Hi! I am Patrick and I have been a Consultant at Roland Berger for more than three years. When I started my early career in consulting I quickly realized that the most important ingredient for a successful project is a successful team. Trust, openness and excellence is key to delivering a service to the client that will really create impact.

At Roland Berger, different people with various personalities and life stories work together. We have very diverse backgrounds. I am a physicist, and I am constantly working with people with various backgrounds in areas like business administration, psychology, economics and engineering. But who we are is so much more. It is the experience that we have collected over the years and the things that we do besides classic business. We are at our best when we are our true selves no matter our gender, religion or sexual orientation. I am a member of Just be, the Roland Berger LGBTQ+ community, and I would like to encourage every person to be as they are. To do so, we kicked-off the Roland Berger Pride Week this year.

The inaugural Roland Berger Pride Week is a company-wide celebration of diversity and the LGBTQ+ community. This week has been chosen to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn uprising, which gave birth to the LGBTQ+ rights movement. On June 28th, 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, back then one of the few safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community in New York City. This led to days of protest and riots and ultimately the first gay pride parade in New York. Since then, every June, cities and communities around the world celebrate Pride.

For many, Pride represents a time to celebrate the values we stand for: Diversity, individualism, self-expression and love, among others. It is an opportunity to openly celebrate your true self, whoever that may be. Our network encouraged every Roland Berger Office worldwide to celebrate Pride Week with different activities, poster campaigns, after-work drinks, rainbow cake and much more. More than this, we asked our colleagues to share their personal view of diversity and to answer the question "What does pride mean to you?". The result can be found here:

The Roland Berger Pride Week, as well as the Just be and Just be Friend communities, are just some of our initiatives to create and foster an even more open-minded and diverse workspace in the consultancy business, which is a people business. I am very happy about the support in our company and very proud of our Just be Friends worldwide.