Course Catalog

Summer 2007

B7699-062: Strategy Consulting Skills

Strategy Consulting Skills,

Instructor: hitendra wadhwa

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This course exposes students to the structured problem-solving and communication skills used in management consulting. The course is organized around the five phases of a typical marketing or strategy engagement: scope definition; problem structuring; data gathering and analysis; recommendations development; and final presentation. Students get to learn and practice specific consulting tools and principles associated with each of these five phases, such as issue trees, hypothesis-driven problem solving, interview guides, triangulation, pyramid structure and storylines. The course emphasizes hands-on practice and real-time feedback. Formal discussion of consulting tools and skills is supplemented by mini–case exercises and consulting cases based on real-life engagements. Working in teams, students get opportunities to practice and hone the skills they are introduced to during the course through in-class presentations and feedback. These skills covered in the course are broadly applicable across business functions and industries, and besides their relevance to management consulting will be valuable to entrepreneurs and managers in the strategy, business-development or marketing-planning aspects of their work.

Hitendra Wadhwa

Hitendra Wadhwa

Associate Professor of Professional Practice

Professor Wadhwa has thirteen years of professional experience in strategy consulting, quantitative marketing and technology entrepreneurship.

Professor Wadhwa teaches elective MBA and executive-MBA courses on Strategy Consulting Skills, Personal Leadership, Pricing Strategies, Customer Centricity and Marketing Channels. He also consults to corporations and teaches executive seminars on these topics.

Professor Wadhwa is the recipient of the 2007 Lear Award for distinguished service to students and the 2007 Most Engaging and Dynamic Professor Award by the Marketing Association of Columbia.

Prior to Columbia, Professor Wadhwa was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he counseled senior executives on a range of strategy issues. He also founded and led Paramark, a technology company backed by $10 million in venture capital that developed the first real-time optimization platform for online marketing and was selected as a Top 100 Internet Technology company by Technologic Partners/Venture Wire in 2000 and 2001.

Professor Wadhwa received his MBA and Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and his B.A. (Honors in Mathematics) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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