by Martin Kihn
… and meanwhile, down the hall, the partner’s other buddy is sweet-talking some beleaguered sap—this one in human resources, or finance—and this person’s hearing: “We’re already doing a high-level strategy revamp and an operations rethink for you guys—now, doesn’t it just make sense to take advantage of this golden moment to peel back the onion on the resource allocation piece… no big deal, just a smallish team, say, three or four of our very best people and me, of course, to keep them honest… couple months, in and out, problem solved…”
… and meanwhile, down the hall…
Now imagine you are the VP of Business Development, and you’ve got your top-tier consultants working day and night, but, hey, it’s only a couple months and it’s a small team… and now you’re hungry, and you hit the cafeteria for a plateful of those delicious sloppy joes they have up there… and you grab a tapioca and a Mr. Depp or two and wander into the seating area, looking for a friend… surveying the throngs of middle-aged, sloppy Joes raging about Nascar… and you see…
Actually, you cannot believe what you see.
There, hiding in the corner, a group that manifestly does not fit. They’re youngish, okay looking, glasses, some smiles, passing through, whispering conspiratorially—there’s got to be twenty or more them, laughing… obviously, they’re consultants. You set down your tray and start counting. One, two… there’s twenty-six of them! Jesus Christ—at those billing rates? That’s all of next quarter’s net income—GONE! What in holy fuck is going on…?
You don’t feel like sloppy joes anymore, do you?
You kind of feel more like taking a cold hard look at this consulting cluster fuck occurring in your anal cavity.
For this reason, consultants do not sit in groups of more than three in public spaces.53
And so the team cubicles become the team cubicle—the partner and the principal have decided their high-level conspiratorial day-long phone calls require them to labor without benefit of company. They each take a cube, leaving the four junior team members to squeeze into a six-by-six-foot space.
“Do you need that phone line?” you ask the statistician, a bone-thin Irani named Baloo.
“Just a second,” she says.
“How long is a second?”
“Like a minute.”
“How long is a minute?”
“Where’s the vending machine?” asks the SA, Davo.
“Are there any more phone lines?” you say to no one.
“Know what?” says Davo. “I’m going to find some Coca-Cola.”
“Good-bye,” says Baloo.
“Where’s Martha?”
“She’s doing work.”
Doing work—you look at your watch, a B-school graduation present. It’s 4:17 p.m. You are exhausted. You have been going for twelve hours straight and have done absolutely nothing for no one.
At some point you extract your lengthy legs from behind the steel desk corner they are wedged behind, smack them to retrieve some circulation, bounce on the balls of your feet, and kind of fall backward against a nearby wall. The team has dispersed to find more phone lines—you need them for your critical 24/7 Internet access54—and you are alone.
Well, not quite.
You rub your closed eyelids with your thumbs, digging out the eye-jam in your ducts. You see real stars. You had a seventh grade teacher, Mr. Price, who said rubbing your eyelids is like banging a brick on your nose. Maybe you could use a brick right now.
When you open your eyes someone is staring at you.
You startle, then get embarrassed. This person sits in the cubicle directly next to yours; he has been so utterly quiet you honestly did not know he was there. Mentally, you run through things you all have been saying…
“Hi,” he says shyly.
“Have we been loud?”
“A little bit.”
“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were there. I’ll talk to them—”
“It’s okay. It gets kind of quiet in here anyway. You guys consultants?”
“Uh-huh.”
He’s maybe forty, pudgy, badly dressed, like an engineer or an off-track betting fan. He wears an undershirt and a mustache. His cubicle is tidy in a way you find soothing and there are reams—phalanxes—cornucopiae of little color photographs of children and babies who look like him.
You can’t help saying, “You got a lot of kids.”
“Just two.” Such a warm look comes over him then.
“They look just like you.”
“They’re my wife’s from another marriage.”
“Oh,” you say.
He kind of smiles at this.
“I’m Geraldo,” he says.
“Sorry about your talk show career.”
“I know,” he says, “but we move on.”
You have many limitations as a consultant, foremost among them your sense of limitations. But one thing you can do is revel in the pointless superficial temporary interaction of the office space. You are an absolute master of the forty-second relationship. As we will see, this skill is your secret arsenal.
Clients clear out early, of course—how early depends upon their time zone. We are one country, in business. So while Manhattan media companies can open up shop around 9:30 a.m. and are deserted again around 6:00 p.m., workplaces in the Midwest are time-shifted two hours. They’ll kick into gear just after 7:00 a.m. and by 4:30 p.m. everybody’s gone. Michigan companies will schedule meetings at 7:00 a.m. and think nothing of it. It’s a culture of the early riser. So now it’s 6:34 p.m. and the hallways are quiet; the elevators still; vacuums abound, sucking up the silence.
The copier takes a breather from its huncka-huncka-huncka.
And the data has started to arrive.
Davo has found an empty conference room behind a pile of truck tires, and you are having a junior team meeting. Davo, Baloo, yourself, and Martha, the other associate.
There is a cardboard box on the table in front of Davo as you walk into the conference room. He upends it, dramatically, and a river of CDs pours out. There’s probably twenty or thirty of them, sliding across the table top.
“This,” he says, “is the first of it.”
“What is it?” asks Baloo, who is exceedingly linear.
“The data dump. The first data dump. I’ve been told there are many, many more to come.”
“What’s on there?” you ask.
Davo pulls a grimy dot-matrix-printed sheet of paper from the bottom of the box and scans it carefully. “Inventory data, historical inventory data. Inventory by channel and by outlet. Two years of inventory going up to… shit, I don’t know. Maybe June.”
“That’s not going to help us much,” you say.
“Of course it isn’t going to help us,” says Davo. “That’s why we got it right away.”
“What do we need?” asks Baloo.
“We need it for right now—for today.”
Martha has red hair and is brand new, so she lacks a certain ease in the team setting. But she proves to be quite practical. “What is this project about?” she asks.
You all turn to Davo.
“What are we doing here? Good question. Meanwhile…” he divides the CDs into three equal piles and shoves them across the table at their new owners.
“What we need to do is go through all of these and understand exactly what is on them,” he says. “Don’t go by the labels, because they’re wrong. They’re written over. In a couple hours we should have another box.”
“Where are you getting these from?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” says Davo. “There’s some guy here, an SAS expert, he’s pulling all this stuff for us off the mainframe. They still have a mainframe, believe it or not. They still use tapes somewhere. There’s this guy and he’s burning these for us.”
“He’s still here?”
“I believe so.”
“Can we ask him what he’s pulling off the mainframe?”
“If we can find him.”
“Who’s his boss?”
“The client. But he’s home now, we can’t call him at home.”
“So there’s a guy here—we don’t know who he is, we don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s told to do. He’s running all these data dumps for us and we don’t know what they are?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“It’d be great if we could find this guy,” says Baloo, warily eyeing her stack of CDs.
The four of you return to your cubicle in a foul mood. There is nothing more pitiless than inching through trillions of ions of data looking for a ray of light.
But you’re powering up your CD-ROM for a good eight hours’ beating when you hear a sound that stops you cold.
A quiet… insistent… click click click tap bang click tap thwuck… the keystrokes of a piss-poor typist working hard nearby.
You wedge yourself out, step over Martha, and exit the cube.
Geraldo is working at something, typing with three or four fingers max, peering at an unhealthy distance into his CRT.
“Can I ask you something, Geraldo?”
“Okay.”
“Do you know SAS?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you pulling data right now?”
“Yep.”
“Does this data happen by any chance to be going onto CD-ROMs?”
You get your answer as Geraldo pushes the latch button on his CD burner and a disc pops out.
“Huh,” he says.
“Do you know who these CDs are for?”
He looks at you now, for the first time.
“You guys.”
On-site Rule #3: Be Nice to Everyone.
Analysis is at heart simply filing. You take a mass of information, sift through it, and divide it into groups with similar relevant attributes. “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” said T. S. Eliot, “it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” The good consultant is in this way an artist, although his best insights tend to be about trucking routes and tariffs. And the simplest categorical division is the Rule of Two. Take any mound of data. Divide it into two and only two different groups. What are those groups? This exercise can reveal the truth.
For instance: Engagements and Consultants. These are the raw material. Dump every single Engagement at every single top-tier firm into a truth machine that divides them into two and only two different groups. What are the groups? Do the same with Consultants. What are the groups?
The groups are
Engagements:
1. Data dumps
2. Huh?
Consultants:
1. Marriott points
2. Starwood points
These categories follow the Barbara Minto/McKinsey framework they call MECE—Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive—which means, simply, the categories are totally different and together they include everybody. Now, you will have more to say about the Marriott/Starwood insight later, but the Data dumps/Huh? discrimination is on point.
Here is a MECE-friendly description of the only two Week Ones a top-tier consultant can experience:
Type 1—Data dumps.
You arrive in Mendocino riding herd on a new summer associate named Jormugandr, who is a dolt. His enthusiasm comes out in mouth spray. He’s under the mistaken impression the team has been asked to “hold down expenses,” so he imposes upon you to drive him everywhere. The client is a good-sized manufacturer of plastic brackets for trailer curtains, and also has an interest in motion picture finance. It owns three actual factories in the U.S. and at least four in Mexico, or maybe Belize—even it is not quite sure. Jormugandr and you sit down with your team leader, Wotan, engineer-turned-consultant. The meeting is spent drawing graphs on lined paper and ignoring your anger. The halls of this HQ seem surely empty, as though you are missing a better meeting. And as you search floors one through three for a working electrical outlet a forklift motors down the hall, beladen with boxes… cartons and reams of brown cardboard boxes extending through the fluorescing ceiling… and it’s odd, says Wotan, that there’s a forklift in the hall but all you can think is: Oh no. The forklift stops and dumps the boxes, burying Jormugandr. You open one and find parcels and truckloads of paper and data discs—printouts of eight-point numbers in bewildering columns with no heading, page numbers, or punctuation. As the forklift leaves, another one arrives—with larger boxes. “Here ya go,” chortles the driver, Bifrost. “You all consultants enjoy the information you requested!” You think you understand why he’s enjoying this… as Jormugandr starts to spit up blood…
Type 2—Huh?
No sound in Duquesne but the screams of true silence. Uneventful travel in a prophylactic nap. Flawless team launch as the all-U.S. partner, Luacharma’n, delivered a eulogy to greatness. You wish you shared her boosterism but you are in a spring flu. The partner leaves you in a vast room alone with a seasoned IT SA, Bhrogan, and another associate, a gifted supply chain analyst and fantasy baseball statistician, Cluricaun. Luacharma’n’s high heels posha-posha down the hall and into greater triumph. Meanwhile, you can’t help but turn with Cluricaun to your technically inspired thought leader. “So,” you say, “what does this company do?” “Not sure,” admits Bhrogan sheepishly, “something in government?” “They don’t make curtain brackets? No?” asks Cluricaun… two hours later, you have progressed into watching Bhrogan scratching boxes with blue Magic Marker onto a printable white board, then erasing them… an hour later you decide to work through dinner… at 9:00 or 10:00 at night, the white board has three empty boxes on it. Bhrogan has rolled up her sleeves. She stares through the windowless wall at the bold night beyond… so much is shared in silence you wonder why anyone talks… “Is this place maybe nonprofit?” you ask. “We need a strategy,” observes Bhrogan. “We need…”
Of these two—and only two—possibilities, it is hard to say which is preferable. Day one you have either (1) nothing but information, or (2) nothing but questions. Neither gets you any closer to the truth.
Despite your precision with Geraldo, it is still a long night. It’s not that you don’t get to leave and spend some quality sack time on your Sheraton/Westin Heavenly Bed—you do. It’s just that the time occurs from 6:00 to 6:45 a.m. and your Heavenly Bed has chosen to be extra hot. You shave with your backup razor and hack up your puss. The clothes you inhabit smell brackish now. Your deodorant is gone but not forgotten. You dead-walk to the Matador Red Ford Taurus and can’t open the door. Jesus Christ! you think—this God-awful Michigan workmanship!
At some point it occurs to you that you are trying to get into the wrong Taurus.
The second day begins thereafter, much as other days begin. You pull into the consultants’ lot and park your Taurus next to all the other ones… a line of red matadors, ready for the bull…
You run into Martha and Baloo in the parking lot, emerging from the Matador Red Ford Taurus they are sharing. Women are better at sharing.
“Good morning,” says Baloo.
“Good,” you whisper, but it comes out like “God.”
The team cubicle appears to be your final stop; the client’s admin drops by at dawn to assert this sad fact.
“We don’t have a lot of room,” she says. “You guys are okay here?”
“Of course,” you say.
“It’s great,” says Baloo.
You are not okay, nor is it great. But making requests at too junior a level in too early a time frame is discouraged.
“I wonder,” you ask the admin, “is the cafeteria open this early?”
“Oh gosh, you might have missed it totally.”
“Missed it how?”
“It closes in a minute.”
You look at your watch; it’s 7:29 a.m.
“It closes at seven-thirty? Are you serious?”
“You betcha.”
Of course, you don’t have breakfast. You get a Snickers and a Mr. Depp and settle in with a pile of discs and a big stack of paper
reports. Nothing is labeled. They might as well be random numbers.
Davo, being more intelligent, has found himself a personal space in a hallway near a stack of Nascar tires, insulated both in space and sound. Despite being two-thirds female, your cube is beginning to odorize; but Davo drops by looking fresh, pressed, rested, and relieved.
“Great news,” he barks, resting his chin on the cube wall—a decapitated head in motion.
“Yeah?” says Martha, who is not a morning person.
“I had a meeting with the client guy. I know what we’re here for.”
You wander the rusting mazes of [Sadtown] HQ searching for an abandoned conference room; Baloo whispers, “I heard they’re going bankrupt.”
“Who is?” you ask her, and think now Who isn’t?
“These guys.”
“Shhh,” interrupts Davo, drawing a finger across his pale throat like a knife.
There is no discussion of the client at the client site. There is no gestation, gossip, dissection, or interpretation of its business based upon information sources seen, read, or heard about by speakerphone. There is no use of speakerphone. There is no animated conversation at the client site, period; no loud talk or character-type noise effects such as chortles, grunts, groans, wild laughter, or screams. All cries of despair are internal, all sobbing alone.
No interesting chatter on the depravity of business or of popular culture is allowed, unless there is a poster for, say, a Bruce Willis movie framed in gilt in the client’s office, signed by Bruce himself with a wild cherry lipstick: “Keep on Truckin’, Love, Bruno!”—in which case there is permitted a single comment to the extent you admire Mr. Willis and are awed by those who’ve met him.
Unsolicited opinions are a one-way ticket to a counsel out. Sacking is the payment for clear points of view. Remember whole swaths of the U.S.A. are populated by right-wing extremists with pinheaded views on scientific principles such as evolution, global warming, and the Pac-10 conference; these people are your clients and are not open to persuasion.