So really there is no point in trying to perform better than these guys in the short term. But in the medium to long term it is always good to have solid appraisals. Now in an ideal world you should be measured purely on the basis of your efforts.

Unfortunately this is not an ideal world.

In the real world, I have sadly realized Diary, people don’t have the time to evaluate your true efforts. Criminals like Dominic are not going to sit with you and figure out what your allocated tasks were and how well you did them. Instead they will just compare. So instead of thinking ‘This Robin fellow is hard-working, inventive, enthusiastic and committed to the Dufresne vision and mission’ he is going to simply think: ‘I like this Swedish fellow. He is fun and brings me coffee. I think I will give him the best rating for this project.’

This is 100% unfair and unscientific and de-motivating. But life is unfair in consulting. This is not like sales and marketing where the fellow who sells the most gets the biggest bonus. (Not that I want to do sales. Of course not. All that sun and dust … ufff …)

So if I want to get a good rating I have to think of many consulting and non-consulting things.

To make everything more complicated Rahul Gupta is also here now.

Forget the fact that he will try to undermine me constantly. That is his way of dealing with people. I am prepared for that. But now, because we are both Indians, all these foreign people are going to compare us continuously. We are both the same batch but he is VP and I am associate. He has experience with Goldman Sachs, but I decided not to join them after MBA. He has experience with banking, I have much broader and more holistic experience across a variety of sectors but nobody will remember that here. He is also taller and slightly slimmer. And has already developed an American accent: ‘Hello. I am Rahool Gooptah. Mine is longer than yours. And you are?’

So in comparison I perhaps come across as a little unsophisticated and country.

So I need to choose my enemies carefully. Rahul may be difficult to overtake directly. But indirectly I may still have a chance.

I have decided to list all the six fellows, besides Dominic who is too senior to be seen as competition right now, and then analyse them briefly in the areas of ‘Consulting ability’, ‘Talent and potential’, ‘Personality’ and ‘Overall Einstein threat level’.

1. Carlos Matamoros, Spain, Analyst

Consulting ability: This is only Carlos’s second project and therefore his consulting skills are very basic indeed. Yesterday, he told me, was the first time he had ever made a spreadsheet that had conditional cell formatting programmed to the output of a dynamic pivot table populated by Solver. Beginner.