In the 1990s, when I passed my MS in Management from one of the top B-Schools in the USA, I considered management consulting as the top choice for my career. Being a woman, I was cautioned by several friends and well-wishers that the consulting career meant living out of a suitcase and a globe-trotting job to be a true partner to the clients.
The world of consulting in those years seemed very rich, I enjoyed juggling the domestic assignments in management and IT consulting across industries covering business process improvement, strategic and operations consulting including supply chain optimization, cost reduction, to name a few. Some of the hot IT consulting areas included Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs), IT health assessment, IT Packaged product selection, helping customers with authoring their requests for proposal for IT services, and so on. Then came the e-commerce boom in the 2000s and there was a flood of engagements...