Speak Like a Management Consultant: Terminology Dictionary

Consultants talk in a simple, structured manner. They also use specific terminologies in pitches to clients.

Talking like a management consultant is a good way to impress your interviewer during the case interview.However, many candidates make that dreadful mistake of using cliche’d jargons they find on the Internet – if you do that, the interviewer will perceive you as naive, at best.

Table of Contents

Keep your words simple and easy to understand

Structure your talk

Use actual, non-cliche consulting terminology

Keep your words simple and easy to understand

Being easy to understand will always come first. In business meetings, nobody cares about how good your vocabulary is. Time is money, and solutions come first.

Also, not everybody you work with will have the same background, so what you say will be clear to some but baffling to others. And again, it comes back to TIME. Simple means less time wasted on questions, more time spent on answers.

So next time, don’t go out there and tell someone’s business procedure is a kafkaesque nightmare (which can leave them flabbergasted), just say it’s too complex, and save precious time asking ridiculous vocabulary questions.

Structure your talk

Everything you say must follow a flow of speech, each sentence needs to make sense and complements one another. One way you can structure your talk is to present what you say in a top-down manner. It’s how issue trees are drawn and how our articles are written. Follow these steps:

Step 1: Start with what you want to talk about, and be sure to make it very clear
Step 2: Go straight to the point in one sentence. In case interviews and actual projects, this is usually the root causes or recommendations
Step 3: Present the solutions/implementation in a structured fashion
Step 4: Brief about the next steps if there’s any

It’s all about the flow. A well-structured pitch would make your clients begging for more. They will gladly ignore your mistakes and relish what you’ve brought to the table.

So here’s an example. Let’s say a company asked you to find out why its profit is dropping, and you’ve got the answer and are ready to pitch it to the CEO. Here’s how it goes:

“Mr. CEO, it’s been a pleasure working with your company to tackle a profit problem. We’ve identified one root cause to be the outdated key product.

We’ve proposed 3 solutions to rectify this:

In the short term, we can buy the technology in critical high-volume areas. This won’t be sustainable, but it clears the urgent need and buys us more time
In the medium term, we develop our capability through joint-ventures with experienced firms. This is a good balance of time and cost
In the long term, when the company has gathered enough know-how through those joint-venture activities, we start to develop our capability in-house. This will be the most sustainable way

Here are the potential vendors and partners for the short term and medium term solutions. We would love to work with you in implementing the solutions. Thank you.”

Use actual, non-cliche consulting terminology

This is a little dictionary of what consultants would actually use in reports for clients.

Talking like a consultant is a good way to impress your interviewer in case interviews, but that does not simply mean using jargons you find on the Internet – if you do that, the interviewer will perceive you as naive, at best. It’s a bit of everything, from being simple, structured, with some consulting phrases for flavor.

This list would be useful for:

First-year consultants looking to immediately improve “professionalism” and “consulting-like” writing on documents, emails, etc.
First-year consultants to understand and get involved in content discussions right on the first day
Future aspired consultants looking to implicitly showing their “consulting-like” background on resumes

This is just a sneak peak. If you want the full experience, check out our Rookie Consultant pack. You’ll find everything you need to kickstart your consulting career!

Exhibit: Common terms used by management consultants with examples

Term	Definition	Example
Ad-hoc	Non-structure	Let’s turn this ad hoc process into a structured and efficient one.
Alignment	Agreement	We have interviewed key stakeholders to get client alignment on the overall approach.
Benchmark	Standard/point of reference	Proportion of short-term debts is higher than benchmarks across sub-holding companies
Constraint	Difficulty; draw-back	Half of the market is out of ABC’s reach due to its capital constraints.
Deliverables	End products of consulting projects	Our deliverables for this workstream include the master strategy and detailed implementation plan for the cement segment in the next 10 years.
End-to-end	Comprehensive; complete	The supervisors should manage and construct projects in an end-to-end manner.
Footprint	Significant and powerful presence in something	The firm has expanded its footprint in the real estate and social infrastructure construction in synergy with the urban development business.
Function	Departments like IT, HR, Operation, Strategy, etc.	IT systems are vulnerable while HR and Finance functions also show gaps.
Gaps	Difference	There are key gaps across all critical control functions that ABC needs to address.
Impeccable	Perfect	Our staff take pride in providing impeccable service.
In line	Roughly, similar	This steel plant performance is in line with market average but room for improvement exists
Infrastructure	System; foundation	Develop an IT infrastructure that enable stability and growth
Initiatives	Actions	ABC could pursue performance improvement initiatives to further strengthen hydro power generation’s contribution.
Leverage	Taking advantage of	Apple should leverage its strong brand name.
Levers	Ways to improve things	There are three levers to boost sales conversion rate at branches.
Mechanism	Method	We used a robust review mechanism to control residual risk during a project.
Milestones	Mini goals/achievements	The company passed the $6 billion market cap milestone this year
Productivity	How efficient and effective things are run	The client needs to more actively manage capital allocation and productivity, associated debts with CAPEX and ensure debts are manageable.
Restructuring	Significantly and massively changing something	The board guided a three-year Human Capital Transformation Plan including restructuring divisions and alignment to business strategy.
Rigorous	Comprehensive	Rigorously improve performance of ABC Steel to remain competitive.
Roadmap	Overall timeline-based plan	The manager presented the outline of the implementation roadmap with key milestones and resources requirements.
Root cause	Bottleneck that causes the problem	The root cause of the problem lies in the poor construction of the bridge.
Segment	The small piece after breaking down big problems, industry, workstream, etc.	The team should focus on projects in niche segments.
Soundness	Goodness	We first need to test this division's operational soundness.
Strategy	Where to play; What to play; How to play	The client should develop a holistic urban development strategy to become the developer-of-choice for large-scale urban development projects.
Streamline	In organized system and with specializations	XYZ’s business support functions are largely over-sized, overlapped and can be streamlined.
Subscale	Small	Although fragmented and subscale, our plants are geographically well positioned to serve industries in the North.
Synergy	Things when combined create greater value than sum of each part	Synergy between different properties (e.g. residential, shopping mall complex, office) enhances total land value.
Turnaround	Revitalize/from bad to good	ABC cement is facing serious financial challenges and the chance for a turnaround is small.
Utilization	Make the best use of something	Low sales volume has kept the capacity utilization rate low across ABC’s cement plants.

Merely speaking like a consultant is not enough to pass case interviews – you need to absolutely master the core fundamentals as well as the tips and techniques!

Here’s a “crash course” to help you do just that – from principles of consulting problem-solving, to case interview formats, along with dozens of tips and tricks, all in one free guide!