Guillermina Bond.

One month into my first engagement, my manager had an accident on a Wednesday morning and had to step away from the project — immediately, indefinitely. No handover. No warning. Just a call from the AP, and then silence.

I had two options: wait for someone to tell me what to do, or keep showing up and doing the work. I showed up. I picked up the Culture workstream on top of the Transformation Office analysis I was already running, and started working directly with the AP. I just didn't know how to do it any other way.

What I learned is that McKinsey gives you more rope than you think. The trick is knowing when to grab it, and trusting that the people around you will catch you if you reach too far.

That manager and I stayed in touch. We worked together again later, and became great friends. I did, however, permanently forbid him from riding a bike on TO meeting days.

There's a version of the consulting story that's all pressure and performance. That version is real. But it's incomplete.

The fuller version includes the 2AM team huddles where someone cracks a joke at exactly the right moment and you start laugh-crying. The slide decks finished on the jet bridge. The personalized Slackemojis. The colleagues who see you at your least polished and show up anyway.

Some of my closest mentors came from those rooms. Some of my closest friends. My partner. The relationships that formed under that kind of pressure have a different quality to them. Honest, tested, real in a way that's hard to replicate.

If you asked me what I'm most proud of from my years at McKinsey, the answer wouldn't be a project. It would be the people I met and the relationships I built.

I booked a flight on a Thursday. By the following Monday we were presenting preliminary hypotheses to a leadership team in an industry neither of us had ever touched. By week two, we were deep enough that the CEO pulled our engagement manager aside and said (half-flattering, half-accusatory) that we must have worked in the sector before. We hadn't.

That's the skill I'm most proud of from consulting: the ability to become genuinely useful, genuinely fast. Not surface-level useful. Useful enough that the people who've spent their careers in a space trust your analysis of it.

I've done this across more industries than I can easily list. I know more than I should about refrigerated supply chains, fintech attention models, and the surprisingly many ways to write (well and very badly) the word 'polyester'. Each one felt impossible at first and obvious by the end.

Curiosity is the skill underneath all the other skills. That's what I actually took away from consulting.