by Martin Kihn
So consultants are not hired as experts, but they can never appear to be anything less than expertlike. The critical part of that word is -like. It’s an act, a charade, a delightful pas de deux. But it is absolutely essential.
Your fourth or fifth month with the firm, you find yourself in a position that would be terrifying were it not so dirt common. You are working for a happy client, a beer and hard liquor manfacturer in the midst of trying to restructure the way it deals with its distributors. As you have heard, alcohol is a great business to be in; since the days of moonshine, it has a large and avid customer base that will risk something like death to be served. And it has evolved over the years since Prohibition into a bewildering web of factors and third parties and state rent-a-cops that do nothing but sit and watch the cash wash in. It’s extraordinary—the amount of money these people soak up for nothing.
Your particular client contact is a woman you’ve been warned about—a rather squat little person with a puzzled look who is draped in gray sweaters. It is the middle of summer. Her name is Cate, with a C. She’s young, too, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and makes two times your salary for no reason at all. She used to work at McKinsey, but they fired her. Now she’s head of something to do with realigning the organization or whatever.
And she always says, “Uh-huh…” She nods and says, “Uh-huh…” Hers is speech minus content; she’s a human agreement machine.
So you are rather alarmed when, on the morning of your second day at the client site, she waddles up and says, “What are you doing right now?”
“I was—”
“Can you come to a meeting?”
The rule in these situations is to say: Yes. Whatever the client asks, you say: Yes. This much you know.
“Yes.”
As you enter the meeting room, she hands you a stack of pages not stapled together. They feel kind of wet, like a runner had strapped them to her body. They’re out of order—you try to order them, absently, as you sit. Then it’s quiet, and you notice something…
Everyone is looking at you. And there are a lot of them—maybe fifteen or eighteen. Some of them you recognize from yesterday, the get-acquainted meeting. These are senior people; actually, now that you reminisce, rather senior senior people. There’s a tanned Welshman who is president of something. There’s the client himself, the VP of sales. The HR woman, who has a distinctly VP-like aura and a colorful scarf. They’re senior senior people and you’re fumbling with a wet stack of pages and you’re in the middle of the room and suddenly, suddenly it hits you—
You are alone.
There are no other consultants in the room. Where are they? You turn to the woman who led you in, but she’s talking.
“Do you all know Marty?” she asks.
“We met yesterday,” says the Welshman, and the bright light flashes off his teeth.
“He’s with [your top-tier firm], as you know,” she continues. “I thought I’d ask him to take us through some pages.”
Everyone is sitting. She turns to you and smiles.
There is silence. Extended.
You start to talk—then stop. The pages are upside down; they’re upside down and in a foreign language. No—it’s English after all. They make no sense. You see a word there, an anchor. The word is distribution. And again, you start to talk.
“The purpose of today’s meeting is to make sure we’re all aligned on the distribution piece going forward—”
“Sales and distribution,” interrupts the Welshman, who bears a disarming resemblance to the actor Tim Curry.
“Right—because what’s the point of distribution if the product’s going to sit there, right?”
“Uh-huh…?”
“Now—Cate asked me to take you through a few pages here….” You look around the room and notice—nobody has any pages to look at. This would not be the case if you were leading them through some pages—“At some point—once we’re all on the same page, so to speak. About the distribution. And sales.”
You look desperately at Cate; she’s checking e-mail on her Blackberry. Outside would be a magnificent view of the city of Stamford, Connecticut, if the blinds weren’t all drawn. You could be in any ecru box in any faux city in the world.
You might as well try.
“There has been a lot of work around distribution that’s been done recently, over the past few—well, decades really. As you know, the tendency as transportation networks improve and information transfers happen instantly is—it’s to try to streamline distribution to the point where all unnecessary middle steps are gone. What’s not necessary—idle time spent sitting in warehouses. That’s inventory, which is an element of working capital, it’s equivalent to frozen assets. More than frozen, they’re actually diminishing in value. So the work we’ve been doing—most of the work—has been around this issue of trying to eliminate the transfer costs and inventory costs in distribution.”
Is anybody buying this? Maybe you should move on to the liquor business…
“Now—the business we’re in has an unusual structure—as, as you know. There are, for regulatory reasons, and other reasons, there are strong distributors between the manufacturer—us—and the outlets. There are requirements against direct distribution, which would be the way most industries are going. The issue is these distributors are getting a lot of… well, power—”
“We know all this,” says the Welshman not unkindly.
“What’s important,” says the woman with the scarf, “is what the new structure’s going to be.”
It occurs to you this could be an elaborate put-on. That Cate and the others are subjecting you to some kind of elaborate high-level new-consultant hazing ritual and in a moment they’re all going to start laughing and spray champagne in your face. But no.
“What we’d like to know,” you say carefully, “is what you’re feeling about that.”
“About what?”
“The new distribution structure. What would you do?”
“Well—I…”
She doesn’t have any more of an idea than you do about it, of course. None of them do. That’s why you’re sitting in this blacked-out room in the middle of nowhere like a bunch of goats. The distribution works fine; it doesn’t matter. Everybody’s getting rich. People are drinking themselves stupid and always will. You’re filling up your day, and so are they.
You remember a partner said once there are two fallback techniques to use in a desperate situation.
Consultant’s Panic Buttons
1. Flatter the clients
2. Ask for their opinion
You decide to hit both buttons.
“Listen—you guys are the experts,” you say with some passion. “You’ve lived with this business a lot longer than most of us have. We could talk about our opinions all day but ultimately you’re the ones—you’re going to know if it will actually work.”
Button 1—check.
“So let me turn it around for a second, if it’s okay. We’d really like to know—just in a kind of background, basic way—what you think would work in a situation like this.”
Button 2—check.
“Well,” says the woman with the scarf, “I don’t think we should—”
“You know what we need,” pipes a high voice from the end of the table—a guy you’ve never seen before in your life. He’s wearing a blue blazer that seems to swallow him up. “What we need is a state-by-state discussion.”
“Start in California,” says the Welshman, liking this idea. You know he’s spent time in the sun—just look at his leather skin replacement. “In some ways they’re the most likely to let us go direct.”
“I know that,” says Blazer Boy. “But the dedicated resourcing we’re talking about is already there in a lot of places.”
“Not in the North, with Alhambra and Giacometti…”
And they’re off.
Ask any consultant—he’ll tell you. There is a moment in most client meetings when the cli
ent team starts to argue with itself, and those are the moments you dream about. You can check out and look concerned. The pressure is off. Now’s the client’s time to show her ignorance.
When you were a summer associate, ten months after you had entered business school and eleven months after you left your job on the television show, your job manager came into your cubicle and said, “We have a call right now.”
And you said, “Okay.”
And she said, “It’s right now.”
“Do you want to do it here?”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“You’re telling me about it.”
“I don’t know. Did you schedule it?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Who scheduled it? Where’s Ken?”
Ken was the principal. He was in the air right now between LGA and LAX. He was totally unreachable and it occurred to you that he was the person who scheduled the call.
“He’s traveling,” you said.
“Oh shit.”
“Who’s it with?”
“Some guy named Jason.”
“When is it?”
“Two minutes ago.”
“Do you have the number?”
“Yes I have the number—how can we call without the number? All I have is the number.”
She was getting hysterical, which seemed like an overreaction.
“What do we know about Jason?” you asked her in what you hoped was a calming tone.
“Fuck all. Nothing. We know his name is Jason and here’s his number and we’re calling him.”
You looked at the printed out e-mail with this information. It was from Ken.
“Can we reschedule?” you asked.
“We have to call him.” She was dialing, stabbing at the digits on your phone. The area code and prefix meant he was in the client’s headquarters building in L.A. Who was he?
“Jason here,” he answered.
Your job manager had put him on speakerphone.
“Hi, Jason, this is Lisa Han from [your top-tier firm], we had a call right now.”
“That’s right.”
“Sorry we’re late. I’m here with my colleague Marty [your last name]. Is it okay to use the speaker?”
“Okay.”
There was a silence. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound very friendly, and he seemed to be waiting for you to pick up the ball.
“Are you familiar with what we’re up to, Jason?” you asked tentatively.
“Very familiar.”
“Have you seen the—the July eleventh update?”
“Have it right here.”
“Great. Then we won’t need to—to walk you through that deck.”
“No you won’t.”
This was very bad—you couldn’t ask him who he was without sounding incompetent, and you couldn’t really talk to him without knowing who he was. In the back of both your minds was the terrible feeling he was somebody very important. There are a handful of people on the client team who have the power to snap their fingers and make consultants vanish just like that. Was he one of these?
You hadn’t yet learned the two consultant’s panic buttons, which might not have worked with this Jason character anyway. But Lisa, bless her, got an idea.
“We were wondering, Jason—we don’t want to take a lot of your time. But we’ve been working various angles of the problem trying to figure out how to put together a solution with you guys. And we wanted to—basically, to get your reaction to the way this thing is going.”
“My reaction?”
“Yeah—we wanted to know what your thoughts were—if you took a step back for a second—what you thought about the overall direction we’re headed in and if you had any ideas—any tweaks—for something different?”
He waited. Maybe we had lost him…
But no: “You’re asking for feedback?”
“Uh-huh. On the overall direction.”
“Oh,” he said, much less belligerent. “I can do that all right—”
Another irony of feedback is that, while to receive feedback requires good listening skills, the feedback itself is often about the quality of one’s listening skills. Like tax breaks and complimentary beverage service, those who need it the most are the least likely to get it. Everybody knows that to talk is easy; to listen is not. There is a universal impulse to write, but not to read. We explode with life, burst with community; implode into silence. To listen is to question oneself, and this is terrifying.
Obscure Minnesota writing teacher and memoirist Brenda Ueland put it this way, once: “The true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good.”34
What a nice woman.
The second day of Feedback Camp you take a multiple-choice test of listening “styles” called the “Listening Styles Inventory.” It is one of those entirely transparent personality tests wherein questions are repeated at the end to see if you’re paying attention. The questions are vaguely Jungian, like all personality test questions written since the days of Jung. Circle to what extent you agree with the following statements: “When someone is speaking in an angry tone I feel threatened…” “I usually take notes when I am attending a lecture…” “I am not afraid of speaking in public…” “When I am alone, I sometimes talk to myself…”
You try to answer in the way that will make you seem the most extroverted. This is the way of the introvert in business.
Your favorite question in this brief inventory is the second to last: “I seek out feedback on my work performance…”
Highly disagree.
The Mormon collects your questionnaires to return them after a ten-minute break, which is lethal. Breaks are to be dreaded in these off-site training sessions. The simple reason is that there are entirely too many snacks. Since the cutbacks, all so-called training is held in a series of identical conference centers in the same ten-mile-square region of New Jersey near Basking Ridge, Bridgewater, and Morristown. This is ConferenceLand. Every conference center on the East Coast is here, and the only difference among them is whether they are ten or twenty yards from I-287. The rooms are equipped with fax machines that never receive a fax and cable boxes that never receive the Sci-Fi Channel or Comedy Central. Acres of landings extrude onto empty pre-entries to vacant meeting rooms with labels in the door pockets with the black name of some pharmaceutical company’s “Sales Training B.”
And in your oasis of hallway, outside the room where the Mormon silently assesses your ability to listen, are cartloads and bongloads of snacks: doughnuts and bear claws and fudge cookies in the morning, dextrously replaced by M&M’s and Klondike bars and fudge brownies in the forenoon, relieved by slabs of chocolate cake and mounds of raw brown ice cream after an engorging lunch of cruel roast beef and Mounds. It is as though you are being tended by some force that wants to see you break—you will not leave here looking good.
It is the revenge of New Jersey upon its consultants.
As so often happens, your colleagues from around the world all turn out to be from Chicago. You don’t know what is happening in Chicago, but it appears to be something. People are there.
It is easy to strike up a conversation in such a setting—same firm, same generation, same J. Crew wardrobe—but who really wants to?
Nonetheless, you’re reaching for a Fast Break when this very thin woman bumps up against you and apologizes. It would have been okay but she bounced off some fat in your side and you suddenly feel grotesque. Once, you were as thin as she is—
“Those are great,” she says.
“What are?”
“Fast Break—those are new products, right? Reese’s?”
You put it back in the bowl and look at her; she is smiling. Her hair is long and black and she dresses like a J. Crew boy, and she appears to be from India.
“I need to cut down.”
“Me too.”
There’s a pause, as you decide
you like one another. Those are good pauses.
“How’s the feedback?” she asks.
“It’s okay, I don’t know—how’s yours?”
“My problem is I’m not serious enough when I give the feedback.”
“Who said that?”
“The group said that—I’m not serious enough. But you know, it seems kind of silly to me that we’re giving feedback to people we don’t even know.”
This—you could not agree with more. This woman really is not like the others.
“What’s your problem?” she probes.
“I’m not good at feedback.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t like to give it very much, and I don’t really want to get it.”
She assesses you, thinking. “You know what—I don’t think that’s right.”
“It came out of that team. They made that assessment.”
“It’s not right—you proved it wasn’t right when you told me you don’t like to get feedback. See, that itself is feedback and you have no problem with it—so I don’t think the problem is you don’t want to get feedback at all. That’s like a—a smoke screen. I think you’re very clever, and you managed to construct this thing—this false problem.”
She’s right of course, completely right.
“Why would I do that?”
“Probably to show your contempt for this week. This whole camp thing.”
You can’t say anything. You have nothing to say to this.
“Anyway,” she whispers, “nobody likes to get feedback. And nobody likes to give it.”
“My group does.”
“No,” she says gently, “they don’t.”
The military guy appears and pushes past you to get a Fast Break, not really making eye contact.
“My name is Shelagh,” she says to you. “I’m from Chicago.”