By Delaney Newhouse | Focus Editor
Business professor Michael Wright’s consulting course aims to prepare students to join the growing field of providing business solutions. His methodology? A few short laps in the “shallow end” before students “swim out to open waters.”
Wright pointed to hands-on learning as essential to not only a practical way to truly understand one’s work, but also as a way to gain practical experience in the field of management consulting. He said that students ought to be able to include the class –– during which they split into groups to partner with local businesses –– on resumes just like any consulting internship.
“The thing I’m really trying to achieve in this since I’ve started it in 2017 is to get as many students as I can hired into consulting because it’s a very lucrative career choice,” Wright said of the consulting program he built at Baylor.
In the past five years, 160 of Wright’s former students have joined consulting firms including top companies like Bain Capital and McKinsey & Company. Wright often finds alumni returning among the supervising consultants he invites to the class as mentors or guest speakers.
Dallas junior Sean Anderson shared his excitement regarding the class’s guest speakers.
“We heard from Alvarez and Marcel last week in a in a really engaging talk about the use of AI and consulting and some of the ethical issues there; Bain has come in and spoken to us,” Anderson said. “We’ve had a guy from Cordero now working in his own startup come in and then talk about the fundamentals of consulting and how we should do that. … I mean, these are CEOs, C-Suite level executives.”
As the semester progresses, consulting students build their own plans to solve problems with a local business or nonprofit. Wright has partnered students with local charities, animal shelters, bakeries and even the Mayborn Museum to solve problems or improve business dealings. The skill he deems the most essential is one he calls “ambiguity management.”
“In consulting –– and quite honestly in most of my career –– if you don’t have a good plan, things don’t go well,” Wright said.
He explained that ambiguity management is the process of developing a multi-step process in order to reach a goal, rather than looking for a simpler, single step solution.
Anderson, meanwhile, described the process of consulting as building a relationship, emphasizing the softer skills of communication over financial management.
“Your No. 1 goal here is to build a relationship with your client,” he said. “It’s not to go in and ‘Oh, we immediately know how to solve your problem,’ but to know how to go in and listen and understand what their problem is.”
Wright credits this relationship building with the numerous businesses that request to continue consulting with his students. Still, he said he’s unafraid to alienate a business for the sake of his students or to maintain integrity.
In one instance, students were simply told to come up with a particular solution to a problem and were threatened with a severed business relationship. Wright encouraged the students to go to the company’s CFO directly to gain the data they needed and present their own, independently sourced solution.
“The person said they wouldn’t give them another project,” he said. “Well, I said I don’t want one, if that’s the way they’re going to be.”
Wright has still built a loyal group of local businesses and nonprofit organizations over the years who allow his students to truly work as consultants, and Anderson is one of them.
“That’s our whole job, is to go in and analyze. Where are they struggling? Where are they succeeding?” Anderson said. “Where do they think they’re struggling, succeeding and how do we provide them with the most benefit?”
