Emily Tam

I'm a strategy and benchmarking consultant at The Hackett Group, working with large global organisations on how their functions perform against the market and what to do about the gap.

Most of my career has been spent turning ambiguous questions into decisions people can act on. At PwC that was data and analytics. At True Search it was executive search, where I learned to read an organisation through its people and to work directly with founders and executive teams. At Hackett it's quantitative benchmarking, where the job is to build an evidence base solid enough to hold up in front of a client who was hoping for a different answer.

The three sound unrelated and aren't. Analytics gave me the technical floor, so I don't need someone else to interrogate a dataset for me. Executive search taught me how organisations really operate and how to hold a conversation with the people running them. Benchmarking gave me method, and the habit of proving a claim before I make it. Together they mean I can carry a problem from raw data to a recommendation in front of senior stakeholders without handing it off halfway. Those two halves don't often sit in the same person.

My training is scientific: a first-class degree in Biology from UCL and an MSc in Translational Neuroscience from Imperial. I still work the way that taught me, evidence before conclusions. This year I've added SQL and financial modelling through DataCamp so I can get further into the data myself.

Away from work I draw and paint, sometimes all three at once if I can!