BearingPoint India MD addresses Great Lakes students on consulting as a career option

addressed students at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai.He delivered talk on consulting as a career option and gave a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities in consulting and the thumb rules to follow when one gets into it.

Mr. Gupta is responsible for development of business operations strategy for global sourcing assignments covering strategy and assessments, developing sourcing business models and conducting operational assessments, building service provider capabilities, and managing relationships. He illustrated the topic by citing examples from his own experience as a consultant and as a leader of a top-notch company with consulting as a mainstream business.

Defining consulting as sale of advice, Mr. Gupta said, Consulting is unbiased recommendation and solution to problems faced by various client firms with an outsider looking in approach.
Commenting on the fundamental steps in consulting, he said, The three fundamental steps in a consulting project are: to diagnose the problem, devise a solution and implement it.
He stressed on the importance of knowledge management in a consulting business i.e. knowledge acquisition, consolidation and exploitation. It is important to learn by experience by dealing with customers and apply this knowledge appropriately for a new problem and a new customer, he said.

He also touched upon fundamental differences in the way core-consulting firms like Bearing Point and other multi-business companies with consulting as one of their verticals operate in the Indian scenario.
Noticing the growth opportunities in India he said, Global clients increasingly want to exploit the offshore advantage in India. The overall domestic demand is also on the rise due to booming sectors like financial services, knowledge management, entertainment and media, aviation, hospitality and retail.

Towards the end of the lecture, Mr Gupta spoke about the values, ethics and passion that one needs to inculcate and the need to align what one does, sees and says, for succeeding in a business. Cautioning aspiring entrepreneurs he said, While starting a business, one has to be conscious of the following: wrong reasons for choosing a business, importance of being passionate, choosing the right team, having right business plan and how one is different from others while doing that business.