Pros
- You will be working with incredibly smart, and mostly very nice people - Very family oriented as most of the Partners and Principals have families, so family obligations like being home in time to have dinner with your kids, are respected, as long as work allows - but don't kid yourself into thinking it's a 9-5. It's more like a dinner break, and you continue working from home, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. - Good compensation and benefits - Company constantly tries to improve, and employee feedback is listened and at least sometimes, acted upon. Innosight is a performance obsessed place, so employees always have to be constantly improving themselves, but in return the company as a whole also tries to continually improve its own processes and its relevancy and competitiveness in the market
Cons
- Forget work life balance. The old review saying this is a company that allows for work-life balance is outdated and absolutely no longer true. Employees are told not to say that we are 9-5 anymore during interviews because this is not the case. It is consulting hours, 60++ a week if not a whole lot more, with lots of travel (although probably still less than traditional consulting firms). - Company is performance obsessed, and as one Innosighter so well put it "It takes some of the most brilliant, talented people, and then beats them up and makes them feel like crap about themselves." Morale and self-esteem can take a very deep dive here, as your weaknesses and "areas of improvement" are put under a magnifying glass and sometimes exploded to disproportionate lengths. People will notice and criticize even the smallest of things (e.g. whether you wait for the entire team after you get off the plane at the home airport, or just head off to go home, whether you help clients/partners with their bags, whether you used the preferred color scheme of the partner in your powerpoint deck, etc - in fact, even using "etc" is criticized as a form of laziness). And even after you improve on your so-called "areas of improvement," you are rewarded with another set of "areas of improvement" to work on because of the "need to show progress." As a result, there is a lot of performance anxiety, stress, and dare I say, general unhappiness amongst the ranks (although the unhappiness also stems from other factors like over-work). - One case or one person can make or break your career. The company is small, and getting on a "bad" case and/or working under someone whom you just don't gel with, can completely break your career here. That said, if you get in good with the right person, your upward progression can be very quick. People with a long tenure here are given some slack, but the newer comers are "only as good as your last case." - Culture has definitely shifted from feeling like a small family doing innovative work that people are passionate about, with people who genuinely like and respect one another, to a mini-McKinsey (but without the resources and prestige). The former Managing partner Matt Eyring left, and what we call the "McKinsey camp" has been winning out ever since. Making us colder, and much more rigid and process oriented. The new Managing Partner Scott Anthony is all the way out in Asia, and so doesn't have as good a pulse on the goings-on in the mothership. He is also a former McKinsey person, another reason for the move towards being more of a McKinsey. And as another reviewer wrote, "If I wanted to work at McKinsey, I would work at McKinsey."