Having spent two years abroad studying for a master’s degree in international relations, I decided not to follow my classmates into international organizations, lobbying firms, and not-for-profits, but instead to seek rigorous private-sector training. As a graduate, I was looking for a dynamic environment with early responsibility, a challenging culture, and exposure to different industry sectors. In all these respects, BCG has outshone my early expectations.

My first client at BCG was a global environmental charity, which placed me in familiar territory, as I had already worked with a couple of charities and knew that they often struggle with complex organizational structures and slow decision-making processes. In this case, we conducted a strategic review, with a focus on defining clear roles and new performance metrics for each department of the organization. The project made real progress, and our efforts were rewarded a year later, when the charity’s director general wrote to thank us for our “sure and guiding hand” at a “critical stage in our development.”

Since those beginnings, I have had a broad range of assignments, from financial services cost-reduction projects to media strategy cases. Building on this experience, I have just started a temporary placement at the BBC. Here, I have been reassured to find that the skills I learned at BCG—thinking in a structured, creative way and supporting my arguments with rigorous analysis—are also relevant to the public sector. This is particularly true for projects involving new media platforms, where technology is opening new doors, audience behaviors are shifting, and new business models are being established.

So, having initially harbored concerns that my background would not be relevant to BCG, I have been happy and somewhat relieved to discover that social science and consulting both depend on similar basic capabilities. Coming full circle, it has been very rewarding to build on these skills at BCG and now, to be able to apply them once again in a public-sector setting at the BBC.

For me, that has meant working across industries advising CEOs, CFOs, and business-unit presidents on their top issues.

For my clients, it has meant changing the rules of the game and outperforming the market as a result. For a Fortune 500 consumer goods company, I helped develop 35 products for a critical new channel in less than six months—as opposed to the six new products they had launched in the previous year. This energized the entire organization to grow. Another one of my clients, armed with insight from our project assessing the value of their strategic plan, negotiated a sale of the company for a 40 percent premium—significantly higher than a previous offer. This created billions of dollars of value for shareholders—now that’s real impact!