What It's Actually Like Being a Big 4 Partner
Seventeen accepted meetings. One washroom break. Three amazings.
The question arrives at dinner parties, always from the person seated to your left, usually between the starter and the main, and always with the same subtext: I want to know if it was worth it. The short answer is that we do not know. The honest answer takes longer, and it has no LinkedIn gloss on it.
The day
You wake at 4:30. Not because you are a morning person. Because the window between 6 and 8:30am, before the meetings begin, is the only uninterrupted block you will get, and your inbox has accumulated 40 emails since you last checked it at 11pm. Some of these require decisions. Several are marked urgent by people whose threshold for urgency you have learned not to trust. You clear as many as possible. One is from a client whose subject line reads “Quick question” and whose body contains seven paragraphs, two of which contradict each other. You flag it for the mythical “later” that does not exist.
At 8:30 the meetings begin. They do not stop.
Your calendar today contains seventeen accepted meetings. That does not count the ones your PA or you already rejected. These are the ones that survived the cull. For some of them you will wait until the last possible minute to cancel or postpone, buying yourself fifteen minutes you will spend not thinking but triaging. For others, you will dial into two simultaneously, one in each ear. These are the meetings whose organisers do not need your input; they need your name on the attendance list so they can say that you were present when the decision was made. You listen to both with one ear each, hoping to catch the moment anyone addresses you directly, while using your hands to respond to emails. You are also hoping, with the quiet dread of experience, that you have not implicitly agreed to something by failing to object to it in real time. This has happened before. It will happen again. You will discover what you agreed to in approximately three weeks, when someone references “the decision the leadership endorsed” in a meeting you do not remember attending because you were also in another meeting at the time.
The practice leadership call runs ninety minutes and covers six items, four of which could have been an email and two of which will generate a follow-up meeting to discuss what was discussed. But this is not your only leadership meeting. You also sit on the country leadership, the regional leadership, and three industry leadership groups because your practice spans sectors. Financial services wants your pipeline numbers. Energy wants your pipeline numbers. Government wants your pipeline numbers. You have twelve senior partners, each of whom considers themselves your primary reporting line, each of whom wants to see your financials, your forecast, and your narrative for why the forecast has not improved since last week. The narrative has a half-life of seven days, after which the next review cycle requires a fresh one.
Somewhere in the mid-morning, if you are lucky, you get a client meeting. This is the part of the job that actually resembles what you told yourself the job would be. The client has a problem. You have relevant experience. For ninety minutes you are a consultant in the way the word was meant: engaged, useful, specific. These minutes are the best minutes. They are a decreasing proportion of your week, and you are aware of this while they are happening, which makes them worse.
By the afternoon, your inbox has refilled. Your teams are sending messages marked URGENT because a proposal needs your sign-off by 1pm, a deliverable needs your approval before it ships to the client, a commercial agreement needs your signature before the procurement deadline. You are supposed to read these documents. As a partner and practice leader, your name on them carries legal and commercial weight. Even after years of doing this, you still harbour a faint hope that this will be the deliverable you actually read before signing. It never is. Your senior manager finally catches you in the corridor between meetings — or, more accurately, outside the washroom at 12:57pm, the first time you have managed to go to the washroom while walking between meeting rooms — and you sign on your phone without reading past the executive summary. The executive summary was also written by someone who did not read the full document.
The 7pm call with the offshore team runs long because it always runs long. You carve out an hour with your spouse somewhere between 8 and 9. The 9pm call with the client who “just wants five minutes” runs fifty. At 11pm you reopen the laptop and apply the zero-inbox protocol. A few emails get immediate responses. Several get forwarded to team members with a one-line instruction that you hope is sufficient because you do not have time to check whether it is. The remainder you triage by sender: key clients first, then your twelve reporting lines, then everyone else. "Everyone else" is a large category. Their emails, the ones you have not responded to and cannot respond to and will not have time to respond to tomorrow because tomorrow's calendar already contains nineteen accepted meetings, you delete. Not with malice. With arithmetic. Your inbox is now at zero. The operating theory, which you have never stated aloud but which governs your evenings, is that if someone genuinely needed your input, they will send the same email again in a few days. Most do not. You choose not to examine what that implies about how necessary your input was in the first place.
The inbox does not get quiet at 5pm. The inbox does not get quiet.
The parts they do not put on the recruiting site
The meeting paradox is the one we want to name, because it reveals the operating logic of the partnership better than any org chart.
Whenever you most need time to do actual work, you get the least of it. A large opportunity appears: you should be at the client’s office, understanding their problem, building the proposal. Instead, every senior partner who is even tangentially connected to the client, the sector, or the capability wants a meeting. They want to contribute. More precisely, they want to be seen to have contributed, because if the bid succeeds, they would like their name attached to the win, and if the bid fails, they would like to have been in a meeting where they offered wise counsel that was regrettably not followed.
One of us counted: on a single major bid, fourteen partners held fourteen separate meetings about the opportunity. Two of them had met the client. The others contributed by offering strategic observations unrelated to the client’s actual problem, scheduling follow-up meetings to discuss their unrelated observations, and subsequently claiming partial credit for the win. Some were shameless enough to tell the practice leadership that they had sold it, on the basis that they had attended one of fourteen meetings. (The client, for the record, chose us because of the proposal we wrote at midnight after the fourteenth meeting.)
This was politics, but not the dramatic kind people imagine. No shouting matches, no sabotage. Calendar warfare. Credit allocation. Positioning. You never directly offended a peer. They might become your boss, or you might need their vote when you wanted to become theirs. So you never offended them. You screwed them over in much more subtle ways, and they did the same to you, and everyone understood the rules. Some partners did nothing except play this game, and they were not punished for it, because the system could not distinguish between a partner who attended twelve meetings and contributed nothing and a partner who attended twelve meetings and shaped the outcome. It measured attendance. We will give the politics their own piece in this series; they have earned the space.
The unit statement landed quarterly, and it deserves its own piece in this publication (it will get one). You could not decode it. A doctorate, or the professional-services equivalent, did not help. You could not reverse-engineer your own compensation from the document your firm provided. Ask a more senior partner to explain and they could not either, but they had been receiving the statement long enough that they had stopped asking.
People management consumed hours every week and resolved nothing. Team conflicts, underperformers, hiring disputes, two senior managers who could not occupy the same room. All of it escalated to the partner. And the partner, no matter how clear the situation, could say nothing of substance, because one wrong sentence would produce an HR investigation or a legal letter. So you delivered the same empty phrases you remembered from the last HR training, and the problem persisted, and the next conflict escalated to you the following week. Every time, the person sitting across from you carried the same implicit hope: that this time, against all historical evidence, the partner would take a side and resolve it decisively. You never did. You could not afford to.
The thought-leadership machine was its own species of time destruction. Marketing wanted whitepapers, conference appearances, social media engagement. Occasionally you got excited about a paper and drafted something over several nights, carving out midnight to 1am, that you were proud of. Then the review process began. Every partner whose practice, industry, or technology area was even remotely adjacent wanted input. Local partners. Global partners. Legal. Marketing. The writer hired by marketing to rewrite what you wrote. The social media team planning the promotion. One of us counted (we are people who count things): one whitepaper, nine months, 130 meetings. The finished paper, after every partner had sanded off every edge, said the equivalent of “AI is coming and you should prepare.” It used considerably more words than that, but the intellectual content could fit in a tweet. One of us declined to put their name on the final version. It did not stop the other contributors from promoting it on LinkedIn as an amazing paper, written by an amazing team, at an amazing firm. Three amazings. That is the minimum for a whitepaper. Two amazings would suggest you had reservations.
The firm also ran a permanent rotation of initiatives. Women in tech. A technical career ladder. Improving the knowledge database (for the estimated 150th time in the firm’s history). New office lighting that would show clients how technologically advanced the firm was and would improve team performance by 50%. Every director or partner who led one of these treated it as a pet project and held weekly showcases. Not quarterly. Weekly. And you attended, and you said it was excellent work, because the person behind the initiative might one day hold a position that affected your career, and you never offended a peer if there existed a subtler alternative. Which there always did.
With all of this (the pipeline theatre, the leadership calls, the credit-allocation politics, the initiative attendance, the sign-offs you could not read, the people problems you could not solve, the talent calibrations, the fire-fighting, the firm committees you volunteered for just to remain visible), you did not have time to do the things the partnership was supposed to be for: becoming a genuine expert, building real client relationships, developing an industry presence, thinking. The partnership track was designed to produce those capabilities. The daily reality of the role left no room for them.
The parts that were genuinely good
Honesty cuts both ways, and if this section were missing, the rest would be dishonest.
The calibre of your colleagues at their best was extraordinary. A senior manager who produced a 40-page analysis overnight because the client changed the question at 5pm, and the analysis was good. The partner across the hall who knew more about pharmaceutical supply chains than anyone in the industry, including the people running them, and who would spend hours walking you through it if you asked. A junior who pushed back on your recommendation in front of the client because they had found a flaw in your logic, and you let them, because the flaw was real and catching it in the room saved the engagement. The system that used to produce these people was superb; we have written about what happened to it.
The access was real. You sat in rooms where decisions were made that you read about in the Financial Times the following week. When a client’s CEO asked what you thought, they meant it.
The moments the work mattered. Not every engagement, not even most, but enough of them. A restructuring that saved 2,000 jobs because the alternative proposal would have closed two plants. A compliance programme that caught a problem before the regulator did. The client who called you two years later to say that the thing you recommended had worked. Those calls arrived rarely enough that each one stayed with you, and frequently enough that they kept you from leaving when the Sunday-evening dread suggested you should.
What the gap reveals
The question from your dinner companion, the one about whether it was worth it, has no single answer because the job contained two jobs.
One was the consulting work: the clients, the problems, the colleagues, the access. That job was frequently superb, and if it had comprised 80% of the role, most of us would still be doing it.
The other was the apparatus: the seventeen daily meetings, the dual-dialling, the documents you signed without reading, the pipeline narratives, the credit-allocation politics, the thought-leadership machine that produced no thoughts, the people management you could not manage, the initiative showcases you attended weekly and called “amazing.” That job expanded every year we were in the role. The balance tipped. By the time we left, the apparatus was the job, and the consulting happened in the gaps between meetings, if it happened at all.
We do not say this with bitterness. We did this job for a long time and chose to stay for most of it. Some of us miss it, or miss the version of it that existed when the ratio between the two jobs was different. All of us recognise that we are describing a period that is not coming back, which is why we left and why this publication exists.
Current partners: what is the biggest gap between what you thought the job was and what it turned out to be? The comments are open, and so is the inbox.