Engagement Leader

ABOUT US:

Incandescent is a strategy consulting and venture development firm; we advise leaders, conduct research, and work with founders to build companies. In our advisory practice, we partner with top leadership of large corporate enterprises across a range of industries on strategy, strategy execution, organizational performance and innovation. A significant part of Incandescent’s practice also focuses on systems change, working in partnership with philanthropy and leading non-profit organizations. In our venture practice, we are partners to founders, growing ideas into businesses that scale and endure, taking equity positions in these ventures. Across these different types of engagements, our focus is often on collaborating with leaders to drive solutions at the intersection of strategy and organization. Founded in 2013, we are building a small team, slowly and carefully. Each team member plays an integral part in developing Incandescent as a firm that discovers better ways to create, build and run organizations. We orient ourselves as generalist thought partners and catalysts, rather than specialized experts; focused on our clients' larger journey more than the discrete project; and work in smaller teams with team members at all levels engaged directly with senior clients

ROLE:

Incandescent is seeking an engagement leader. Engagement leaders are the day-to-day owners of work on the high-stakes questions that range from developing the corporate strategic plan for a Fortune 500 to helping a company transform its culture. Incandescent is much flatter than a traditional consulting hierarchy, and we think about team structures in a flexible, bespoke way. Inside a principled, unwavering commitment to the long term, we encourage team members at all levels to contribute to developing lasting relationships with clients and creating new opportunities for the firm. We think about our objectives as broader than simply maximizing the performance of the firm as a business. We hold four fundamental commitments–Discovery, Impact, Community and Economic Value–and at different times we make trade-offs to give these distinct commitments the weight they need.

EXPERIENCE:

Incandescent is looking for candidates who will take ownership of important client relationships and firm objectives, and at the same time who will be active citizens of the firm, contributing beyond areas of direct responsibility. Successful candidates at the engagement leader level could come from a range of backgrounds, with experiences that demonstrate their ability to drive strategic thinking in the “white space” of difficult, ambiguous problems; bring together multiple disciplines, reaching beyond their own areas of specialized expertise; lead teams; and navigate complex stakeholder environments, building organizational support for important decisions and driving change. A demonstrated track record of applied business acumen, entrepreneurial drive, and a commercial growth orientation is essential. 

Most hires into this role will have had prior strategy consulting experience; those who have not worked in a strategy consulting firm will have engaged in similar kinds of work in a different environment, for instance inside a large enterprise or in rapidly-growing start-ups. While Incandescent does not privilege any specific academic background, an engagement leader should have mastered a range of “MBA-like” skills and mental models, although not necessarily with particular focus on financial analysis.

• Conceptual thinking: the capacity to see high-level patterns and principles and the ability to translate concepts into concrete decisions and action
• Empathy: the capacity to imagine how the world looks to others and to build bonds of trust even in difficult circumstances
• Discipline: consistent follow-through and the capacity to translate intentions and decisions into sustained actions and results
• Drive to learn: intense curiosity, a commitment to honest self-examination and open feedback, a willingness to take risks
• Intentionality: thoughtful and deliberate about each aspect of one’s work; commitment to make each detail express the broader vision
• Incandescent is a demanding environment, wonderful for people who are built in this specific way, and not for anyone who isn’t ready to be stretched to his or her limits on these dimensions
• When we notice something isn’t working as well as it ought to, we work to understand root causes and to push through to implications
• Incandescent doesn’t have a defined title system and career ladder like traditional consulting firms. Similarly, our business model is not parallel to the large consulting firms and we are not attempting to create a parallel compensation model

• A person who loves the work of being an advisor, and is drawn to an environment that will provide a supportive context for this development, without a formal up-or-out model or the purely commercial focus that comes with the path to partner in the big firms
• A deep thinker who values the opportunity to develop themselves as a thought leader. We invest dramatically more time than traditional consulting firms in drawing conceptual insights from our work with clients, offering an intellectual home akin to that of a business school faculty
• An entrepreneurial individual, who values the ability to work across stages, combining work with large enterprises with the ability to play a role in developing and building businesses from the ground up
• An individual who is attracted by the ability to work both in the private sector and the social sector and to draw connections between the two
• An individual who is excited over time to develop a practice in a particular industry domain. Incandescent engages with large enterprises and early-stage ventures, and with for-profit and nonprofit organizations. While Incandescent does not organize by practice area, we could imagine somebody with entrepreneurial vision and excitement about specific domains “majoring” in deepening their work in one of these spaces