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The Case Interview: 20 Days to Ace the Case: Your Day-by-Day Prep Course to Land a Job in Management Consulting
Game-changing tips and tricks to nail the case interview and launch your consulting career.
Management consultants Destin Whitehurst and Erin Robinson give you need-to-know techniques for polishing your poise and tightening your case interview skills. 20 Days to Ace the Case Interview preps you with the nuts and bolts of the case interview process with daily exercises, mock interviews, and industry know-how designed to help you ace your interview.
Think of this book as your twenty-day intensive, management consulting boot camp, the perfect supplement to your arsenal of case interview lessons and material.
With this guidebook, you will:
Gain day-by-day structure: Daily case interview exercises progressively prep you
Ask the right questions: Fundamental frameworks teach you exactly what to ask under pressure
Learn from the pros: Review real-life stories from consulting experts
Uncover unique strategies: Discover custom-developed case interview tips straight from the authors
Go off script: Adapt what you've learned with our bonus case interview guides
Management consultants Destin Whitehurst and Erin Robinson give you need-to-know techniques for polishing your poise and tightening your case interview skills. 20 Days to Ace the Case Interview preps you with the nuts and bolts of the case interview process with daily exercises, mock interviews, and industry know-how designed to help you ace your interview.
Think of this book as your twenty-day intensive, management consulting boot camp, the perfect supplement to your arsenal of case interview lessons and material.
With this guidebook, you will:
Gain day-by-day structure: Daily case interview exercises progressively prep you
Ask the right questions: Fundamental frameworks teach you exactly what to ask under pressure
Learn from the pros: Review real-life stories from consulting experts
Uncover unique strategies: Discover custom-developed case interview tips straight from the authors
Go off script: Adapt what you've learned with our bonus case interview guides
196 pages, Paperback
Published February 11, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 14, 2019
The "20 days" thing was a little bit of a gimmick - I don't recommend reading this if your interview is just 20 days away. You'll probably need a little more time to absorb everything.
But other than that, I thought that this book was a pretty good introduction to handling case interviews. The approach shared was relatively simple, and the frameworks the authors write about are general and high-level (internal vs. external; profit = revenues - costs etc.), meaning that they can be applied to a multitude of cases without too much rote memorisation.
The downside of course is that if the interviewer is looking for a specific framework then you're probably not going to do too well.
Still, having read this book, and perhaps more importantly gone through many of the mock cases, I find that my thinking about business problems has evolved. I find myself utilising the steps espoused in the book in my day-to-day work.
Here they are, and my comments on how I've adapted them to my non-interviewing life:
1. Unwind the case prompt - clarify and paraphrase the problem in your own words. When a colleague comes to you with a problem, ensure you understand it on your own terms, and don't go trying to solve a problem that didn't need to be solved.
2. Develop a framework - some people come to you with problems that are ridiculously open-ended. These "big picture" people (typically senior manager types) have a sense of what they're looking for, but may not be too clear. A framework helps keep everyone sane, even if high-level. It gets the conversation going, and when you're a little into the doing of the work, you and your stakeholders will learn more about the problem, and that nature of the solution that is being sought, and iterate to something closer to perfection.
3. Collect data - enough said. But then again, I was once in a meeting where a stakeholder thought I had all the data I needed, and when I tried to explain that I didn't, things didn't go down very well. It was as if that stakeholder wanted me to make up the data on the fly.
4. Form a hypothesis - important, very important. You want to define the hypothesis, because otherwise you won't know if you're answering the right question. Also, without defining it early on, you'll find a question to fit the data and not the other way around.
5. Test your hypothesis - with the data you've collected, you can now test if your hypothesis stands or not.
6. Summarise the case - because as in every project, there should be an outcome that can be communicated to senior stakeholders and sponsors.
7. Make a final recommendation - because this is essentially what the project was all about in the first place.
But other than that, I thought that this book was a pretty good introduction to handling case interviews. The approach shared was relatively simple, and the frameworks the authors write about are general and high-level (internal vs. external; profit = revenues - costs etc.), meaning that they can be applied to a multitude of cases without too much rote memorisation.
The downside of course is that if the interviewer is looking for a specific framework then you're probably not going to do too well.
Still, having read this book, and perhaps more importantly gone through many of the mock cases, I find that my thinking about business problems has evolved. I find myself utilising the steps espoused in the book in my day-to-day work.
Here they are, and my comments on how I've adapted them to my non-interviewing life:
1. Unwind the case prompt - clarify and paraphrase the problem in your own words. When a colleague comes to you with a problem, ensure you understand it on your own terms, and don't go trying to solve a problem that didn't need to be solved.
2. Develop a framework - some people come to you with problems that are ridiculously open-ended. These "big picture" people (typically senior manager types) have a sense of what they're looking for, but may not be too clear. A framework helps keep everyone sane, even if high-level. It gets the conversation going, and when you're a little into the doing of the work, you and your stakeholders will learn more about the problem, and that nature of the solution that is being sought, and iterate to something closer to perfection.
3. Collect data - enough said. But then again, I was once in a meeting where a stakeholder thought I had all the data I needed, and when I tried to explain that I didn't, things didn't go down very well. It was as if that stakeholder wanted me to make up the data on the fly.
4. Form a hypothesis - important, very important. You want to define the hypothesis, because otherwise you won't know if you're answering the right question. Also, without defining it early on, you'll find a question to fit the data and not the other way around.
5. Test your hypothesis - with the data you've collected, you can now test if your hypothesis stands or not.
6. Summarise the case - because as in every project, there should be an outcome that can be communicated to senior stakeholders and sponsors.
7. Make a final recommendation - because this is essentially what the project was all about in the first place.
May 15, 2019
It's an okay wrap up but too simplistic and some chapters are pure filling of pages...
June 22, 2019
The content could have been summarised much more. There was a lot of fluff. I liked the case examples though.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews