Upon joining Bain & Company in 1992, Jenny Davis-Peccoud followed the standard consulting track from analyst to consultant to manager. Now Davis-Peccoud's daily focus is on Bain's global organization practices, and helping clients and partners on organizational effectiveness issues. Using these skills, Davis-Peccoud became heavily involved in the London branch of Bain's award-winning community program, the Bain Cares Network. The network allows Bain employees who want to give back to the community the chance to volunteer their services or time. Davis-Peccoud sat down with Consulting's One on One to discuss the network, pro bono work and a new Web site that allows Bain employees to see case studies from previous work done by the Bain Cares Network.
Consulting: What is the Bain Cares Network all about?
Davis-Peccoud: Community engagement has historically been a very office-driven activity at Bain. In almost every office there are people who are passionate about doing great work in the community and come together in the local office to make that happen. Whether that's giving our time and volunteering, or using our skills for pro-bono consulting, or raising money through charity through marathons or what have you. Every office has some program, and I've been very active in shaping the program in London. We've been developing the Network for the last two to three years. It occurred to me there was great stuff going on in other offices, and I wanted to hear more about it and have the opportunity for all of us to share experiences and make sure we're getting the best out of each other as we try to help our communities. It started with a quarterly call with each Bain Cares program in each of the offices around the world. This served as an impetus for some offices to rekindle programs that might have been lost, or put a push on starting a program that hadn't gotten as much traction as people wanted.
Consulting: What are some of the volunteer activities that Bain employees who get involved with the Network have done?
Davis-Peccoud: Every office has something they're involved with, whether its cleaning the Thames River in London or painting a school in Boston or helping at a children's health clinic in India. Quite a lot of offices do pro bono or what we call low bono consulting work for charities.
Consulting: How do consultants balance pro bono work with their other work?
Davis-Peccoud: People get involved in this kind of work because they're absolutely passionate about it, so they're willing to spend their spare time on these kinds of things. Some of our pro bono projects are fully staffed, so people will be there for case assignments. That's an investment we make in our community because we want to have an impact in the communities where we operate. We do have a number of pro bono client assignments that people do in their spare time. I ran a project in London last year with a team of five or six people, everyone was staffed on client projects, but we managed to do the project in a way that the deliverables and activities were very clear, and the timeframe was flexible enough that if we couldn't quite get it done this week we could always pick it up next week. Since they knew we were fitting it in on our spare time, we were able to deliver a great piece of work even with people fully staffed on client assignments. It comes down to that passion, if you love something you want to put your time into it.
Consulting: What are the elements in these case studies regarding pro bono work that you might not find in regular client work?
Davis-Peccoud: There is an amazing similarity between those two. One of the great things that inspires our people is a lot of the skills we learn in the for-profit consulting with our for-profit clients are absolutely relevant and applicable to our charity clients. So what you see is a lot of similar frameworks and approaches because you can apply a lot from the for-profit world to the non-profit world. What you'll see more of in non-profit cases is really quite often around the client process and what it takes to bring people on board, and get people behind a common agenda, because there isn't the overriding metric of shareholder value or profits.
We now have a new Internet site set up which is similar to what we do for our client consulting work, which captures all of the knowledge we've been able to pull together from our pro bono consulting. It's been very rewarding because people have started using it. For example I was running a team here in the U.K. on fundraising strategy and I was able for my team to find the other teams around the Bain system that have tackled this issue of fundraising strategy and we can jump on the phone with them. People have found it very helpful as a means of getting started rather than recreating the wheel every time we do a project for one of our clients we're able to tap into our resources.
Consulting: Anything in these case studies that says, 'we hit an obstacle we didn't foresee, and this project didn't go exactly as planned, but here's what to look for if the project that you're doing is similar to this.' Are there cautionary tales in there?
Davis-Peccoud: You absolutely do find those things that happen, and sometimes it makes it into the case studies that are available on the Internet. Sometimes the cautionary tales will come out more when people make the connection because they see so and so did this type of case, let me give them a call I'm starting something very similar, and that's when you get the cautionary tales around, "we tried doing it this way and it didn't quite work," "if I were you I'd really advise you doing it this way." It helps that sharing goes on between colleagues as they're connecting once they know they're working on something similar.
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