House of Lies

by Martin Kihn

  Consulting is a profession peopled by clock-watchers; but the clock measures years, and not hours.

  Reality 2 is that a large proportion of any top-tier firm’s client base consists of that firm’s alumni. Ex-consultants tend to hire their own former firms as consultants. They like using consultants, in fact. It allows them to take revenge.

  The net effect of these two realities is to make consulting firms somewhat like those girls in high school who have no self-esteem. They’re mistreated, insulted, abandoned—but they’re still available. Still nice.

  You know all this, by now. You’ve been with the firm seven months; you’ve made it to the holidays. No snow is on the ground, as global warming hits Manhattan. But you remember snow. There’s snow in your mind. Along with the snow, all Christmas parties have been annihilated. There are none this year; it would be unseemly, what with all the floors being shut down and the blood on the walls. There are no Christmas parties, but the firm honors its alumni so much it has decided to sponsor a Media Alumni Holiday Party.31 It is held two blocks from the office, in the basement of a Japanese steak house on Third Avenue.

  You don’t want to go. Through some misguided principle of loyalty to the dear departed, you have opted out of corporate merrymaking entirely this year. Informal drinks with partners, dinner with despondent principals at their place—everything is a pass, as you wait for the season to die. But then, as you shut down a workbook and close out Excel in your cubicle, the most attractive female associate in the firm appears and says, “Are you going to this drinks thing?”

  “You mean the media alumni thing?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  You look at her. She is married; and you are, of course, married. But you are far from dead.

  “Let’s go,” you say.

  And you go.

  Now, if she were to ask you who is the last person in the world you would expect to be standing at the foot of the basement staircase as you wend your way down them, turn left, and appear in the Japanese basement with the top-tier media alumni—who is the very last person on earth who would be standing there, like a tiny maître d’, soft hand extended, hair most definitely in place, eyes aglow with deals going down, you would have to respond “the Rainmaker.”

  You don’t see him at first—you’re looking over his head, at the walking wounded. All the fired people, the carcasses of ex–media consultants, hanging out by the cash bar in the dark.

  But you stumble into something, as your eyes adjust, something squishy and vile—and it’s him.

  “Hey,” he says, stepping back, “glad you could make it.”

  You take his hand; it’s been called fishlike, but that’s not quite correct. It’s not like a fish. It’s warm-blooded, and furry.

  He looks at your companion, whom he doesn’t know. “Hello,” he says. “I’m [the Rainmaker].”

  You are pushed along by someone and he’s moved to the next hello.

  “Wasn’t that…?” asks your beautiful friend, and you nod.

  “Yep.”

  You order a mojito and it turns out the cash bar is not a cash bar after all—why, the Rainmaker himself has decided to pick up the tab. Why not? He can certainly afford a few mojitos to dull the pain of all the lives he has shattered by destroying a practice and taking not a single person with him to his reward.

  As you drink and talk, you count. There are maybe a dozen people in this room with the Rainmaker’s fingerprints clearly visible on the shaft of the knife in their backs. He makes his way to every one, talking quietly, sincerely, eye to eye. He looks up—in some cases way up—at them, nodding thoughtfully. You overhear some of these words exchanged in confidence.

  “Of course,” he muses. “That sounds like a great opportunity. Good luck to you.” And always, in closing: “Let me know if I can do anything for you—anything at all. Seriously, call me. Great to see you again…”

  “It’s pathetic,” you say to Beauty.

  “What?”

  “These people are all so nice to him.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be nice to him? He paid for the drinks.”

  “He lost them their jobs.”

  “It’s only consulting, for God’s sakes,” she says.

  And she’s right: It’s consulting. It’s not serious. Somehow, it’s just not serious. Nothing about top-tier management consulting seems remotely like life or death or even close. It’s an industry built on frivolity. Realizing this, you feel better.

  Some combination of the gratis mojitos and the pulchritudinous company makes you bolder than, in retrospect, you might have been. You don’t make a pass at Beauty—no, that is not in your nature.

  But you do make another pass—one perhaps more ill-advised and dangerous. You make a kind of pass at the Rainmaker.

  At some point you edge your way through the room full of sycophants and pull him aside.

  He indulges you, kindly.

  “You know,” you say, “I really enjoyed working with you. And maybe… maybe we can work together again someday?”

  He looks at you as though you’re standing on his shoes—which, in fact, you are.

  “That,” he says, “is very unlikely.”

  Part II

  Consulting Craft Skills for a Well-Stocked Tool Kit

  Part II presents, in a single handy package, a grounding in those craft skills necessary to become a top-tier management consultant. These are the basic craft skills required, in order of importance:

  1. Ability to give—and, more important, to receive—erroneous feedback from colleagues and partners

  2. Ability to speak with authority about topics of which you are ignorant

  3. Intimate knowledge of the consultant’s “lingo”

  4. Knowledge of basic mathematics, specifically:

  a. Subtraction

  b. Addition

  c. Multiplication

  d. Nonlinear multivariate logistic regression32

  The Gentle Art of Feeding Back—or, a New Way to Grow & Hate Yourself

  It’s very difficult to tell if you’re serious or not,” says the woman, feeding back.

  “I’m always serious,” you say.

  “See what I mean?”

  After a year you are sent to Feedback Camp. It is in the woods in New Jersey and, like most woods in New Jersey, right next to a large highway. Cars hurtle past your talk circles; they infiltrate the corners of your bed. The purpose of Feedback Camp is never quite clear, but you suspect it has something to do with teaching you to work well with other people. It is a mandatory week in the woods for all (surviving) associates… and it is by far your worst week with the firm.

  By far.

  “My name is important to me,” says the man in the military reserves, suppressing a quiet rage.

  “Of course it is, Jim.”

  “My name is Jason.”

  The title of this week is “Consulting Team Skills,” and you were supposed to have taken it shortly after joining the firm. In fact, it’s supposed to be completed within six months of your start date, but things occurred. For instance, half the firm was fired. And all training programs were suspended. Morale among the lower ranks inexplicably began to plummet and so the partners decided to do what they presumed everybody did in moments of self-doubt: They hired a consultant. That consultant haunted the halls for a few weeks talking to the war-wounded and the battle-weary… and she reported back that what everybody needed was not an end to the madness, no, what they all needed was a week in the woods of New Jersey with their top-tier colleagues from around the world telling one another in excruciating detail just exactly what it is about them that makes them so difficult to work with.

  What they needed was Feedback Camp.

  “What I wish,” says the woman who talks too much, “is that you would talk more.”

  “About what?”

  “I just want to let you know that I’m feeling that you’re not exactly hearing what I’m saying.”

  “I’m hearing y
ou.”

  “What I’m feeling is I doubt it.”

  “Can I give you some feedback now?”

  “It’s not your turn.”

  “Well one of my feedbacks is you’re hung up on whose turn it is—”

  “Guys,” says the moderator, a Mormon who makes you want to avoid Salt Lake City, “take a step back. Breathe. Center.”

  There’s a moment—just a moment—when nobody talks.

  Ah…

  It’s inculcated in the business school–bound that industry is all about “team work.” In fact, it’s so often used it’s elevated to a single word: teamwork. You’ve got to work as a team. It’s all about the team. You’re only as good as your team. The team is more important than the individual. What’s your role in the team? Which team are you on? You’ve got to report to the team; check in with the team; have team dinner, team lunch, team debriefing in the airport lounge.

  It sounds strange to you, the first time you hear it: “We.”

  A partner said it in a meeting your first or second week at the firm. He was walking past the team room, on his way to a different team meeting, and he steps in and gets to asking what your team is up to; so your team leader briefs him, and the partner asks a question about the client, which goes something like, “Do we have any capacity in Asia…?”

  We?

  He means, of course, we, the client, the company that hired us. We are we. It’s routine by now—this convenient linguistic fiction that we are actually employees of the companies we serve. There is no us and them; there’s only us and us. The team. So ingrained is this usage, top-tier consultants even slip into it with the client.

  “What we need to focus on,” your principal says to a client in Dearborn one time, “is getting more value-added content onto the handsets.”

  The VP looks unmoved. “I’ll focus on that,” she says. “Why don’t you focus on getting the numbers right.”

  We are amused.

  So it is to build the narrative we that you are put into a cluster at Columbia Business School, and broken down into an independent project team, with a specific team role. It is in service of the we that you are on a home team at your top-tier firm, and a mentoring team, not to mention your actual work teams and subteams. When you see your friends from business school, always on a Friday night, you all refer to it as “team dinner.” For that’s what you are now—a team player.

  The problem is—it’s all a lie.

  There are no teams. Teams accomplish nothing. Good work is done in a cone of real quiet. Truth comes from the silence alone. Is this true? We don’t know.

  All we know is—right now—we hate other people.

  They’re all so critical.

  Feedback Camp starts with an online questionnaire. It asks you to rate yourself along a number of dimensions supposedly correlated with the skills you are thought to need to do your job well, and it’s sent to a dozen or so people who have worked with you. Your co-workers are asked the same questions, and they can jot down anonymous comments about what they like and don’t like about your unruly personality. Most team members wisely choose to comment very little, but those that do give themselves away immediately. It is amazing how few words it takes to ferret out a voice.

  “Marty has a magnetic, disarming personality,” one says, and you immediately picture the job manager on the secret government project33 down in Baltimore. It is the word disarming, a favorite of his in many contexts, most of them not related to the U.S. military.

  “Marty needs to make sure he takes team members to meetings with the senior staff”—you know this guy at once, the reedy, picky fellow in Stamford who was obsessed with his free box of pears at the Hyatt. He walked past a room once when you were in there with the senior team members talking about what you should think about ordering for dinner, and the look on his face betrayed such abandonment…

  The single biggest problem with Feedback Camp is that it used to take place in Brazil. There was training in the morning and beaches and Brazilians in the afternoon, and from what you hear the training was optional. They are becoming almost unbelievable—these stories of the past. There was a cruise the firm sponsored every year in August for the summer associates; an entire Carnival cruise liner was rented for a week so the kids and their spouses could spend tropical time with the partners in an informal setting of heaving waves and salt spray. Abruptly canceled last year, of course, these cruises have gained in debauched reputation since. An associate passed out in a stairwell. An associate threw up on a partner. An associate hosted a “train” in her cabin. There were castles rented in Scotland for the operations practice annual dinner, and there were strippers and worse charged to American Express with a wink. These stories of the “go-go ’90s” always reminded you of something, and then you realized what it was. The “go-go ’80s.”

  You’d like to go-go home right now.

  You’re sitting around a conference room table in a windowless hutch in New Jersey, hearing what people think of you. There are four of you, including the Mormon moderator. You have spent a week together already and there are strong opinions in the room. The comments are supposed to be structured as one good thing (capability area), one bad thing (room for improvement), but it all sounds the same. Very bad.

  “The thing I like about you,” says the woman with the troubled teeth, “is… oh God, I knew I wrote this down somewhere.” She fumbles with her index cards. “I’m sorry,” she says at last, “I have to pass.”

  “Can—can you paraphrase what you were going to say?” prompts the Mormon.

  “I just can’t remember.”

  The first day you were handed back the results of the online survey, including the anonymous responses of your co-workers and your own self-ratings. Your self-ratings were consistently lower than those of the others, and this depressed you.

  You’re supposed to go through the prefeedback, looking for patterns, then come up with a goal for the week around repairing your most glaring capability gap. Fixing what’s most obviously wrong.

  Once you’ve decided what your goal is, you gather in the windowless conference room that is to be your home with your three core team members and the moderator, and you do what hordes of businesspeople have done for decades in Basking Ridge, New Jersey—namely, you share. You tell these previous strangers your major fault and what you’re going to do about it.

  When you realize what you’re going to have to tell them, you want to cry. It’s just too perfect, as if you made it up. It turns this week in the woods into a magnificent postmodern business experiment.

  Can you guess what your major fault turns out to be? Can you even imagine?

  It’s this: You don’t like feedback.

  Well.

  Think about the irony of it—the sublime ridiculousness. The firm’s considered feedback to you is you need to go to a camp to get feedback about yourself, and that feedback is: You don’t want any feedback.

  There’s a lot of feedback in here.

  Your wife is, sadly, a musician; to her this word has other connotations. To her this word is repellent.

  “Okay,” says the Mormon, considering. “So what’s your goal going to be for the week?”

  “I’m going to ask for feedback.”

  “Solicit it.”

  “Yeah—solicit feedback. All week.”

  “And on the job?”

  “I’m going to ask for feedback from my co-workers. And my team leaders.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Anything else?”

  You think about it. “Not really.”

  “What are you going to do with the feedback?”

  Ah—that is the real question, isn’t it? What are you going to do with the feedback. You suspect the truth—ignore it—is not, in the circumstances, acceptable.

  “Listen to it.”

  “And?”

  “Take it in.”

  “And?”

  “Really listen.”<
br />
  “Hear it.”

  “Yes—hear it.”

  “Hear the feedback and act on the feedback, right? And how are you going to do that—”

  “Can I say something,” interrupts the woman who talks too much, the one with the eating disorder and the terrible skin. She has been wanting to talk this whole time, and now she is going to talk.

  You all turn to her.

  “I feel that Marty is mocking us.”

  Beginning consultants are always afraid of confronting this scene: The grizzled old VP of sales puts down his 7-Eleven carafe and hooks his thumbs into the ring of blubber at his belt. “Now what,” he spits out, “do you know about my business? I’ve been forty years selling tires and you think you can come in here and tell me how to sell tires? How old are you, anyway? I’ve got shirts that’re older than you, boy!”

  Trouble is, that scene never happens. It’s more common, as we have said, to have friends and parents question exactly what it is that you know about selling tires and how old are you, anyway? This kind of second-guessing of skill levels never happens for the simple reason that the clients know the answer. You’re probably not that old, and you probably don’t know that much about their business. You’re a consultant, for God’s sake. You don’t work anywhere for forty years.

  Consultants are not hired as experts. This is a misconception common among nonconsultants: that they are hired for their knowledge. They are not. They are hired to accomplish in very rapid order a daunting, discreet piece of fact-finding and analysis that they are then required to present in exceedingly clear and convincing form to their client. There may or may not be an element of strategic thinking in the presentation; there may or may not be a series of recommendations. These recommendations might seem to an outsider suspiciously like telling the old guy how to sell tires—but they are not. The recommendations are there, in the end, to make the consultant feel more like a manager and less like the hired help, but they are generally entirely ignored. The client knows where they came from, after all.