Grant Allen: Who I Am, and Why B-School Is for Me

CONSULTING TO PHILADELPHIA.  As a thus-far career consultant, it continually amazes me how much time you devote to logistics. Meetings, deadlines, deliverables, travel – they define your life. Who's interviewing Ms. Soanso and Mr. Bigswingin'? That pack's due when? Who's finalizing our flights? And which airline has the prime frequent-flyer program? (Answer: Continental.)

Winding down my job this past June, I remember sitting in my Cleveland hotel room at 11 p.m. sketching out an agenda for the next day's client meeting, idly wondering if I made the right choice staying at the Ritz Carlton when the outmoded Marriott was so much closer to the client. My thoughts were thick from the molasses politics of the day's meetings and the client's oracular business jargon . . . "Vision Meetings" and "Domain Capabilities" . . . Let's throw it up against the wall and see what sticks, then we can get down to brass tacks. It was a too-real case of b.s. bingo gone acutely awry.

This is an admittedly clichéd example but, as with reputations, clichés usually have some basis in fact. Mostly, though, I found the industry to be exciting, inherently varied, and quite rewarding. Yes, arduous travel can be part of the equation and client inertia can boil your blood, but that's the job and it requires patience, leadership, keen communications, and mental dexterity to tender value and succeed. I loved it.

For me, consulting provided a broad business education rather quickly by letting me "have at it" with a slew of business problems across a broad industry spectrum. These often enervating, sometimes migraine-inducing problems provide variety (I get bored fantastically easily), creativity (I used to oil paint, now I get paid to think), and challenge. Gaining the necessary hard skills so I can continue business leadership and problem-solving at a higher, general-manager level is the major impetus behind my decision to attend business school.

Specifically, I've decided on Wharton. I started August 3 so there was little time for far-flung, post-work summer trips to Southeast Asia or fantastic KAOS gigs like they have at Kellogg. Penn instead has a mandatory pre-term where you brush up on math, stats, and microeconomics, attempting to close the skills gap with the Wall Street wonks in accounting and finance. Except for the math test you must pass (the hurdle is a 55%; surprisingly, folks still failed), Wharton Pre-Term was in reality a month-long happy hour meant to coalesce the class and introduce everyone to Philadelphia, cheesesteaks, and college (again!). It was an absolute blast.

ME IN AN AIRLINE PEANUTSHELL.  Some highlights from the G.R.A. resume: I graduated from Duke in 2000, where, according to Tom Wolfe, "the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns" play backdrop to a jock-obsessed, anti-intellectual climate. Hogwash. Yes, basketball's big, but Duke's much more. I was a civil engineering major but eschewed my formative passions of art, architecture, and design in exchange for a promising and hopefully lucrative career in Internet something-or-other . . . maybe start my own sock puppet online pet store or better.

In 1998, I founded a Web design company, A-k Presence, and was immediately haranguing clients, building Web sites while abroad in Australia, and developing managerial skills shepherding programmers at Duke and MIT. I also interned with a "Big 5" e-strategy outfit and oversaw marketing for OnCampusRecruiter, a now defunct dot-com.

In 2000, I accepted a full-time offer from a young firm in Boston named Nextera (also now defunct), where I "helped build a beta site for an incubated financial services dot-com," among other things. Mostly I played foosball. The whole experience was so 2000 — the Aeron chair, exposed brick, leverage your core competencies rigmarole. And, yep, I'm 22 and never had a real job, so you better listen up.

To the surprise of everyone except everyone, we were all soon laid off. I spent the next two-and-a-half years in multifarious roles: project manager for a Delaware IT firm, helping with a faith-based philanthropy group in Cambodia and Vietnam, waiter/bartender in Boston's Beacon Hill, and working with high-powered attorneys and Ph.D.s down in Washington developing epidemiological damage models in support of nine-figure asbestos bankruptcy settlements.

I thought about applying to B-school, but I decided I needed (and wanted) a broader consulting experience beforehand. In 2003, I moved to a 60-person strategy consulting firm in northern Virginia, Dean & Company, where I worked as a generalist strategy consultant for telecom, banking, and even weather forecasting clients. "Typical" projects there were not, but Dean's consulting practice does skew towards data- and operations-focused cases. I traveled about 25% of the time, and, generally, the people were mind-bogglingly intelligent and quite quirky, but I guess those go hand-in-hand. The experience certainly lived up to its educational expectations.

THE WHARTON WAY.  So that's it. I still consider myself a consultant, going so far as to interview for and get a paid MBA consultant position with Wharton's Small Business Development Center where I'll be working with sub-$10M firms looking to grow or change their business (stay tuned for more on SBDC). As far as my in-classroom experience, I'm looking to build my hard skills, especially in finance, hence the decision to attend Don Trump's "School of fin-ANTS." Like Duke, though, Wharton is so much more. I'm actually planning on steering clear of all the intense finance classes with the Gordon Gekko wannabes, instead getting my quant base out of the way quickly and shifting focus to marketing, entrepreneurship and general management.

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