do a terrific mixture of marketing analytics projects, customer service operations projects, and what you pointed out, the customer experience projects, which were kind of a blend of the two. I was able to do that for some time.

[12:01] Paul: Yeah, it's interesting. When I joined in '08, and I joined the operations practice and post-recession. I think you left around a similar time too. Operations was really one of the bigger practices that sort of, helped them come out of that because they were able to like build, build this large bench. So maybe you helped influence some of that shift as well, but it definitely seemed that operations and other functional practices were becoming a little more high status within the firm as well?

[12:37] Adam Braff: I think so. Operations has this nice built-in hedge. If you're doing service operations work, like the stuff I was doing at call centers, you can just as easily work on cost reduction projects as on revenue enhancement projects, even within that channel. So operations people have had a pretty good run there for some time.

[12:55] Paul: Yeah. What, what made you want to leave? I imagine you were only partner there for a few years.

[13:03] Adam Braff: Yeah, I was a young partner. I felt like the functional stuff I was doing would be— I was just kind of itching to get out into the world and to do things for real with companies on a sustained basis. I had 3 young kids who were born all during my time at McKinsey, and I had a program that took me very far away from where I was living in DC. And so I said, all right, let's, you know, my wife and I went on what we call the strategic planning offsite. We took a trip to Paris and we talked about it and said, should I stay or should I go and get into, you know, business? And as soon as I made the decision to go, and then as soon as I just dangled the line in the water, I was testing ideas around, should I become an analytics executive or an operations executive?

I found a lot of traction on the analytics side. This was an era where they were just starting to coin the phrase big data, and tons of people needed somebody to come in and be an SVP of analytics. And so those were the offers that I got, and that's why I made the jump.

[14:06] Paul: Yeah, that's, that's a pretty cool time period to be doing that as well. I mean, I remember like the term like data scientist didn't even exist now, and now it's wild how many data analytics people like firms like McKinsey and BCG have. They have probably thousands of people by now. They were starting to build the practices when I was at those places in the early 2010s. But did you consider becoming a freelancer at that point, or were these opportunities sort of like greenfield for you as well? So it felt just as exciting.

[14:42] Adam Braff: No, the whole point was to be part of a big organization and to build something sustainable, Right. So making the move from McKinsey to JPMorgan Chase to, to be their head of customer data and analytics was a very deliberate pivot from one big organization to another kind of big organization. The idea of being a freelancer was very, very far off in my mind and far off into the future.

[15:04] Paul: Yeah. What do you think were some of the biggest things that kept you in consulting for so long? There must have been. I mean, I stayed in the field for 9 years. I jumped around to a bunch of different firms, but I just loved synthesizing information and making sense of ideas. And eventually when I became good at that, that's when the other stuff I became less inspired by.

But what were some of the things that kept you in at McKinsey?

[15:33] Adam Braff: I think for about 10 years, the two things I would say were first, the diversity of work even within my sort of narrow-ish functional slice or slices. There were so many different industries I could serve, and that's just not a thing you find outside of consulting. The ability to go from a bank to a hotel to a telco to an insurance company and do something that by then I was pretty good at helping them improve the customer experience at a positive ROI or helping them set up a set of tests to improve customer lifetime value. So having that diversity of different problems to solve, I think was one. The other was the quality of the people. There is a tremendous, I would call it an elevated floor on the people at McKinsey, right?

You could take for granted that 80% of the people you're going to work with are going to be extremely good at what they do in whatever function they're in. And you can rely upon them. To be a very complete team that can take on work as you delegate it, hand it out, and synthesize things. In the real world, you're not going to find a lot of organizations where like the 20th percentile person is really great. You know, in most organizations, I'm just going to be honest, it's maybe you get it, you have to get up to like the 30th or 40th percentile person in the firm before you find someone who you absolutely love working with and who you can rely very heavily upon to do their piece of the job. Right.

So. McKinsey had that like high floor on the, on the talent.

[17:05] Paul: Yeah. What do people get wrong about McKinsey? And I'm sort of teeing up an article you wrote about that McKinsey book. We don't need to name the book, but there's, there's a book sort of panning McKinsey. And there's, I mean, there's been this media narrative for the past few years that like McKinsey is this evil empire. I mean, from my experience there, most of the work is way more boring than people would think.

Done in a very intense way, done for some interesting clients at high levels of organizations. But what do people get wrong about McKinsey?

[17:45] Adam Braff: So one thing I'd start with is the idea that there is just one McKinsey and that there is a kind of an unchanging ethos of McKinsey. There is something persistent about the firm and its values and the talent point that I, that I made earlier. But when you spend time inside of a firm like that, it's just an enormous place that's extremely decentralized. And it's decentralized to the point where there were multiple different groups working on customer experience initiatives at the time that I was forming that practice. I had to exert myself quite a lot to rope them together and to say, let's build something together. So I guess the first thing I'd say is it's kind of a category error to even try to critique McKinsey as such in a way where you're trying to predict the next thing that McKinsey will do, right?

Because it's the part of McKinsey that you are talking about that is the relevant unit of measure. So that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing is, is the point you made about the work being largely I'll call it boring, right? Largely straightforward business advancing work to increase shareholder value, increase other kinds of stakeholder value, mostly by raising revenues, by helping companies just grow better and like make more money and avoid doing stupid stuff and avoid waste, right? That's the large majority of what McKinsey does. And only a tiny fraction of it is serving clients who are in any material way, like controversial on subject matters that are really controversial.

It's a bit like just hearkening back to my lawyer days. If you talk to people who've clerked on appellate courts, very little of the work in an appellate court clerkship or on the docket of an appellate court are these culture war constitutional questions about, you know, individual rights and stuff. Like most of it's like administrative law stuff and, procedural stuff that just has to get done for the efficient functioning of the law. And it's very much the same inside of a consulting firm.

[19:49] Paul: Yeah, I think that's spot on. It's, um, I think these firms have become so big. I mean, they're dramatically bigger than when I left, or McKinsey is, um, in 2010. And it is decentralized, which is actually a great way to to run an organization like this, and this is probably why they continue to grow. But when you are decentralized, you are sort of— I went deep into like chaos theory and complex adaptive systems in a lot of my research, and there's this phrase like surfing on the edge of chaos by this guy Richard Pascale. He's actually a former McKinsey person, but yeah, you're always kind of pushing the edges.

And most of what like pushing the edges looks like is basically like trying to move into new fields that like don't really work out, right? And then you do get people that are working on projects which are a little more sketchy. But I do wonder if the media is almost creating like more demand for consulting because these executives will look like, oh, we can just blame McKinsey for our own decisions. If this is the sort of narrative.

[21:02] Adam Braff: Yeah, I like, I like your idea about emergent order and the value that comes from people experimenting on the edges to create new ways to, in my, in my case, use data and analytics to improve companies' performance. And the more you have people experimenting in this decentralized way with new fraud-fighting use cases and revenue use cases and operations use cases, people discover cool stuff. They cross-pollinate it across sectors and the winning ideas win. The losing ideas just disappear. And then unfortunately, the really risky stuff that's happening, that's reputationally bad for the firm. As the firm gets bigger, there's more of a risk of that kind of stuff happening, which can, you know, kind of bring the house down.

Right. So they definitely need a different governance model from what they had when the firm was, you know, 8,000 people, I guess, when I left. They need a better way to keep tabs on it. And from all accounts, that's what they're doing, right? They're trying to create various client committees and ways of screening work. To avoid that very dangerous stuff on the edge.

But, you know, it's not easy. There's definitely a growth imperative inside an organization like that. And so there's going to be a lot of activity happening at that edge for sure.

[22:12] Paul: Yeah, they had 30,000 employees as of 2 years ago, which is pretty wild. And it really is creating a new kind of organization. I mean, even we've had massive manufacturing companies in the middle of the 20th century, but we haven't had like organizations at this scale doing service at this scale in this way. And yeah, it's gonna require new ways of thinking about how to run an organization, which I don't know, maybe there are limits to scale. We have to find out. In customer experience, were there new ideas you helped to shape and form at McKinsey that you were really successful with, with your clients?

[22:56] Adam Braff: Yeah, I mean, I hesitate to take full credit for ideas that probably were invented, you know, many times over before I stumbled across them. To some extent, a lot of the newest ideas that were happening in customer experience in that era had actually been pioneered by Bain, where Fred Reichheld was running the loyalty practice and where he had created a very popular product called the Net Promoter Score, which I'm sure you've heard of. It's a, it's a way of, right, it's a way of calculating customer satisfaction by using a willingness to recommend question and subtracting promoters and detractors. And so a lot of what I was doing was sort of competing with that product in a sense, with, with McKinsey's offering on customer experience and why it was not necessarily more helpful to use NPS versus whatever customer experience product you were using already or metric you were using.

But the main thing I did in terms of creating something persistent and lasting inside of McKinsey was I launched a customer experience survey, just a really large sample annual, you know, 25,000 Americans each year survey where we asked them about their satisfaction with their bank and their insurance company and their airline that they use. And and internet providers and everything else. And what that enabled us to do was create benchmarks, create longitudinal datasets where we had lots and lots of granularity and we could slice it ourselves really finely by different demographic cuts and everything else. And it enabled us to do driver analyses to see for a given industry, for a given company, what were the factors that most significantly drove customer experience to be higher and lower when you, when you really controlled it and put it all into a kind of a multiple regression.

So that was, that was kind of the central idea of the practice was doing all that and then coupling it with all of the firm's resources in analytics and in operations to execute on the winning ideas in a, in a lean and effective way.

[25:04] Paul: What was your experience taking that and going into finance with this kind of stuff?

[25:11] Adam Braff: When I went off in industry or when I was a consultant?

[25:15] Paul: Yeah. When you went off into industry, because I mean, you made this job change in '09.

[25:21] Adam Braff: Yeah.

[25:22] Paul: What a time to be entering a big bank.

[25:26] Adam Braff: Yeah, it was. We were, we were coming right out of the the craziness of the, you know, the collapse in 2008. What had happened at JPMorgan Chase was they had just acquired Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. WaMu was more relevant on the consumer side where I was sitting, and they had a ton of data about lots of different customers. They had to deduplicate the lists and everything, but they basically had, you know, some 60 million customers across all of their different consumer products, checking accounts and credit cards. They were the biggest credit card issuer in the country and mortgages and auto loans and all that.

So what I was taking from the McKinsey days was a little bit about customer experience, but much more about data and analytics and customer lifetime value and marketing to those customers and, and, you know, some of the operational tools as well.

[26:22] Paul: What, what have you learned from your experience doing this about turning data into insights?

[26:30] Adam Braff: The first thing is you have to define success, right? Define the problem and figure out what, what kind of insights can actually be useful. If you take a pile of data and just start analyzing it, it's not going to tell you very much. If you start with the hypothesis, which is we start with the business problem, which is We, a bank, would like to issue more credit cards to the people who are going to pay us back and fewer credit cards to the people who are not and who are going to become delinquent and eventually default on us. We would like to do this using the data that we have available that everybody has, like credit scores, but also to use all of the proprietary data that we have as an enormous financial institution with lots of touchpoints with our customers. So what are the ways we can do that?

So then you do hypothesis-driven problem solving and you say, well, maybe the customers with lots of money in their checking accounts are going to be really good credit risks. And the people who are constantly living paycheck to paycheck are not going to be good credit risks, right? So you do that process of prioritizing the problems that are going to really matter and make money for the company. And you You know, go get data that you think is going to be relevant and you build a prototype and test it and then, you know, roll it out. So it all starts with defining a problem that really matters and you go from there.

[27:51] Paul: Yeah, and this is such a core thing. It sounds simple, right? Define a problem. But I've found working in other organizations without the consulting background, a lot of what is happening in organizations is sort of like starting with the solution that the highest ranking person thinks is the best thing to do, which is either like just copying what other companies are doing or picking something that's in the zeitgeist. What do you know about influencing other executives to kind of embrace problem solving thinking and hypothesis first framing?

[28:29] Adam Braff: You know, it's often helpful to start at their level. A lot of times what executives want is objective, you know, descriptive data about their business. They call it like a business intelligence dashboard where they see, I'm sorry for all the clichés, but one version of the truth and a 360-degree view of their customer. All these phrases that you might hear, but they're clichés for a reason, right? People actually need these things because instead what they tend to get will be one set of answers from finance and one set of answers from the, you know, the general manager of their businesses about just what's going on in the business. Under those circumstances, you can see why an executive might be a little bit led by intuition and a little bit led by what's the oldest report that I've had for the longest time that seems to give me an answer that's approximately what I want.

So in some sense, influencing senior executives is a lot of it's listening to them about what their problems are. A lot of it is just providing basic facts that they haven't had before. And a lot of it is coming up with ways to test new ideas at low risk for them to see if they can test it out before they, before they fire.

[29:44] Paul: What are, what are maybe one or two skills that you either had to train some of the people working with you or the things you wish more people had that you took from consulting?

[29:56] Adam Braff: I would say two things in the corporate world that are missing that are found almost kind of by default within consulting. One is the, and I think you probably have some strategy units on this, but the pyramid style communication, like how to tell a story in an argument or a grouping that is a nice coherent PowerPoint deck with an executive summary on the front of it where everything tracks that storyline. That is not the native language of decks and emails and, you know, documents and stuff in corporate. Even to the extent that they're using PowerPoint, they're not using it that way. So that's the first thing is kind of McKinsey-style communications is, is a thing I have to teach and reteach every time I show up at a new, at a new company.

The second I would say is McKinsey-style performance management and the idea of a semiannual review process where You take the time to go around and talk to the clients or the internal clients of the people on your team, and you collect their objective feedback on, you know, how these people are doing. And you give them the feedback in a session where you, you know, follow the feedback format of here's what's working well and here's what you need to work on. And here are my concrete recommendations on what you need to do. And then you provide the employee an opportunity to give you upward feedback. Like, All of that stuff you take for granted inside of McKinsey and almost none of it exists in the wild inside of a corporate setting.

[31:27] Paul: Yeah. And it, it's really hard to copy paste that stuff too. I mean, I think one thing, one thing I've sort of figured out by teaching this Pyramid Principle is like, it's not actually about teaching the framework. People intellectually can understand this Pyramid Principle framework really quick, but they do not understand the sort of like obsessiveness in the firm, right? You're basically doing like endless amounts of iterations, right? And that's really the magic that results in that end product, not just like taking the Pyramid Principle and applying it.

The biggest thing I have to sort of ingrain in teams is like, you're probably going to need more than just 2 rounds of feedback. You might need like 25 and people have a hard time like realizing how fast things go back and forth in consulting. Yeah. Did you have any success sort of training that mindset into your teams or were they like, Adam, slow down?

[32:31] Adam Braff: No, you take your time with it and you do it in a way that's kind of commensurate with the importance of the project you're working on. Like, I like for my taste, almost every internal document at any stage of a project would benefit from a clear executive summary on the front of it that tracks the, you know, the progress that we're making, right? So to me, it's not too much work to do it, and it probably doesn't require that many iterations for me to just get up at a whiteboard and, you know, and start writing out, you know, in 3 bullets what's going on. I think I can train to some extent the people under me. I mean, you know, in one of my jobs, I had 170 people under me and like 3 layers. And so, I had to train the trainers and I had to train the managers to be better managers of their people.

This is more on the performance management side than on the communication side, but people learn by doing and they see the way that I run a meeting and they see the way that I run the reviews. I'll typically have, you know, in my corporate jobs, these cross-calibration sessions where I get together with the one-down managers and we stack rank all the employees and we come up with some objective way of of rating them, right? So they see how I do that. And then when they move on to their own more senior jobs, they've learned a kind of process for evaluating people based on objective feedback and giving that feedback very clearly to the employees twice a year so they can get better regardless of what the corporate minimum is within that company for their own performance management system, right? So usually the bar is like really low.

Inside of a company, but that doesn't stop you as a department head from having a little more rigor in everything you do in your performance management, in your communication style, in your problem solving, in the rigor of your recruiting and everything. Yeah.

[34:22] Paul: One thing that's interesting about the McKinsey model, which I actually didn't even see at BCG, was they have this person called like a DGL, and they are actually not your manager. But they are personally responsible for your development and feedback. And so you sort of have this coach who's like looking out for you, trying to help you improve. They don't really care about your manager's like pet peeves and like they want to work with them and get the feedback from them, but they're really like invested in you. That person is still one of my, somebody I go to pretty often and like I've feel like I want to like check in with him and like talk about how I'm doing because it was so cool to have somebody as sort of like your champion and your coach at the same time that was removed from your actual work.

[35:15] Adam Braff: It's very hard to, it's hard to replicate that in the corporate setting. So the DGL, which, which stands for development group leader, works really well in a consulting context where there's a pool of, of somewhat interchangeable, you know, people who are, you know, they're wonderful human beings, all of them, but they are interchangeable in the sense that if one of them disappeared, you could staff the project with a different one. Um, and that's not really how corporate America is set up, right? People like to have a boss. They like to have a known boss. They like to have a set of things to do.

The boss likes having the confidence that if she needs to do a certain project, she can grab her resources and rearrange them. I tried an experiment within one of my jobs where I created a pool of kind of interchangeable associates and analysts, and nobody liked that, right? People really, they liked the concept of having a diverse mix of projects to work on, but at the end of the day, they were much more accustomed to the stability of having a manager-employee relationship. So there are some things that you can't easily copy from McKinsey to the rest of the world.

[36:20] Paul: Yeah. So I, I'd love to shift more to your post-McKinsey experience. What did you learn about data from working at Point72, a hedge fund? The stakes, like this is about as hungry as you could get in terms of wanting more data and the best data in the world. What did you learn from working in an environment like that?

[36:45] Adam Braff: Well, so to begin with, the problem that a consulting firm is trying to, sorry, that a hedge fund is trying to solve if they're a multi-manager long-short equity fund is they're trying to get uncorrelated, you know, positive returns, like they're trying to get alpha and they're doing it in a zero-sum world where everybody around them is staffed with very similar people trying to go after that same alpha, right? So it's a little different from, I would say, much of what happens in business where companies do compete with each other for market share, but they're also trying to break out and find new ways for them to grow the overall pie and to get like a little mini monopoly in some space that doesn't easily exist inside of hedge funds. So you've got the dynamic where they're all fighting with each other.

They've all got the same, you know, lacrosse players from Fairfield County who went on to become, you know, college lacrosse players and are now working at these funds. And so they're all trying to outthink each other. Okay. And they're doing it in a context where in theory, a really great insight, a really great analysis, a really great dataset can instantly turn into money in a way that isn't possible inside of a credit card company or a satellite TV company. Right? If I found a cool relationship between the amount of money you have in your checking account and whether Chase should write credit cards, that takes a long time to turn it into a lot of money for Jamie Dimon and for Chase shareholders, right?

If you find money inside of a hedge fund, if you find an insight about a company that's about to miss earnings or outperform earnings, that could very quickly be like a 7-figure payoff, right? Or an 8-figure payoff. So the stakes are different inside a company like that. I would say the main insight I learned that's broadly applicable is people don't appreciate enough the volume and diversity of data that is out there in the world. So if you've got a problem you're trying to solve and you've got the consultant mindset, let's say you're working in knowledge, you're working in, you know, research and information somewhere, you've got a set of databases that, you know, you can look at and research sources you can look at. What the hedge funds are doing is they've got a problem they want to solve.

You know, is Chipotle going to sell like more burritos this quarter than last? And they know that there are a bunch of resources they can look at that will answer the question at one level, but there's a whole universe of other data sources out there, right? Alternative data sources that can give them an advantage over all the Muppets who don't have access to that data. But then there's another game that's being played on top of that game. Which is what are the other hedge funds using for data and how do we get, you know, 2 days ahead of what they're doing and where are they going to make mistakes in what they're doing? So there is, I think, a lesson to be drawn from what hedge funds do in data and analytics that is about just being relentless in the search for more and better and newer kinds of data, then especially where you can have it on a proprietary basis.

That is underappreciated in the corporate world. That's probably underappreciated in consulting.

[40:06] Paul: Yeah. So it sort of helps you expand your imagination for what's possible in terms of like what you can actually measure and use. I mean, even in consulting, we did a lot more interesting data analysis than I saw in other companies, which is like you might send somebody to a grocery store and just like have them count the cars, right? And try to get like some proxy of traffic at this store or like interest in certain products or things like that. Yeah, that, that's fascinating.

[40:40] Adam Braff: Yeah, yeah. Channel checks are like a tried and true way of kind of rounding out the information, getting it on a proprietary basis. I'll just say though, if you, if you start with a problem that you're trying to solve for a client and you lay out a problem-solving framework, right, to find the problem, generate hypotheses, get data, do an analysis, you know, visualize the results and iterate. But you can spend as much time or as little time on all of those steps as you want. Right? And I guess what I learned is you can profitably spend a lot of time on the step called get the data, right?

You can, you can spend a lot more time on that, whether it's channel checks and having people hang out in supermarkets or doing that by proxy, by looking at satellite pictures of parking lots over a longer time horizon, or looking at geolocation pings from cell phones to get a bigger sample. Like there's a lot you can do on the get the data step and you can probably get a competitive advantage by doing it better than other people.

[41:34] Paul: Yeah, that's interesting because you sort of have this. So from your perspective, you're sort of under, like uncovering this arbitrage opportunity, which is like the default norm in the business world is that like you should be working, right? So like teams might just orient to just doing stuff, rather than like, they might actually be, it might actually be better to spend more time like trying to acquire data and coming up with better sources of data rather than just focusing on processing or working on what you already have.

[42:09] Adam Braff: Yeah. And your, and your job is to measure customer cancellations. You're, you're on the retention team at a satellite TV company. Your job is to try to figure out which customers are leaving, where they're going, why they're leaving. You can do that with your existing tools, right? You can do that with the existing internal data you have about your, the people passing through your save desk and disappearing, or you can choose to ask a different set of questions about the, your competitors' churn rates and about the relationship between weather and churn and about what the early signals are that happen within the unstructured data in the call center long before people churn.

Right? So you can formulate different hypotheses and then go out and try to find data that matches that. Or you can spend your time doing what you've been doing before, depending on, you know, how much work your boss has piled on top of you.

[43:00] Paul: So did the World of Billions inspire you to go solo?

[43:07] Adam Braff: You know, I've never— I never saw the show. I have seen the executive producer speak at data conferences. Going solo is just something that I discovered I wanted to do after so many years of trying different things. I really did want to try to make it on my own and see if it was possible to do that. So I launched in 2019 my independent consulting biz, and I launched it with the principle that I would do the stuff I've been doing for a couple of decades, helping investors figure out how to make more money and helping corporates figure out how to use data and analytics to improve their outcomes, which are also largely about making more money, but also some longer-term objectives they have. So that, so I started that in 2019.

[43:55] Paul: It's a pretty interesting shift. I think people, people have said things to me like, oh, it's easy for you to become a freelancer because you worked in consulting. It was way harder. Than I thought in ways I didn't expect in terms of you, especially when you start and before you're like trying to find people to help you or get support on things and getting in your groove, like you're doing everything of everything you do, which is kind of a crazy thing. Like I didn't have as much experience as you at that super senior level. So suddenly I am the partner, the manager, the analyst, the, the researcher, the, um, slides person, the sales guy.

[44:36] Adam Braff: Yeah, the sales guy too, right?

[44:38] Paul: Yeah. And one, I actually loved it. Like, I loved just the lack of having to go in between so many people and the friction that's there. But also it was like, wow, this is really pushing me. What were some of the things that were hard for you at first and surprising?

[44:56] Adam Braff: So I had to define what my offering was, right? I had to figure out like data and analyst consulting. Is that like, does everybody do that? Are there lots of people doing some version of that? And it's not hard to find them, right? If you, if you, I've bought some of the relevant keywords, but if you, if you just typed it into your search engine, you would probably find lots more people than, than me out there doing this.

I found it enormously helpful to, to go through the entire, oevre of our friend Will Bachman. Right, because the Unleashed series is like—

[45:28] Paul: Will is invaluable for— yeah, shout out to Will Bachman. If anyone is a strategy consultant and wants to become independent, you must touch base with Will.

[45:37] Adam Braff: Yeah, just search for the word, you know, Unleashed. And I mean, going through those, um, going through those podcasts and all of his content was so helpful for the nuts and bolts of how to become, uh, an independent consultant and just solve the basic problems of getting, you know, business liability insurance and, um, you know, and starting up the website. So, uh, the other inspiration, by the way, I would say is Venkatesh Rao and his Art of Gig series.

[46:01] Paul: Oh yeah, yeah, he's been a huge influence on me.

[46:05] Adam Braff: Yeah, so, so the— so he was, um, in the 2019-20 period, just when I was starting, and through the COVID era, he had started this, uh, series that you'll remember called The Art of Gig, where he had characters and he had stories and he set out a lot of wisdom. It kind of Much of it was in his kind of cryptic, like Straussian style of, you know, very dense. But he also had something that was very accessible, which was a series of consulting tips that he posted on Twitter and then compiled. And they were also tremendously influential on me, I would say, because he got you thinking about the higher order questions, like why are you independent anyway? And, you know, how can you be a good member of the independent consultant community and refer business out to other people? And how do you not like nickel and dime your clients?

And how do you make sure you're not wasting time communicating the wrong way? So the combination of Will and, and kind of Venkatesh, I think is a really great kind of starter pack for people who want to, who want to become independent consultants. And I think, I don't know if he ever packaged it up. I think there was going to be a two-volume set of this Art of Gig, you know, these books. I don't know if I've seen them at the market, but All the content is probably there somewhere.

[47:20] Paul: Yeah, he said he shut it down, so you can't actually find these articles. He did tell me he's going to publish this, but he's going to do it at his speed and how he wants. So we will see when that happens. But yeah, that's invaluable. Tom Critchlow has been huge for me too. Yeah.

And there's this sort of like really small but like emerging set of people that are sort of taking this non-traditional approach to freelancing. And you said at the beginning, like, I need to figure out my services. And like, that was sort of my mindset going into it. I need to like package things. I need to have like these offerings, just like the McKinsey site, which is like, I do digital transformation. I think the reality you quickly realize is you get on the ground or you get hired for things and the scope of things you're doing is probably way wider.

and way weirder than like a big consulting firm. Um, what have you learned about like the need to like clearly define versus like just being like Adam Braff who's doing generally helpful data-driven stuff?

[48:31] Adam Braff: Yeah. I mean, everything in life is about this question on how much you plan versus how much you let happen, and you can't overcommit to one side or the other. I think the, you know, the main, the main thing I guess I learned through the first few years of the journey is that I'm not just a consultant. Really what I'm doing is 4 things. I've got my consulting business, which is just me, right? I've got my teaching that I do, which is, you'll see that these are all symbiotic, but the teaching that I do, which is I teach a graduate class in business analytics and data visualization at NYU.

And now that I've moved to Providence, I'm going to be starting to teach in the spring a class on data for social good here. So there's the teaching element of, of what I do there. And all of these are things that I discovered kind of by accident as I tried different things in my independent life. The third thing is I run a series of forecasting contests. So I'm on the 7th annual forecasting contest, and that generates a tremendous number of ideas and connections and relationships and content for me to write about. And then the fourth thing is my blog, where in addition to reviewing the Hatchet job on McKinsey, I tend to do things like write up the ongoing play-by-play in the forecasting contest.

And then somewhat less boringly, I'll also share thoughts on data and analytics and lessons learned using food metaphors. So that part of the blog is called Analytics is Eating the World.

[50:02] Paul: Yeah, I love that.

[50:04] Adam Braff: —It makes—

[50:05] Paul: this combination of things makes perfect sense to me. And I'll have to send you this stuff from Tom Critchlow, but he has these 3 pies where he's writing this article around like rejecting specialization. A lot of people when they become freelancers think like, oh, I need to start with the services and then I just build my entire identity around like delivering these services, right? He has what you're good at, Um, what the market wants, and then an identity that gives you energy, right? These three interlocking things. And I think the opportunity of working on your own really is like getting a bunch of different combinations of things that basically just gives you the energy to keep going.

Right.

[50:47] Adam Braff: And yeah, he's, he's kind of simplified the ikigai framework. He lopped off one of the four nodes of ikigai, which is like, you know, what's good for the world. But yeah, I like, I think that's exactly the right framework.

[50:56] Paul: Yeah, and I sort of buy it because I think at the individual level, if you start with what's good for the world, you start short-circuiting your own energy and you burn out anyway. Right? So like the best way to arrive at like what's good for the world is to be at like the, like, right relationship towards your actual work. What were you— were you surprised? I mean, you talked earlier on about writing as a central thing, but Has writing played a bigger role in like finding clients and introducing to different opportunities than you expected?

[51:31] Adam Braff: Yeah, it's very, um, I don't know if zen is the right word for it, but if you, if you write in order to directly kind of bring in clients, it's not going to work, right? It's too mercenary and it's unappealing for everybody involved. So you have, you have to write things that are at that quitslow kind of three-way or the ikigai thing, uh, because you're genuinely interested in the subject and you, you know, in the back of your mind that what you're writing is interesting to somebody out there. And it's not just your personal kind of, you know, like writing about your kids. So, I would say it has been helpful. Like I have gotten a number of surprising inbound leads from people who either learned of me through the blog or knew me from before, but were reminded of my existence because they happened to see something float by on LinkedIn, on the sea of garbage that is generally LinkedIn.

There are occasionally interesting posts and I hope to be among the interesting ones. And so, and so I have actually gotten some really cool leads and gigs from an indirect result of the writing that I do, even though that's not why I do it. Yeah.

[52:35] Paul: And it probably sort of like shifts you more slowly towards like things you actually want to be doing over the long term. Did the nature of your project shift from the beginning to now in terms of like, okay, I'm like, customer experience framework around this versus like now these more ambiguous, more Adam Braffian projects?

[52:58] Adam Braff: I would say the projects have shifted a little bit just because I've discovered what is, you know, I've got a competitive advantage in certain things. So for example, when I'm advising investors, whether it's pension funds or, you know, private equity firms or, you know, family offices, when I'm talking to them about how to do their business better with data and analytics, a lot of the value I can add is my comprehensive knowledge of the alternative data space. I, I just know what datasets are out there and I know the pros and cons of these different datasets because I've been, you know, buying them for, for some time now. And, and I've had to really put them to the test, right? If I were to do generic kind of analytics consulting, for a hedge fund to help them build better models. Like, I wouldn't have a comparative advantage in doing that.

So my consulting is in some sense the result when I've learned I'm good at along the way and where I can just be the most helpful. In a corporate setting, it's really the end-to-end, you know, chief data analytics officer role, playing that on an interim basis, helping them set up their existing, you know, head of analytics for success. Whatever it takes. But my goal is to then do that, build that, shape it, and then move on.

[54:13] Paul: What's the best part of this kind of like self-employed life that you didn't expect?

[54:19] Adam Braff: I would say the best part is the freedom to do all these different things. It would've been pretty difficult within my corporate jobs and within the hedge fund to be writing a blog all the time and to, and to kind of be, you know, and be teaching. And to spend a lot of time doing things that are at some level pretty symbiotic, like I said, right? Having access to students who are talented and want to get jobs and having clients who want to hire the students and having a forecasting contest that becomes fodder for the content that I teach in the class and having, you know, the ability to blog about all the insights that come out of this is pretty great. So, I've enjoyed the independent life mostly for that kind of freedom, the freedom of how I spend my time and how I express myself.

And you know, it's not that I would never go back to the corporate life, but I would be giving up quite a lot if I did.

[55:14] Paul: One of the most interesting things I've seen this year has been the introduction of AI into a lot of different things. I've played around with AI writing tools, image generation. Is, must be the biggest question in some of the clients you're working with. Like, what's your model for how this reshapes, like, pretty much everything?

[55:40] Adam Braff: In general, the clients that I'm serving are somewhere on the spectrum between remedial and, you know, and pretty good at analytics, right? So they're not at the margin where they should be spending too much time thinking about their own internal AI. So the way we think about it is we start again with problem definition. Like, what are the problems you're trying to solve? How much of it is, you know, the more straightforward, like knowing your market share and knowing why your customers are leaving you? Those are not necessarily AI problems, right?

Those are more likely to be just get your data acts together and do the right analysis on it. Maybe there are some regressions in there. But So the first thing I'd say is most problems for those kinds of companies are not AI problems. The second is to the extent that there is useful AI, it's often embedded inside of a tool that you can, that you can buy or borrow from someone else. And then third, yeah, if you have some advanced analytics use cases, like the example that we touched upon earlier, if you're trying to figure out why your customers are canceling their satellite TV accounts, like a DirecTV, there are things you can do with natural language processing, right? A kind of a subset of cognitive and AI work.

There are things you can do to structure the data that comes out of a call center that are not easy to do if you don't have people who have that kind of AI training. So you will find use cases that are going to benefit from it, but you need to let the requirements drive the use cases, drive the use of AI, as opposed to doing it backwards.

[57:13] Paul: Yeah, it, it almost drives home your point earlier, which is that there's more opportunity on getting the right data, right? I think these tools are gonna layer on things like Excel and basically help you structure data faster, which means you'd probably spend more focus on defining the problem, asking the right questions, which is probably always going to remain a human thing. I was also, um, I got a preview of this PowerPoint tool using like this AI technology. And one of, one of the things it does, which you'll, um, be like, oh my gosh, I wish I had this. It's like, say you have like 3 columns, you basically just hit one button and it adds a 4th and just like automatically aligns stuff, right? So as a consultant, that's probably like 20 hours of your life saved right there.

[58:07] Adam Braff: Yeah. When Think-Cell came out, it was, it was great for formatting and for all that stuff. Like it, it was weird that PowerPoint didn't have all the Think-Cell functionality built into it. So I know what you're talking about.

[58:16] Paul: Yeah. Um, fantastic. Any, uh, other things you wanted to reflect on, uh, on your path or, uh, different things you've learned along the way in your freelance journey?

[58:29] Adam Braff: Everything I've learned along the way is something you can find on my blog. If you go to braff.co. You'll find it and it's just under the section called advice. I would encourage people who are interested in the path of data and analytics consulting, or even just being entry-level talent or mid-career talent in the analytics space. All of that is available on my website and I'm always happy to talk to people who are trying to make their way through this world. So that's where people should go, braff.co.

Yeah, and it's very good.

[58:58] Paul: I went on a deep dive on your blog this week and it's very fun. I love your writing. It's approachable. Approachable, it's interesting, and it's very personal and yours. I'd love to give you an opportunity to shout out the forecasting contest too. That seems pretty fun and something people might be interested in.

Yeah.