Guest Appearance #2 – Henrique Brenner

New segment in “O Limpa Vias” - every month I will invite a friend for a guest appearance in the blog writing about a particular topic. I’ve met Henrique here in Brazil, and more than a colleague, he has become a very good friend of mine. I’ve been learning a lot from him during the last months, and I find his views on the business consulting job particularly interesting. I challenged him to write a little bit about our job and share it with you. Stay tuned.

It’s Monday, a quarter to 6 in the morning and I am suddenly awaken by the bright light on my wife’s dressing table. She’s got a flight at seven to Rio de Janeiro, where she is going to spend the whole week. Again. Our weekly travelling routine has made roughly five weeks of actual living together out of the whole five months of marriage. But I am not complaining. We both knew from the beginning of our relationship what it meant being both consultants.

After Daniel asked me to write something about consulting, I did some research on the internet and found several texts about the consulting industry, firms, career, etc. However I didn’t find one that presented the consulting job as I see it, intense. Just to be fair, I will restate the common view; yes, the consulting job is work intense. One shouldn’t expect less than ten hours work per day or, depending on the project’s complexity, twelve to fourteen hours work per day. That implies, for instance, in difficulties to keep one’s workout routine, although I do have some colleagues who are disciplined enough for this.

On the other hand, a consulting job typically presents other intensities which, in my view, compensate by far the heavy work load. One of them is that it is experience intense. In just a few typical consulting career years, a consultant is probably working in a dozen of different projects, clients and industries in dozens of different cities. A consultant is also learning and applying several of business administration disciplines independently from his or her background. And all this sums up with work intensity, i.e., one learns a lot in a very short period.

However, this is still just a little bit further what is already written about a consulting job on the internet. Now the interesting part is that a consulting job is also people intense. People, either from the client or from the team, are what make every day in a life of a consultant. The human interactions in this kind of job is greater than usual because it doesn’t depend on one’s particular impulse for human interactions, but rather because human interactions are an inherent aspect of the job. A consultant travels, has almost every meal, works and parties with people from work. In just a few years a consultant is meeting real geniuses, but also real charlatans. Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes it happens. Also a consultant may meet some people very hard to deal with, but also make real friends for life. And that is the intensity that makes it worth it after all.

And that’s one very nice way of seeing things…