A McKinsey partner once told me about his niece who got a job offer as a management trainee from a world-leading healthcare company.
This company had (and still has) a spectacular global brand, and is a market leader in many categories.
And therefore, he advised his niece — “Don’t take that job offer. What will you learn there? These guys have such high profit margins that their operations will be bloated and inefficient.
“If you want to really learn management, work at a company like Wal-Mart, where they fight for every dollar. That is where you will see how a tight ship is run.”
This applies not just to companies but to all of us. When we have a lot, we often become complacent.
In the early days of your career, you may lament not having enough money, experience, network, and so on. It certainly makes life harder but these hardships teach you something that a scion of a big industrialist family will never have a chance to learn.
I am not saying that we should aim to be poor or work at low-margin companies.
But constraints are not always obstacles — sometimes, they are what we need to bring out the best in us.
– Rajan