She Transforms Companies for a Living. She Decided to Transform Herself First

On business trips, work started at seven in the morning and sometimes ran until eleven at night. The upside was that the firm covered meals; by the end of one project, she realized she had not spent a single penny of her own.

“I don’t want to work for someone else my whole life,” she said. She loves slow travel and the outdoors, and longs for freedom over her time and her location. Consulting cannot give her that. It cannot even give her remote work.

The person who transforms companies for a living decided to transform herself first.

At McKinsey, Lala’s job was helping companies transform. On business trips, work started at seven in the morning and sometimes ran until eleven at night. The upside was that the firm covered meals; by the end of one project, she realized she had not spent a single penny of her own.

She did not hate the job. Everyone on the team was impressive. McKinsey has an internal competition called the Innovation Olympics, which works like a round of internal entrepreneurship: teams build proposals around solving client pain points, and a global leadership committee picks out the best ones and rewards them. Her team entered one year and took silver.

Helping companies transform is, roughly speaking, helping them grow revenue and cut costs. When the economy is good, clients are happy to hear the growth story; these past few years, with the economy down, most of the work has been layoffs and cost cutting. Some clients, to save money, even took their proposals to cheaper consulting firms for execution.

Within a project, quick wins usually sell best. CEOs have their own situation to manage: a tenure of just a few years, no guarantee of another term, and everyone wants results they can show while still in the seat.

AI transformation has been a hot concept in recent years, but a company has to invest money up front and explain clearly when it will earn that money back, so for the past few years such projects were hard to get approved. Now it is different, she says. The cost of using AI has come down, and AI transformation finally has its opening.

Except she is already planning something else.

“I don’t want to work for someone else my whole life,” she said. She loves slow travel and the outdoors, and longs for freedom over her time and her location. Consulting cannot give her that. It cannot even give her remote work.

She started building mixed income streams: pet boarding, investing, career coaching, and a company of her own.

Now she has left McKinsey.

“Resting for a bit first,” she said. “I want to see what else I can do.”