Good money but not much else - Anonymous employee Strategy& Employee Review

Most of the negatives are common of consulting in the Middle East, but much stronger in Strategy& (at competitors, people try to avoid working with ex-Booz colleagues who moved there..) Working culture is bad and still dominated by old Booz/Lebanese mentality. Work-life balance is low: long hours are taken for granted, even when not needed by the project. Many teams take for granted to work until 2-3 am, and will spread the work accordingly… it is not unusual to see teams chatting and checking facebook at 11pm, and then start working (unfortunately, most of the projects are in Riyadh and most of the teams work from same office/hotel late at night…). Facetime is considered important. Many seniors encourage these negative behaviors (e.g., planning late night meetings, calls on weekends…) ‘Boiling the ocean’ is a term probably created at Booz, and output is often measured in number of slides. Decks are done and redone multiple times, with endless appendixes (for clients who do not even look or understand most of them) Support infrastructure is sub-par (no knowledge sharing, slide production, …) adding 10-20% extra work than mbb. Some internal functions are managed by pwc with negative consequences (e.g., IT provided is from the 90s, even sending email is a real struggle) Diversity is a big issue. The company is predominantly Lebanese, who tend to be very hierarchical and cliquey. It is not unusual for non-arabic speakers to end up in a team where Arabic is the norm, on and off the job. Almost half of the staff is Beirut based: often these are people with limited international experience (leaving the country only for their MBA, where they hang out with other Lebanese consultants), so they do not even realize how impolite is to speak all the time a language not understood by other people present. Juniors from Dubai are often asked to adapt their travel and weekends to the Beirut team (Lebanon has the weekend sat-sun, while UAE and other GCC fri-sat) Trainings/on boarding/personal development is almost non existent. For new MBA hires with no consulting background it is extremely tough, and attrition rate is huge even by industry standards. Many good people are lost (voluntarily or not) just because they received no help/protection...or by pure frustration Politics is strong, and a large number of people, especially at senior level, would do anything to protect themselves … There are very few leaders with a sense of doing ’what is good for the company’ vs ‘what is good for me’, for instance in staffing decisions. Company is very hierarchical; it is basically impossible to give real feedback on seniors, or report bad behaviors. Besides, the higher you go up the rank, the more people with no emotional intelligence you can find There are few well known examples of people who made it to principal and partner lacking sufficient professional and ethical skills... just because they are protected or ‘get the job done’. These are people that worked all their life in this company, and totally lost reality from the ‘real’ world, or fail to understand colleagues from different backgrounds Strategy& is slightly more than an international ‘franchising’, even more so since owned by PWC. You don’t feel you work for an international company, but rather for a middle eastern (Lebanese) one.