New drum & bass rap song hits the dancing floor: ‘Welcome to the Middle East consulting life’
Kearney director Yevgeniy Fedko has raised quite a few eyebrows in recent days – not for his slide decks, but for releasing a drum & bass track about the intricacies of the Middle East’s bustling consulting sector.
It was a Saturday morning when Consultancy Middle East’s team received an email from a Kearney leader. Nothing unusual there – Kearney is a well-established player in the region, and hard-working consultants are never too shy to fire off emails at the craziest hours of the day.
But this time, the email from Yevgeniy (Yev) Fedko caused some confusion at Consultancy.org’s joint Beirut and Amsterdam headquarters. We’re used to receiving tips, press releases, and reports covering the vast breadth of consulting’s focus areas and verticals. Rarely, however, does a drum & bass track about the Middle East consulting scene land in the inbox.
Three minutes later, our newsroom was skanking to the sounds of ‘Welcome to Middle East consulting life’.
Abu Dhabi-based Yev, a director in the Digital & Analytics practice at Kearney, had apparently stepped out of the boardroom and straight into the studio, dropping a properly dirty banger about the region’s consulting sector.
Sample lyrics: “Yeah, touchdown DXB. Riyadh in the morning, Doha by night. Big Four, McKinsey, BCG and Bain, Kearney and Oliver Wyman, let’s get to work! Terminal three, the weather is heat; suit pressed sharp, looking ready to meet. Uber Black waiting, heading straight to the tower – billing the client for every single hour. From the Big Four hustle to the strategy tier – we’re building the roadmap for the fiscal year.”
If that sounds mildly ridiculous, the track is actually kind of fire – at least for those fluent in consulting slang and PowerPoint warfare.
More lyrics: “Slide deck loaded in that McKinsey blue, or BCG green, yeah we pushing it through. DIFC mornings, grab a quick flat white, because this financial model gonna take all night. Alignment? Synergy? Let’s circle back. Keep the utilisation strictly on track. Please find attached, the deadline is tight, but we making it happen in the desert light.”
“Welcome to Middle East consulting life, where the glass skyscrapers touch the sky and the utilisation targets never sleep.”
Consulting rap with drum & bass
Whether you personally like the track or not – and perhaps this is one for former EY global leader Carmine Di Sibio to adjudicate officially – Yev has arguably managed to concept a new musical niche: drum & bass consulting rap for the Gulf management consulting scene.
For those aspiring to enter the harsh, high-pressure world of top-tier consulting – the kind of environment where Kearney operates – Yev’s hobby project is also a reminder that somewhere between the 80-hour weeks, airport lounges, and five-star hotels, there is apparently still time for creative side quests.
Whether Yev plans to pursue a parallel career as a DJ or musician remains unclear. But if he does make the jump, and goes all the way, he would be following in the footsteps of John Legend, perhaps the world’s most famous former management consultant turned global music star. Before rising to fame, Legend worked at Boston Consulting Group in the United States.
