BLT’s home is in Chancery Lane, London. So when we open our Australian office we can save some printing costs by locating it in Chancery Lane, Bendigo (Victoria).

We thank JC, one of our newsletter subscribers, for sending us the picture. And if you see a Quality Court or a Chancery Lane on your travels, please let us know -and send us the snap.

The MCA Annual Awards ceremony attracted a 600-strong crowd of management consultants, their clients, and BLT to the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, London. We sponsored the award for the best change management project in the private sector (won by Boxwood)., We also cheered for PKF and Hudson & Yorke, two smaller consultancies who beat off the big boys to scoop awards for best international project and best outsourcing project. Top-Consultant writer Mick James caught the mood of the evening well.

BLT’s Kate Birtwistle presented the prizes .

Case study guru and strategy consultant Victor Cheng wrote this great item in his newsletter. The first part is an extract from a New York Times interview with the former head of the Bain Capital NY office, who has a new book out on the US economy. It also reveals how this ex-Bain consultant used a statistical approach to choosing his wife.

Here's Cheng’s excerpt from the newspaper (you can click through to the whole New York Times article here )

"There's also the fact that Conard applies a relentless, mathematical logic to nearly everything, even finding a good spouse. He advocates, in utter seriousness, using demographic data to calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area.

Then, he says, you should set aside a bit of time for "calibration" -- dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like. Then you enter the selection phase, this time with the goal of picking a permanent mate.

The first woman you date who is a better match than the best woman you met during the calibration phase is, therefore, the person you should marry. By statistical probability, she is as good a match as you're going to get. (Conard used this system himself.)

This constant calculation -- even of the incalculable -- can be both fascinating and absurd."

Cheng continues:

Now, obviously not everyone from Bain actually uses this approach to choose a spouse. Some of us prefer the romance of falling in love. BUT, (and this is very important), everybody I know at MBB most certainly sees the logic behind this approach (even if they would not use it themselves) and many of them will use a similar logical approach to other aspects of their lives.

For example, you should have seen one of my former McKinsey colleagues. She was a woman who was planning her wedding and basically "estimated" how many people would attend her wedding.

She started with a list of everyone invited, estimated whether or not said person would bring a date based on their current relationship status, further estimated based on distance of travel needed what percent would actually make the trip to create an excel forecast model that estimated total headcount.

This in turn provided the assumptions for her wedding cost forecasting model which factored in the latest head count estimate and the cost per person for food.

Crazy? Maybe. Did everyone at McK who saw this, understand and at some level was secretly impressed (even if they wouldn't admit to it out loud)? Oh most definitely.

THIS is just how consultants think about things... or at least have the OPTION to think in this way when they want to. I hope this gives you a sense of the mentality MBB consultants have and how they approach (or have the option to approach) nearly any unstructured problem, and structure it in some logical way.

Is Simon Cowell right to be worried about the threat from ‘The Voice’?

I think he is; ‘Britain's Got Talent’ is tired and out-dated.

The BBC has not only captured The Voice, it’s captured the nation’s voice or, more importantly, its mood. As I watched last weekend’s showings of The Voice I was struck not only of course by the huge talent of everyone competing but - and competing is the key word - they were competing together; the contestants had to share the floor and work with each other to be their best, proving that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly the judges had to share the glory and the pain. Turning over to Britain’s Got Talent, the contrast was clear. Simon had done his best to keep up and wisely ensured that a great young talent would be the first act the channel-hopping audience saw. However, it wasn’t long before a counterpoint appeared and I was faced with the usual embarrassment of watching TV that is simply cruel and voyeuristic. The Voice is reflective a new collaborative culture; Britain’s Got Talent is the equivalent of the worst of the last decade of ruthless “every man for himself” and “laugh at the losers” style of commercial exploitation. I turned over again and found The 1970s: How did the mood of that decade compare? Who can remember?

“It’s not you, it’s me”

It’s the classic fob-off that we all dread to hear, and if we do, we dismiss it as a feeble attempt to sugar-coat the truth. Really, how often is this NOT the case?

Well, today it really isn’t.

The old it’s-not-you-it’s-me line was pretty much the essence of my decision to leave BLT. But I don’t do so running away manically, blinded by the horrors I witnessed within the recruitment world. As a fresh graduate, dragging my feet into full-time employment, I found BLT exciting, nurturing and fun to be a part of, and though I have decided recruitment is not what I currently want to pursue in the long-term, all of these qualities still stand true for BLT. The team are friendly, supportive, committed and kind – everything I could have asked for in my first exposure to a professional environment. More importantly, Don and the other directors didn’t scare me away by frantically waving blank invoices and unmet sales targets in my face, wondering why I hadn’t raked in big money within my first month. They understood that it would take time, training and patience to develop good and solid skills for recruitment.

Next week I’ll be starting an internship with Amnesty International. Short of denouncing secular life for a religious calling, my next move is pretty far removed from Management Consultancy recruitment as one might imagine. But it’s a chance for me to channel what interests me academically and personally in a constructive and productive way. My want to be active and mobile, campaigning for causes I believe in, trying to deliver change in places that are long over-due would have always left me with a sense of restlessness – whether I’d been in recruitment, accounting, marketing or any other solid career path that doesn’t bemusedly ask what on earth you expected to do with a history degree. Not even a year out of university, I’ve no idea what career path I’ll carve for myself, but I’ll always know BLT is where I started to chip into my potential. As the team celebrates BLT’s 25th birthday and remain the preferred recruiter in their specialist areas, I can leave with the pride of having been part of such a successful organisation. And what with ‘BLT Deli’ and ‘BLT Snacks’ being a stones throw from my new office building, they’ll never be far from my thoughts.