Kearney reviews

Travel: Travel is non-stop, continuous, and burdensome on the soul. That said, all consultants travel all the time, but ATK is likely worse than some (Bain, BCG) and at par with others (Booz, Mck). A lot can be done to manage client expectations around this issue, and to optimize staffing for life as well as work. Processes: ATK is an 80 year old start-up. AFter the 2005 buyout, the firm started from scratch. So we are still building core processes. Examples: We have pretty mediocre intellectual capital develpoment, dissemination processes and tools, pretty crap financial management at the partnership level (a pareto of partner contribution would reveal a long tail, i suspect), and not the strongest people review processe (although its getting better).

- Simply put, the firm's outlook is horrible. Its hiring strategy in 2009 indicates that the firm is way off-base when it comes to establishing workforce targets and effectively projecting workloads over the next year. - Workload is brutal (~70+ hours), and the client locations aren't much to shake a stick at (want to spend a summer in central Kentucky?) - "Global firm" model means that you could be travelling across the street for a client or across the country on a red-eye; lots of variability - Virtually zero strategy work; it's all sourcing, cost reduction, and IT work at this point - Creativity is simply not valued. A lot of ATK's intellectual capital (which is fantastic) is almost used as a crutch in client engagements - Establishing a positive rapport with the client is frowned upon - Review processes are opaque