The executives who move from top-tier management consulting into corporate roles carry something that is difficult to replicate through any other developmental path: a structured habit of analytical thinking applied under time pressure, across industries and organizational contexts, in service of decisions that have real consequences. That habit does not go away when a consultant joins a company. It becomes the lens through which every subsequent operating challenge is examined — the instinct to define the problem precisely before proposing a solution, to disaggregate a complex question into its components, and to build the analysis around the decision rather than the other way around. Anubhav Mittal’s career at Booz & Company, where he worked in corporate strategy and go-to-market transformation before transitioning into senior corporate roles at Kellogg Company and Archer Daniels Midland, established exactly that foundation.
What Consulting Actually Develops
Management consulting at a firm like Booz & Company develops a specific set of capabilities that are distinct from what operating roles build. The pace of client engagement — moving across industries, organizational types, and strategic questions in compressed timeframes — demands rapid context acquisition. A consultant cannot afford to spend six months learning a business before contributing meaningful analysis. The ability to identify which information is decision-relevant, which assumptions are load-bearing, and which analyses will actually change the recommendation is developed through repeated exposure to high-stakes situations with short timelines.
That rapid-synthesis capability has direct application in corporate development. M&A screening, investment committee preparation, and divestiture evaluation all require executives to assess businesses and markets quickly, under time pressure, with incomplete information. The analytical patterns established in consulting — hypothesis-driven problem structuring, sensitivity analysis, clear recommendation logic — translate directly into the quality of investment cases and strategic recommendations that a corporate development function produces.
At Booz & Company, Mittal worked specifically in corporate strategy and go-to-market transformation — two areas with immediate relevance to the portfolio management and business development work he would later lead at ADM and Kellogg. Corporate strategy engagements develop the skill of evaluating a company’s competitive position and strategic options from the outside in — the same perspective that an acquirer must adopt when assessing a target. Go-to-market transformation work develops an understanding of how commercial organizations generate revenue and where structural changes to sales models, pricing, or channel strategy can shift performance trajectories.
The Transition from Advisor to Operator
The move from consulting into a corporate operating role is not seamless. The skills transfer, but the context changes materially. A consultant’s recommendations are implemented or not by the client. An operating executive owns the implementation — and all of its consequences. That accountability shift is significant, and it disciplines the analysis in a different way: the question is no longer only whether the recommendation is analytically sound, but whether it is organizationally executable within the constraints of the actual business.
Mittal’s entry into corporate operating roles placed him in that accountability context immediately. At Kellogg Company, he took on corporate development and strategy responsibilities that required translating the kind of strategic analysis he had practiced in consulting into investment decisions with real capital at stake and real organizational consequences attached. At ADM’s Nutrition Business Unit, the CFO mandate extended his accountability to financial performance outcomes — margin improvement, working capital management, ROIC — across a business employing more than 14,000 people globally.
The span of that accountability is what distinguishes the consulting foundation from consulting experience alone. Mittal did not remain a strategy advisor who moved laterally between client engagements. He moved into operating roles that placed the analysis in direct service of outcomes he was responsible for delivering.
Consulting Discipline in a Capital Allocation Context
The analytical habits built in consulting have specific expression in the capital allocation governance work that Mittal leads at ADM. Investment committee processes, by design, require structured presentation of assumptions, sensitivity analysis, and risk characterization — exactly the analytical deliverables that consulting engagements produce. The difference in a corporate context is that the audience is internal, the capital is the company’s own, and the consequences of a poor investment decision accumulate over years rather than ending with an engagement.
That longer accountability horizon changes how analysis is built and presented. Assumptions that might be acceptable in a consulting recommendation — where the client bears ultimate execution risk — carry a different weight when the executive presenting the analysis will also be accountable for the outcome. The consulting habit of stress-testing assumptions and presenting scenario ranges, rather than single-point estimates, becomes even more important in this context, because it forces an honest characterization of uncertainty before capital is committed.
Mittal’s combination of the CFA designation’s analytical rigor, the Harvard MBA’s strategic framework, and the Booz & Company consulting foundation creates a layered capability set that is directly visible in how enterprise capital decisions at ADM are structured, evaluated, and governed.
The Durable Value of Analytical Discipline at Scale
As organizations grow in complexity — more geographies, more business segments, more concurrent investment decisions — the value of a consistently applied analytical discipline increases. In a smaller organization, decision-making can be governed by experienced judgment applied directly. In a global enterprise managing dozens of concurrent strategic and capital initiatives, the quality of the analytical infrastructure surrounding those decisions determines how well judgment can be applied consistently at scale.
Mittal’s current mandate — overseeing global M&A activity, enterprise capital allocation governance, and strategic business development at ADM — sits at exactly this scale. The analytical discipline that Booz & Company’s consulting environment originally developed is now embedded in the governance frameworks, investment committee processes, and portfolio review disciplines that give ADM’s corporate development function its structural rigor. That is, ultimately, what a consulting foundation does at its best: it does not merely sharpen an individual’s thinking — it shapes the quality of the organizational systems that executive subsequently builds.
About Anubhav Mittal
Anubhav Mittal is a senior finance, corporate development, and value-creation executive with more than two decades of experience leading strategy, M&A, capital allocation, restructuring, and business transformation across global public companies. He currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Previously, he held CFO-level and senior finance leadership roles within ADM and at Kellogg Company, and began his career at Booz & Company. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School with a concentration in Finance and Strategy, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, graduating in the top 5% of his class. He holds the CFA and CMA designations and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
