Each module of the Bootcamp is founded on a set of best practices and tools that participants take back with them for future use. These are all laid out in easily usable forms, such as checklists, a set of insights, templates or a step-by-step approaches. You will walk out with insights and a binder of materials that will act as your toolkit and your guide in any strategy consulting situation - and in a range of other careers as well.

There is often no better way of driving home a point than to illustrate it with a true-to-life story. The instructor utilizes a number of candid stories from his consulting experience and those of consultant he worked with, to bring the learnings from the Bootcamp to life. These span the spectrum, from "how to do it" to "how not to do it". Students who have taken this course at Columbia have often commented on the rich insights they received from these informal recollections of the high and low points in the life of a consultant, quite apart from the formal discussion of best practices and tools.

Participants are exposed to "live" consulting situations via a range of role-plays. The instructor plays the client, with student volunteers assuming the role of the consultant. These role-plays allow participants to think and act on their feet, to review the resulting dynamics with the instructor, and to learn ways to prepare for, and execute in, these "moments of truth" in client interactions where their credibility and impact is at stake.

This is a sanitized version of an actual McKinsey strategy engagement that the instructor worked on during his career. Participants are exposed to the engagement in stages, and are made to work in teams to tackle each stage. They are asked first to define the problem based on preliminary information, and, at the next stage, to develop a structure for how they will solve the engagement. Later, they are given data and asked to size the market for a certain product, and at the final stage, they are asked to develop a go-to-market strategy. At each stage, team solutions are compared and reviewed across the class, and students get to see what happened on the actual study. In this way, students get a unique, hands-on view of the end-to-end process of strategy problem-solving.

The Bootcamp is punctuated with a number of consulting scenarios where the instructor places the participants into specific consulting situations and asks for ideas on how they would approach these scenarios. Any given approach often involves some trade-offs, different participants often take different positions on an issue, and the class is challenged to come up with the "right" approach after the different viewpoints have been elicited. Before the discussion ends, the instructor lays out a way to reconcile the key points of tension in the class, and presents a set of insight and tools that could guide the students in similar situations in real life. This form of hands-on learning allows the students to gain a tangible, hands-on understanding of the consulting process and to absorb key insights in an experiential manner.