Quintiles Advisory Services

Employee

QAS has seen tremendous organizational change in the past year, with the new President attempting to turn QAS from a healthcare product and strategy oriented firm to a generalist firm, focusing on undifferentiated expertise and services to compete with the top strategy consultancies such as McKinsey, Bain and BCG. The vision of the new QAS leader was unclear from the beginning with a shoot-from-the-hip style, making sweeping decrees and changes immediately based on his experience at Bain without examining the existing consultancy, expertise within, clients and differentiated offering leveraging the other divisions and expertise of Quintiles, the global CRO. Included in this strategy was removing business development responsibilities from managers and senior managers and pushing it all up to the VP level, some of whom were recently brought in from Bain, Booz and other top strategy firms. This approach has, at least to date, not worked to increase business as planned, but rather business has dropped precipitously (multi $MM), and there has been an exit of consultants who provide differentiation, especially as it relates to product-specific projects and those involving anything deeper than corporate strategy (e.g., commercialization, market access, reimbursement, anything that involves technologies outside of cookie-cutter drugs). The morale is quite low across QAS, with a recent QAS-wide performance calibration process that was poorly implemented and highly biased in its approach, the decree requiring all QAS talent residing anywhere outside of driving distance to offices in NY, Boston, Reading UK and Amsterdam the Netherlands. This last point has forced excellent QAS talent residing in RTP NC, Chicago, Philadelphia, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere to either leave the firm or uproot to move without any relocation assistance, and without any committment to retain people for any length of time beyond the move. In my opinion, and others in QAS, the firm is in a bit of a death spiral, hemorrhaging top talent, with great uncertainty as to whether it will ever be able to recover without great expense organically, through acquisition and time. Despite all this, QAS continues to recruit and pull in newly minted MBAs, and intends to drop salaries with new hires moving forward, which will reduce competitiveness of QAS and will leave the only talent the company can recruit being those who have not received offers from other firms (as all other firms will have better starting packages than QAS). It is for these reasons, I would not recommend a friend to work here at QAS.

Employee

Pay bands have enormous overlap, with some senior consultant level people making less than analysts (unrelated to geographic location) - bonus process is nontransparent and year to year has varied tremendously with no good reason provided. Senior leadership has promised promotions to multiple people each year and has reneged on such promises equally frequently, generating a complete lack of trust between consultants and leadership.

Employee

Lack of trust by consultants of senior leadership; Poor morale; Consultants who monitor whether others are in the office and report this information upwards are rewarded