BrazilFrench consultant and singer Marie Turin releases debut album
By day, Marie Turin is a strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman in France, but when she is off-duty she is better known as singer songwriter Slow Jane, having just released her first music album Caroline.
Many young professionals arrive in the consulting industry early in their career, when they are still looking to chart a course for a more specialised vocation further down the line. While many might use their time with the wide-ranging sector to climb the consulting ladder or find their way into management roles in industry, Marie Turin is pursuing a very different calling.
A trained musician since childhood, Turin took a wide-ranging creative education, resulting in her holding a Masters in History of Philosophy from Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm, and a Masters in Media, Art and Creation from HEC Paris. Following her graduation, she entered the consulting industry in 2016, joining venture development specialist Fast-Up Partners before taking up a role with Oliver Wyman a year later.
Speaking on arriving with the prominent global management consulting firm, Turin said, “I really enjoyed my interviews there: each interviewer took the time, before and after the case study, for a real dialogue, open and sincere, not formatted. Oliver Wyman is proud of its inclusiveness and for me it is demonstrated this by the firm’s desire to give each of its employees the space to express their personality.”
After the firm's classic integration program – two days in the Paris office, followed by 10 days of training in strategy consulting with all the young people recruited at a European level – Turin spent two years as a consultant. Now a senior consultant in Oliver Wyman’s Paris office, she has put the firm’s willingness to give its employees space for expression to use by pushing ahead with her love of music.
In 2013, Turin was part of a band named Carolina, playing easy-pop in the bars of East Paris. In 2015, however, as she looked to jump-start her professional life, Turin put the music on hold. Finally feeling she has her feet far enough through the door at the US-origin consultancy, she has decided to return to her creative calling, under the stage name Slow Jane.
Following a year-long recording period, her self-produced album Caroline – named as a nod to her old group – signals a departure from their poppy sound, instead embracing an acoustic folk vibe.
Turin explained of her double-life, “I need both, this demanding profession, and music, which is more about emotion and gentleness… I have always sung, I write texts and I compose music since high school. My musical references are Anglo-Saxon, and particularly artists from the 1970s, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. That's why my texts are all written in English, from the start. And what I like above all is acoustic music, with a little produced sound.”
According to Turin, Caroline benefitted a great deal from the skills accrued during her day-job. While music provides her as a necessary valve to let off steam from the driven world of consulting, the two worlds are not entirely opposed, as she managed the creation of Caroline as a consulting project, from A to Z.
Turin is not the only member of the firm to lead two lives meanwhile. She is President of MelOW, Oliver Wyman’s association of musicians which organises rehearsals and concerts for special occasions. Also in the association is Jean-Baptiste Lepetit, a principal in its financial services wing, who is a talented guitarist with an album to his name.
Consulting’s best-known musician is John Legend, an American singer, songwriter and record producer who previously worked a number of years for Boston Consulting Group in the United States.
