And he sends me good morning text messages every day.

Puke.

24 August 2006

11.12 p.m.

Diary, you are aware that ‘Always know where you stand with respect to your personal and professional goals’ is one of my personal philosophies.

Today I think it is time we take a quarterly overview of my experience working for one of the top mid-sized premium full-service consulting firms in the world.

And what better way to do this than to use Dufresne’s own project evaluation framework. I have decided to self-evaluate as honestly as possible and see how well I have been doing. So here goes. Each criterion is marked on a scale of one to five where five is awesome and one is deep shit.

ANALYSIS

Score: 4

Details: To be very frank, I have surpassed even my own stringent expectations when it comes to this aspect of my job. So far not a single piece of number work or modelling I have done for the Tantra project has been sent back to me to be reworked. In fact, very often Tony and Yetch look at my work and then tell me not to show it to Santanam or the client. I always agree; I know they are petrified of exposing my excellence. With unbelievable competition building up within the firm for the post of associate opening up in March, they don’t want to let the new kid shine too much. No problems. I know my time will come.

PRESENTATION

Score: 4.5

Details: In any other environment I would be, without a doubt, a five-star presenter. But as long as Yetch is there I cannot give myself a 100 per cent. Yetch still miraculously creates huge presentations in just an hour or two with great data and meticulous detail. Yesterday Santanam asked Yetch to make a small list of points on Stanford University. Eighty minutes later Yetch gave him a hundred-and-twenty-eight-slide PowerPoint presentation. Till the day I can do something like that I cannot give myself a five. Otherwise my presentation skills have been excellent. Even though I haven’t made any presentations to the client so far, I am pretty sure I’d do them very well indeed if I had to.

CLIENT RELATIONSHIP

Score: 5

Details: If there was any mathematically rational way to give myself a six on this I would. I so totally and thoroughly outperformed in this aspect. My relationship with the client is simply superb. I am in daily touch with the client team through SMS with Babykutty. Even now whenever the team has a problem Babykutty calls me first. My client skills are outstanding.

LEADERSHIP

Score: 4.7

Details: First we must answer the question: What really is leadership in a management consulting context? As far as I am concerned it is exactly what I am doing nowadays with the Tantra project. For instance, I organize conference calls, prepare the paperwork for every client meeting and even make sure that the meetings are effective by maintaining a written log of everything that is discussed. This is the sort of attention to detail that makes a true leader. As Professor Parikh used to say: A true leader is one who leads by doing. I am doing.