House of Lies

by Martin Kihn

  PIOUTA (“pee-yáh-tuh”) adj acronym for “pulled it out of thin air,” e.g., “Tomorrow’s presentation is gonna be strictly a PIOUTA strategy”

  pod n work team

  process check n coffee break, urinary break, or both; not appropriate for defecation

  puke/throw up on vt react negatively, e.g., “Marianne really threw up on your deck at the pulse check yesterday.”

  reinvent the wheel v phr see boil the ocean

  rolling off vi leaving an engagement, probably to go on the beach and then get counseled out due to low billability

  suboptimal adj loathsome

  swag n a wag, only a smart one

  wag n a wild-assed guess

  Employing The Complete Consultant’s Dictionary early and often can get you a long way toward developing that faux expert-in-everything glow of the successful top-tier consultant. But it is not enough—there is another critical speech element you will need to master. It may seem simple, but it’s absolutely essential to fitting in within your pod.

  The origins of this mode of speech are obscure, but it is common to all top-tier firms in English-speaking countries. Rather than come right out and say what it is, you will try an experiment. You are writing this at work.37 As usual, you are camped in a tiny windowless room with four other youngish men and two of them are having a loud work discussion, disrupting the thought flows of your other cell mate, assembling a bar graph in PowerPoint, and yourself, writing this.

  You transcribe their discussion verbatim:

  “Tom’s going to Claudia, I want her to know where it’s coming out, right?”

  “Right—is she gonna present to Claudia?”

  “Right.”

  “If she’s supportive of this I kind of want her to present, right? We kind of want that.”

  “She’s in training, she can’t help us at all, right? We positioned—we’re positioning this as—it’s just an update—”

  “Essentially what we’re saying is your first pass has larger ramifications than—”

  “Right—”

  “—than what you were planning for, right?”

  “Right—”

  “So we’re gonna drive that home to them and hope she—she doesn’t have something off the top of her head like she does sometimes.”

  “Like the sales of Wal-Mart channel, or whatever, they’re like… blah blah blah, right?”

  “Okay. Right.”

  A funny person might enjoy writing dialogue for a couple of consultants driving somewhere and giving one another directions like, “It’s left, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You said left.”

  “Right.”

  “Right or left?”

  “Left, right?”

  “Right—”

  But a funny person would not be in a car with a couple of consultants driving somewhere, right?

  The Good Partner

  The Good Partner knows all the words—in fact, he invented a few of them.38 He never interviewed at McKinsey and did not attend HBS. At the time he joined your firm, ten years ago, he was a professor of economics at a small Midwestern university. He ran eight miles a day, drank filtered water, loved his wife and Lhasa apso. He’s an ordinary-looking man—neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, bald nor not so bald. And he’s the most successful, joyful consultant you know, right?

  You pause in the course of this litany of atrocity to ask a simple question: What makes the Good Partner good?

  You are no expert in the art of leadership; most of your life has prepared you simply to be an expert in followership. You have followed many and have followed well. You have won prizes for your ability to follow and have been praised in year-end job reviews at length for your remarkable acquiescence to authority. There have been some very difficult bosses who have been utterly grateful for your ability to suppress your own personality to the realization of their greater vision. Your secret is, of course, that you have very little to suppress and no appetite for responsibility. The sheep is your favorite animal.

  It has sometimes puzzled you that so much attention has been paid to leadership. There are leadership seminars and books—encyclopedias—on leadership. Learned articles are written in the Harvard Business Review and strategy + business on the seven or eight or twenty principles of first-rate leadership. Courses abound at HBS and lesser schools on the characteristics of the great and important leader. Business Week and Forbes weekly and biweekly, respectively, profile leaders, lionize leaders, scrutinize and itemize and systematize the observed minutiae of the leadership class.

  But when it comes to followers…? Nothing.

  As far as you can tell, not a single article has ever been written in the eighty years of the HBR about the secrets of the great follower. Not a single cover of Business Week has been given over to this country’s Follower of the Year. There are no seminars on following at HBS or other lesser schools on the psychodynamics of following… and this, as you say, has sometimes puzzled you.

  The reason is that most people will spend their lives as followers, not leaders. The kind of leaders who are studied by the business scribes and academics—people like the great Jack Welch of General Electric, the great Lou Gerstner of IBM, the great Attila the Hun, Elizabeth I, and Jesus39—these leaders are extremely rare. You could enter a business career assuming you will never be a leader of that rarefied caliber and you would almost certainly be right. Why waste time obsessing over Jack’s criteria for divesting underperforming units, or Attila’s predilection for attacking enemies from the rear? Almost none of you will ever single-handedly get to divest a unit—underperforming or otherwise—or attack an enemy from any direction whatsoever.

  There is no shame in this. Following is essential. It is one of the core values of the U.S. Navy: “Obey Orders.” Without good following, there is no point to leadership. It is essentially vacuumed, like two actors doing Zoo Story in their apartment for their cats.

  In his 1960 classic The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor outlined two well-known models of worker motivation, which he called Theories X and Y. The former assumes “that the average human has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.” The latter, on the contrary, assumes “that the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play or rest.” Moreover, goes McGregor’s Theory Y, a lot of people—maybe even most people, maybe even you—have within them “the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity.”40

  This Theory Y was considered something quite unusual in an era when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was composed of companies such as International Nickel, Corn Products Refining, National Steel, and American Smelting. Theory Y is, however, true. People do like to work—provided they are in the right job.

  Or provided they need the job they’re in.

  You are in one of these two categories yourself, and that is why you appreciate the Good Partner. For to this day managers adhere to Theory X or to Theory Y, and no others. There is a quick and flawless test of whether people are true Republicans. Ask them, “Do you believe people with money generally deserve it?” If they say yes—Republican. If they say, “It depends on how they got it”—Democrat. In the same way, you can tell bad partners from good partners by the answer to a simple question: “What do you think associates do when you’re not looking?” If they say, “Precious little”—well, they’re bad.

  The Good Partner is a Theory Y person, though he doesn’t make it obvious. Subtlety, too, is a hallmark of good management.

  Philip Selznick wrote a 1957 book called Leadership in Administration, unearthed by McHarvardites Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. in their best-selling In Search of Excellence. You think it may help answer this question about what makes the Good Partner good. There is something about Selznick’s style that is impenetrable—almost poetic. So you decide to present his prose in the form of a distinctly postmodern tone poem:

  The
art of the creative leader

  Is the art of

  Institution building

  The reworking of human and technological

  Materials to fashion

  An organism

  That embodies new and enduring values

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  To institutionalize is to infuse with value

  Beyond the technical requirements

  Of the task at hand.

  The prizing of social machinery

  Beyond its technical role

  Is largely

  A reflection of the unique way it fulfills

  Personal or group needs.

  Whenever individuals become attached

  To an organization or a way

  Of doing things as persons

  Rather than as technicians

  The result is a prizing of the device

  For its own sake…

  The institutional leader, then,

  Is primarily an expert

  In the promotion and protection of values.

  So there it is: the Answer! Great leaders are… are…

  What?

  Or, as Peters and Waterman themselves comment, in a rare moment of levity: “We should pause briefly here, as we exalt values, to ask what values?”41

  The Ten Most Overused Words in Business

  Leverage

  Grow (vt)

  Going forward

  Skillset

  Drive (vt)

  Pushback

  At the end of the day

  Buy-in

  Incentivize

  Core value

  Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

  —WARREN BUFFETT

  Defending the core value of the company that is different from the competitor [sic] during difficult times is the quintessence of the search for the truth north.

  —ORIT GADIESH, president, Bain & Co.

  In every culture there is a central core of religious convictions and moral values which constitutes, as it were, its soul.

  So greatness in leadership may be related to values. You’ve heard this word a lot since leaving show business behind: Values. Core values. They are supposed to be the bedrock upon which any successful enterprise rests, right? Right?

  What exactly are core values? You begin to wonder what one might look like. Like the Ten Commandments? Those are commandments, not values. Those are things you have to do or you will be punished, whereas values would seem—from their name—to be more like things that come from inside and aren’t punishment-related. They’re an aspect of goodness.

  And as you ponder values, you begin to wonder—as you so often do—about McKinsey. Does it have core values? Come to think of it, do you? You remember something from your new-hire orientation in New Jersey—some partner with glasses saying something about the permanent values or core values of your firm. What were they?

  You have no idea.

  You decide it would be a good idea to find out. Surely any good partner is only as good as the values she embraces, embodies, and lives. Surely these values are a part of her secret.

  You turn to the colleague toiling next to you in your windowless, airless death pit in New Jersey. Trying to sound matter-of-fact, you say, “So, what are our core values?”

  “What?”

  “[Your top-tier firm’s name.] Our values. Our core values—what are they?”

  “Do we have some?”

  “Of course we do. Everybody does. They’re our soul.”

  “I don’t think we have any.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “I’m saying I don’t think we have any.”

  Undaunted, you ask a few other people on the team. They do not think it a strange question; they haven’t slept in three weeks; any oddity is ingested quite calmly.

  “We used to have them,” says a new associate, a woman who lives not far away in Montclair, New Jersey, and so is better rested. “They decided they didn’t apply anymore.”

  “What do you mean, anymore?”

  “They changed them and then they went away.”

  “Are there any left?”

  “There might be one or two. Just the good ones.”

  “Which ones?”

  “I think like… I don’t know.”

  “Why did they shorten the list? What was wrong with the long list?”

  “People were getting confused.”

  You feel she’s nervous and committing the sin of many new associates: acting like an expert. But what she says can’t be right—are values really so powerful they can actively hurt a company?

  You ask your team leader, a partner who—while not qualifying for the title of good partner—is nonetheless not exactly bad either.

  “I don’t remember,” he says, over $450 worth of team sushi in the conference at 10:30 p.m. that night. This is a man who joined the firm out of Kellogg at twenty-five, half his life ago. “Check the Web site.”

  You check the Web site—and there they are! The core values. Rather a lot of them, in fact. Your firm appears to have a number of cores—multitudes of souls Ping-ponging around through cyberspace shoring up the commitment, character, and aspirations of your cohorts, entirely unbeknownst to them. It is dismaying, in a way, just how many core values you have.

  There are ten. In the manner of David Letterman,42 you list them backward:

  10. Trust

  9. Respect

  8. Integrity

  7. Fairness

  6. Professionalism

  5. Teamwork

  4. Entrepreneurship

  3. Diversity

  2. Excellence

  And the number one core value of your top-tier management consulting firm is…

  1. Client Service

  There it is. The “soul”—as Pope John Paul II called it in a speech at the University of Havana—of your firm. The “true north” toward which your compass points in the turbulent seas of commerce and dismemberment. The rigid spine around which the magical character of your treasured Good Partner is wrapped.

  Why do you feel so empty inside?

  Is it that these words are like the current president—they sound like something but mean a little less? It’s not that they’re impeachable—of course not. Who could argue that “trust” is entirely toothless in life, or that “teamwork” is trivial in a business where people work together all day in teams? Who could call “diversity” a bad thing or summon the troops together to argue that never—under any circumstances—is anyone in this building to strive for anything remotely resembling “excellence”? One you might quibble with is “entrepreneurship”—what does that mean? Should you start your own Web site on the side, perhaps selling client company secrets to the highest bidder? That jibes with the “entrepreneurship” value, but it would seem to conflict directly with the value about “client service,” unless kickbacks are involved. And those kickbacks would have to be fairly distributed (“fairness”) among all the client team members (“diversity”).

  This is troubling. You had expected more, somehow. Your firm is best-in-class in its ability to disappoint. You’ve found yet another region where you’re falling behind the competition. Or are you? What about all the other top-tier management consulting firms? What are their core values? What drives them to be great? What sets their compass, points their sled dogs, blows their forecastle? You decide this is worth finding out.

  Bain & Co.: You locate an undated white paper called “Winning in Turbulence,” written by Bain’s Darrell Rigby. In it, Mr. Rigby echoes his boss Orit Gadiesh: “The best compass in turbulent times is a strong set of core values that consistently guides choices among tradeoffs.” There is that compass again, presumably pointing toward you-know-where. A very nautical firm, Bain. It turns out that the compass may be encountering some turbulence of its own. For Bain’s core values do not appear to be consistent; Gadiesh, in her frequent speeches, alludes to them and at times enumerat
es them, but her own personal lists do not agree with those put out by the company itself.

  Gadiesh’s core values are: passion, teamwork, responsibility, and fun.43

  Elsewhere, Bain recites its core values as follows: ownership, communication, collaboration, teamwork, and value creation. The value creation core value has some subcore values of its own, namely, client service, analytics, and collaboration. Note that the last core value there—collaboration—appears on both lists, perhaps indicating a lack of collaboration among those dreaming up Bain’s lists and sublists of core values.

  If your firm was guilty of core value inflation, Bain & Co. has fallen victim to a fritzy guidance system.

  Boston Consulting Group: So you turn to BCG—a truly impressive firm. Not full of egregious pricks like the McKinsey crowd, BCG is the regular guy’s top-tier consulting firm (provided that regular guy was Phi Beta Kappa and went to Wharton). Perhaps a bit too regular—they don’t have any core values. That is, they don’t have a list of traits they explicitly label “core values.” They do, however, have a mission that reads a lot like a set of core values. “We see the essence of our work as a virtuous circle of insight, impact, and trust,” declares BCG, naming what could easily be construed to be its top three values. Other values cited by BCG in its corporate and recruiting literature include diversity, personal growth, and passion.

  Not really passion so much as: “A passion for going beyond the obvious.”

  Though not, apparently, in its core values.

  You look at other firms—AT Kearney, BearingPoint, Accenture—and notice not a single point of agreement among them, valuewise. The only plaintive note is sung by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY): its Web page takes a postliterate approach to the whole core values ad hocracy by citing honesty, boldness (!), trust, freedon [sic], teamwork, modesty (!), and fun (solo fun: “the feeling one gets when one is happy to work, feels good in the team to which one belongs, is proud of what one does and achieves one’s objective in the never-ending search for top quality and the greatest possible effectiveness”). (italics added)