by Martin Kihn
He thought about this some, then took a step sideways. “Next?”
Hertz is a division of the Ford Motor Company, so it offers only Ford cars, including Volvos and Land Rovers (both owned by Ford). From your point of view, however, they have only one car: the Taurus. And it comes in only one color: matador red. You have never been given anything else. You suspect because there is nothing else to give.
“Hi there,” you say to the Hertz lady, who, like Jon, is distressed.
“Last name?”
You tell her. She taps on her ancient IBM PC. “Declining insurance?”
“Yes.”
“Want fuel option?”
“No, thanks.”
“You’ve got a Ford Taurus, number one-ten out that door.”
“I was wondering—”
“Huh?”
“Could I get a different car?”
“What’s wrong with that one?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering—do you have something else? Like a Volvo?”
“Not since Christmas, I don’t think.”
She taps and taps, you suspect just random letters. She shakes her head.
“We had a Silver Frost. Naw. Sorry.”
This sounds intriguing—a new type of Ford. Perhaps experimental. “What’s a Silver Frost? Is that an SUV?”
“Naw. It’s a car.”
“Is it new?”
She looks at you like you’re old and strange, which might not be so far from true.
“It’s a Taurus,” she says. “A silver Taurus.”
“I thought they only came in red.”
“They do come in red.”
You find the fleet of crimson Tauri awaiting you—the mechanical bulls for the bullshit artists of the century. Yours doesn’t have even a helpful map of the area inserted into your card paper contract, but you don’t particularly feel like reentering into a discussion with the Hertz lady. It is 10:27 a.m. and you have been en route for five hours already.
Your wife, the musician, still sleeps.
This is day one of the new engagement—and it occurs to you now that the engagement is not actually in Chicago. You are in the Chicago airport, driving past the Hertz checkpoint, turning left toward a major highway, tooling past a locked shut Wendy’s in your Matador Red Ford Taurus, and you suddenly realize you have less than no idea where you are supposed to be going.
It is always thus, in week one.
The crisis has begun.
The client is located in [Sadtown], Illinois, and is a large company involved in the manufacture, distribution, and selling of tires for cars and trucks. [Sadtown] is not really that close to Chicago, and by the time you’ve raised the job manager on the cell phone and extracted directions to the city, become lost, raised someone else on a different cell phone, and whittled your directional errors into a sense that you’re on the right track, it’s almost noon. And while it is understood that consultants from out of town arrive late on Monday morning it is supposed to still be Monday morning when they arrive. Some combat the risk of late arrival by flying in Sunday night, but you would really rather die.
This part of Akron or Cuyahoga Falls or wherever you are appears to have been designed not merely for but by your client. There is a [Client] Avenue, of course, but also a [Client] Library, a [Client] Test Track, a [Client] Veterans of Foreign Wars Center, a [Client] Road and [Client] Mews, a [Client] Auditorium, a [Client] Wellness Center and [Client] Playground, as well as the inevitable, majestic [Client] Museum of Rubber. And like St. Petersburg, Russia, the entire burg appears to have been erected in a day. By the same design firm using the same truckload of red bricks. Everything is red brick; not so red, as times have turned south for your client; times turned south some decades ago, actually, when the U.S. lost its ability to mass-produce commodities economically; and this southness is reflected in the tenor of the brick, which has descended now into a kind of brackish slimy gray with specks of red. The sky is wet like crime. Your radio can pick up nothing, because it doesn’t work or plausibly because there is just nothing to pick up in [Sadtown].
You keep it on. Static is the soundtrack of this film.
You’re about to drive and dial again when up ahead you see a large gray dome and a flag welcoming you to [Client] World Headquarters. There is a visitors parking, patrolled by two fat women wearing yellow. Their smiles are wide, in unison, as you power down your window.
“Hi there,” they shout.
“Howdy.”
“You a consultant?”
“How could you tell?”
“The car, for one.”
“Of course. Where can I park?”
“You park wherever you can find your car.”
“Great.”
You take the ticket and think: What a strange response. Not Wherever you can find a spot or Wherever you want to but Wherever you can find your car. There’s something deep here too, you think… until you see what they mean.
This parking lot is entirely outdoors, a single massive lot snaking around and enveloping the dismal [Client] Community Center. And once you press past the monster trucks of the actual visitors seeking community within the center—once past these evil machines that could crush a child, you find yourself adrift in a crimson tide of Matador Red Ford Tauri. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Consulting chariots, awaiting instructions.
It is difficult to feel special, in business.
You enter the headquarters soaked to the bone. A cloud opened up as you crossed under it and dumped a load on you, then stopped. A surreal weather experience. You wonder if there is a [Client] store for new shirts, and if they have the [Client] logo. You have never, ever been wetter.
The security guy behind the headquarters reception desk does not appear to notice. Wet people must show up all the time in here. He hands you a pen and a pass and takes your picture “for the record.” What is so important about preserving this moment is not clear. Perhaps he wants to blow up your deep dark circles and your shivering ratlike face and laugh and laugh behind your back.
“Go in there,” he says. “No—over there.”
He points you toward not the actual front door where people mope into and out of the headquarters but a smaller door, concealed behind a rack of dust-caked promotional pamphlets.
“That there,” he says with the shyest little hint of smirk, “is for people like you all.”
“Me all?”
“Yassuh.”
“What kind of people is that?”
“I’m making some crazy guess,” he observes. “But I’m to believe that you are a consultant.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That door is for you.”
It is 12:16 p.m. You have been in transit to this moment for almost eight hours. A full day’s work for some; for you, it feels like. Time to turn around and call it a job.
You get buzzed through the door and you push.
“What I need to make perfectly clear here is that we are late. We are behind. The clock is ticking on this piece of work and we had better start meeting the deliverables. There is a client senior team meeting in two days. I need your analysis—all of them to be done at that time. We’re not gathering data here for anything—we’re done gathering data, by my schedule, and we’re putting together the decks for this senior team in two days. Which means I’ve got to see something tonight—and we finalize tomorrow night. Is there any part of this you’re not clear on, because I need to know? We need to meet these timings, and I’m telling you we are already behind.”
Already behind—and you just walked in the door.
The team is gathered in a small and airless meeting room around a table. There are seven of you in the room—an operations partner, a principal from Cleveland, an SA you talked to on the phone once, two associates,51 and a statistician, a job title available only in the Cleveland office due to its high volume of quantitative operations-type work. The only person you’ve met before is the principal, an obese and impressive yo
ung man who pounds Diet Mountain Dews and chews his fingernails into bloody putrid stumps.52 The seventh person is the speaker, an ancient senior senior partner from the firm’s prehistory, recalled from glorious retirement because he “owned” the relationship with this particular midwestern client. You are wondering if there is any particular reason he is in such a foul frame, or if this is the consequence of age and ownership.
He continues: “Are we all clear what we need to do here? ’Cause if there’re any problems we need to state them now or we’re going to be in trouble with this client. They’re operating on a compressed time frame, so we have to also, right? Okay?”
There is an extended moment here.
Then the principal, bless him, decides to speak. His name is Jeff. The senior’s name is Jack.
“Now, Jack,” says Jeff, “I understand the sense of time pressure here. But do we think it’s realistic we get a draft to you by tonight? I mean, we just got here a couple hours ago. I don’t even know where the men’s room is, right? We don’t have connections for the computers, we don’t know the clients yet. Now I’m guessing there’s a lot of data we’re going to have to be sifting through, but we don’t have any of it yet. It’s difficult to see our value add for tonight.”
“Exactly,” says Jack, not missing a step. “That’s what I’m saying—we are really behind.”
Jack breaks up the meeting a few minutes later having granted a concession to Jeff. He doesn’t need to see the first draft before 11:00 p.m. There is a review meeting scheduled for midnight. By the time that breaks up, you will have been (marginally) awake for twenty-four hours, and your ability to reason will have descended down to the level of a cabbage’s. Even by consulting standards, this is a punishing first day.
On-site Rule #1: You Are Always Behind.
The team has been given three small cubicles outside a copy room with a high-speed copier going huncka-huncka-huncka nonstop 24/7. It must be copying the résumés of the entire employee population, over and over again, as they search for escape. Three cubicles you have—and even your limited math skills come in handy.
“Where are you sitting?” you ask Jeff.
“Where you are.”
“So where’s Davo sitting, then?”
“Ditto.”
“So there’s three cubicles total for us now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And we have two partners?”
“Jack’s sitting somewhere else. They gave him his old office back.”
“So we have one partner?”
“Yes, sir.”
This is bad—a partner never shares a cubicle. Certainly not with a form of lower rank. So his presence demotes your space grant down to two cubes for five people. These are not large cubes.
“When do we get more space?”
“How about never?”
“Never?”
“Do you see any vending machines around here? I need a Diet Mountain Dew.”
On your way to the men’s room later you soak in the ambience of [Client]. This is the pre-Christmas season, and many companies choose to enter into the spirit of the time by putting up a green plastic tree in their headquarters entrance, say, or hanging a few discreet wreaths. More distressed firms tape up paper snowflakes in their cafeterias. Holiday parties can occur, even in this deep Republican recession.
But [Client] is relentless in its unwillingness to bend to convention. As you wend through long corridors of 1950s-era carpeting and employees, it might as well be midsummer. There is no holiday here. A couple days later you ask one of the secretaries what’s up with that, and she says, “They canceled Christmas this year.”
Even Jim Carrey couldn’t cancel Christmas.
You cannot find the men’s room, no matter where you wend. Could they have canceled comfort?
By now you are so lost you are convinced you are in another building. The headquarters has no windows; that is, there are windows, but none of them are visible to you. It’s as though there is another, better building wrapped around the building you are in—and the wraparound building is where they have Christmas and men’s rooms, vending machines and (come to think of it) lunch. This is the building you want; somehow, by walking and walking and walking, you will get there.
You’re underground, perhaps. Large tires are stacked against the walls—racing tires, and tractor tires. You’d heard this company had an inventory problem, but you had no idea it was as bad as this: excess product stored all over headquarters, gathering dust. The employees you see wear white shirts and gray skins, frowning at the calendar place mats on their blocky desks. They look up as you pass, terrified.
You cannot ask them where the men’s room is because they might burst into tears.
You are now in an orange concrete tunnel sloping downward… a marble on this floor would roll quite fast. Up ahead there is a room with a light, brighter than the others. It spills onto the rust-soaked carpet. Faint sounds of words are somewhere near you now. They’re soughing from this room. You come to it and stop and look inside.
Jack is in there, putting down the phone.
He sees you.
“You lost?” he asks. There is no high school play pause before Jack’s lines of dialogue; he’s right on top of it.
“No,” you say, then, “Yes.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Marty.”
“Come in here, Marty. Sit down a second.”
This you do. What else can you do?
“Did you get the point of what I was saying earlier?”
“In the meeting? Yes.”
“Did the other guys get it? Is there—I’m wondering, is there a sense of urgency in there?”
“We just got here.”
“Of course—of course you did.”
You are wondering what is going on here. Jack has been written off as an asshole by now, yet here he is…
He looks at the phone, takes an audible breath.
“You know, I’m retired.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My wife is not well. We moved—we moved—we moved…”
Jack takes another audible breath and you cannot believe you are going to see him cry in front of you, now, like this.
“I’m sorry. How long have you been at [the firm]?”
“A year, almost two years.”
“You’re an associate?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You seem older. How old are you?”
You tell him, and he seems a bit cheered. He recovers fast—this Jack.
“Okay. I see. Okay, then.”
He nods, and you stand up, since this appears to be what is supposed to occur.
“Thanks, Marty.”
You step into the hallway, out of the light, and then turn back. “Can I ask you something, Jack?”
“Yep.”
“Is there a men’s room around here?”
“You see that door?” He indicates a gray steel door directly across from this office. “Through there, up the stairs, and”—he looks at his watch—“you’ll find them all in line. The cafeteria’s closing.”
Upstairs, you find some confirmation of the rumor that Jack is never wrong in matters of fact. The team is scattered in the cafeteria, final customers before the early midwestern closing time. You even find a men’s room. Jeff is in there, washing his hands with a kind of frightening intensity.
“Hey, Jeff,” you say while springing a leak.
“Where were you?”
“Looking for this place.”
“Okay.”
He dries his hands and leaves without another word.
The cafeteria itself is dismal and delinquent. The lettuce in the salad bar hangs like a tongue. The dessert cabinet is only tapioca pudding, crusty on top, and red Jell-O. All the soda pop is private label, no-name brands like Mr. Depp in scratched-up cans. The Special Today is SLOPPY JOES. Thankfully, they are out of them. Anyway, you are not so hungry anymore.
And there you
are, the team, lined up with your Mr. Depps and little bags of Doritos.
You do not talk. This is entirely by design. There are subtle rules of client-site behavior, and you know them all as instinct now; they are simply what you do.
On-site Rule #2: Do Not Make Group Appearances.
This is one in a series of guidelines related to a phenomenon consultants call optics. You spend your working life in someone else’s hell; you can safely assume they are watching. Every moment at a client site is another moment in a dish of petri. Even private team meetings in quiet corners of a warehouse at 5:30 p.m., long after everyone you’re working for has split for home—even these have been known to be observed, on the fly, by workaholic key executives strolling past on their way out the door. Let’s peek in on the incredibly high-priced hotshots—let’s see if they’re earning their money.
This is why the consultant never brings his complimentary USA Today from the hotel to the workroom. This is why the consultant never puts her feet up on a desk, any desk, even at 3:30 in the morning, or takes off her shoes, or rolls up her sleeves, or calls home…
Earning their money…
Optics dictate that on-site engagement pods never ever, ever:
Walk down public hallways in groups larger than three;
Linger outside elevators together;
Leave at the same time; and, especially,
Eat lunch together in the cafeteria.
This last one has destroyed careers. Now, let’s see why.
Imagine you are a key executive at an ailing firm and you have been sweet-talked into hiring Consulting Firm X to take a look at things. It’s a small team, says the partner—no more than three or four top-tier experts, plus herself. In and out in a few months or so, problem solved. You say, “Okay. We’ll give it a shot.”
Meanwhile, the partner and his buddy have wandered down the hall, sweet-talked some other key executive—this one in operations, say—that, sure, they’re on the case down the hall with a high-level strategy team, and now is the time to take a hard look at that inventory problem in Iowa, and those money-losing plants down South, and it just plain makes sense to bring in a small team of crackerjack consultants to kick the tires… since you’re here anyway… nothing much, maybe, oh, three or four of your best people and a couple supervisors to make sure they’re totally in tune with you, the client, and…