House of Lies

by Martin Kihn

  These expenses, more than the fees, are what rile clients. They do not like to subsidize a lifestyle they perceive to be lavish. You have torn away the tawdry veils concealing this lie, you hope, yet the image persists: highly paid consultant, living high on the broken backs of the working poor.

  To diffuse this ticking time bomb, you are advised not to “flaunt” your expenses. Don’t mention your hotels by name. Don’t talk about “limo services,” but refer often to “cabs” or “carpooling.” Never say “team dinner”—well, you’d never do that anyway, for other reasons—and don’t bring these up. They are boondoogles pure and simple and fine wines and cognacs of the world should not be dwelt upon the morning after. Don’t ever say you have a “refundable” airline ticket that you bought “at the last minute”—and never, ever mention the words “business class” or “fully reclining seats.” It is better to talk about “three-week advance booking” and “unbelievable discounts”—advisable to go on about “crummy bargain airlines” and “no peanuts.”

  And never use a Ritz-Carlton pen to draw on a napkin in the employee cafeteria at the client site while having lunch with a client personnel.

  2:17 p.m.

  The day wanes, the end draws nigh.

  Your meeting with Jack produced an “action item” for you consisting of a meeting with a relatively high-ranking client named Barbara. You don’t know her, nor do you know why they are sending you and Davo specifically to this meeting. Nor do you know what the meeting is about.

  Negotiating the hall tires on the way to meeting with Barbara, you ask Davo, “So, what is this meeting about?”

  “I don’t know. Inventory?”

  “Didn’t Jack tell you?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Why did he send us to this? What about Baloo? Martha?”

  “Apparently this Barbara has a problem with women.”

  “A what now?”

  “She doesn’t like women. Last time we were here—Jack told me this—Barbara had an issue with some of the women and it got to be a problem.”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “Not sure. Anyway, Jack says she’s much better with men. So we’re going.”

  “Why couldn’t Jack take the meeting?”

  “Jack hates her.”

  “Oh.”

  The meeting was everything, and more. You and Davo are made to wait for twenty minutes, and you don’t talk much. You can hear the client’s shrill voice etching through the door. Her secretary has abandoned her desk and left a half-full coffee cup, a half-eaten oatmeal scotchie. And Barbara’s sharp laugh is followed by: “Why did you do that…?”

  When she finally appears, opening her own door to you, Barbara is not laughing. No one emerges; she must have been talking on the phone.

  “Come in,” she says without apology, nodding you in like puppies.

  She sits, and you sit, and you look at each other. You’re not sure what she sees, but she does not like it. What you see is a tiny little person and a very small head and large glasses; a kid-sized executive with an enormous Chagall print on the wall right behind her. There is horse-riding paraphernalia all around—pictures of horses, plastic horses for kids, even some newspaper clippings and ribbons.

  “How long have you guys been here?”

  “Oh, it’s no problem,” says Davo, “just a couple minutes—”

  “No—I meant here at [Client]?”

  “Oh. Just a week or—”

  “What kind of progress have you made?”

  “Well,” says Davo, sort of rattled by her rat-a-tat. “Um… we’ve been—”

  “Listen, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like consultants. They’re always putting together arrows and little boxes and recycling stuff we give them anyway. But”—here she names the main client, the CFO, who is friendly with Jack from way back—“thought you could help, and he outranks me.”

  You’re both nodding. You, in fact, are taking notes. You’re always taking notes that you will never look at again. It is a method of distancing yourself from the unpleasantness around you, and it’s common. You have noticed that the tenser the meeting, the more frenzied is the note taking—all around. When the partner breaks out the notepad, that is a sign the meeting has become a disaster.

  “So,” she says, tilting back in her large leather chair, “how are you going to help us?”

  “Well—” says Davo.

  “I’ve been here for twenty years now,” she continues. “And there have been a lot of consultants. A lot of them. It was always like I said—they’d look at our data, tell it right back to us, packaged up pretty. Then they’d make some ‘recommendation’ that didn’t make any sense for our business and they’d leave. Two years later, we’d get a different bunch come in—they’d look at our data, make some noise, run around… nothing ever changed.”

  “Sometimes,” says Davo, “it can take some time to—”

  “McKinsey was the best,” she says, “but even they didn’t help us. Not compared to their fees. They were wearing suits—how come you guys don’t wear suits?”

  “It’s the dress code,” you say.

  “Suits are a bad idea—it was making the guys here feel like they’re being disliked. Maybe they were, I don’t know. But they seemed real smart and had no background at all in this business. You guys know tires?”

  “Well…” starts Davo.

  “No,” you say.

  “I thought so. And you think you can sit here and tell us what to do? You see the absurdity of that? You see where I’m coming off of here…?”

  You’re thinking: If you were so good at running your business, missy, you wouldn’t be on the brink of Chapter 11 and on chronic deathwatch while the whole country laughs at you behind your back.

  And she goes on… it’s not offensive so much as it is incredibly boring; she doesn’t want an answer, she wants an audience; she wants to ventilate. You let her.

  In a few minutes, after she’s decompressed, Davo lets the silence linger. Then he takes a step he seems to have taken before; something you can learn from and admire. A step toward rapprochement…

  “You know,” he says softly, “I see what you’re saying. A lot of people are kind of skeptical about consultants, and for good reason. Because we come in with such big teams there’re going to be people on the team who are not experts in the particular industry—”

  She makes an explosive sound—like qjklasjklwchsh-shshshchklskj!—and chokes it down.

  “But if you think about it, we have a lot of expertise we can tap into. We have a company full of experts in the area, people like yourself who know this industry like—really well. How could we top that? What we are good at is doing the heavy lifting—you know, the grunt work of breaking down the problem, finding the data, sorting through it, packaging that up. We’re not gonna tell anybody how to run her business—especially not one like this one, tires, it’s too complicated”—

  You think: It would be difficult to find a business less complicated than tires. But no matter.

  —“so all we can do is run some analyses for you, put together some graphs, and so on. You can make whatever conclusions there are. It’s like we’re here to help you make your decisions, if that makes sense.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But we can only really do what you ask us to. You guys are paying a lot of money for us—we need to make sure you’re getting what you need.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So,” he says—lowering his voice, leaning forward, toward her—“please let us know how we can help.”

  “How what now?”

  “You may not need us right now—but let us know if you do.”

  She considers Davo’s enticement. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your background?”

  “I’m a chemical engineer.”

  “I mean, what clients have you worked with before?”

  “Mainly in the
automotive industry, auto parts and service, some consumer—”

  “No, I mean who were the clients? Ford? GM? Hyundai?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Have you worked for our competitors?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s confidentiality. We never talk about who we work for, not by name.”

  “I never understood that. Everybody has consultants running around—it’s not like there’s a stigma.”

  This is always the implication: that clients don’t want anyone to know they have a problem serious enough to require the services of a top-tier consultant.60

  “It’s…”—here Davo hesitates. You get the impression he’s never really thought about this question before. “Uh…”

  “You know why? I’ll tell you—and don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”

  Oh shit, you think. And after all that progress with the “let us know how we can help.”

  “Like I said, I’ve seen a lot of consultants sitting in that seat there,” she continues. “They’re all the same—we worked for a major this company, a superbig that company and the other. No names, of course. It’s kind of like if you fill out a résumé but you don’t have to put down where you worked or what you did—or, or even when it was. You know why you guys do that?”

  “Confidentiality—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I kind of think it’s because you’re making it up. Maybe not all of them—but it’s a lot easier to seem like a big deal when you don’t have to give specifics. See what I mean?”

  Davo doesn’t know what to say to her. He really doesn’t.

  A few minutes later, she has made her point and seems quite happy to let you go.

  Her door closes behind you. The secretary’s doughnut is still half finished, like the final meal on the ghost ship Andrea Doria. You are beginning to believe this godforsaken rubber company will indeed be in bankrupty by next year and another great era of American manufacturing will stop.

  “That,” says Davo, walking next to you down the hall back to the team room, “was truly weird.”61

  On-site Rule #5: Cultivate Your Mystery.

  When you first got to your top-tier firm, at your new hire orientation, there was a lecture given by a partner you have long forgotten. The topic was “Maintaining Client Confidentiality.” This forgotten partner laid down the ground rules for your new profession, rules (she said) that had been put into place shortly after World War II and were inviolate.

  These rules were

  Do not mention your client’s name to anyone outside the firm, including your wife, your mother and father, cousins distant and close, best friends and mentors, and gurus and father confessors—“Not even,” she joked, “the pope.”

  Consultant

  Tell your spouse/SO (a) the general industry/business, and (b) the nearest large city—and that’s it.

  Never talk about the client or its problems in public, on the tarmac, in planes, in restaurants—never ever talk about them in elevators of any size or shape—in the gym, on your cell phone in a crowd of yahoos pushing onto the Metro North train to Larchmont.

  Do not tell one client employee what another client employee—even at the same firm, on the same floor, in the same department, in the adjoining cubicle—told you or showed you.

  Don’t even think about mentioning to one client that your top-tier firm has any other clients.

  If pressed, admit your top-tier firm may in the past have had some other clients—and that these clients in addition to being worldwide household names are among the most successful companies ever.

  Smile and nod a lot… offer very little personal information… stay strong.

  The tradition of total secrecy has been endemic to the top-tier consulting business since the beginning. For years after the firm was founded, Bain consultants had no business cards—and not because they couldn’t afford them. McKinsey consultants are referred to even in some internal documents only by a first name and an initial, like recovering sexaholics. To your knowledge BCG has never publicly admitted to having a single client. McKinsey occasionally acknowledges only those, such as Swissair and Johnson & Johnson, for whom it has toiled in large numbers over many, many years, and who are succeeding. To this day Monitor has never aired the name of its single biggest (some say only) client—AT&T.

  Now for a contest. One of the following real quoted passages was written by an unemployed liar in the pages of a half-baked women’s magazine; the other by a highly respected, far beyond top-tier management consulting eminence in the archives of a preeminent management journal. Which is which?

  Passage 1: “Carlos, 32, is chiseled and has the taut dancer’s body women respond to. ‘I don’t think about my looks a lot,’ he says. ‘Still, it really bothers me when a woman says “You’re handsome” straight out. It’s not only embarrassing, it makes me think, Is that the only thing she cares about?’ ”

  Passage 2: “In many of the companies I work with, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people get involved in crafting strategy…. In one company, the idea for a multimillion-dollar opportunity came from a twenty-something secretary. In another company, some of the best ideas about the organization’s core competencies came from a forklift operator.”

  Okay, not so difficult. But as the author of Passage 1—which appeared in the pages of Cosmopolitan in June 1999, to your eternal shame—you can now admit an uneasy truth: Sorry, ladies, but there is no Carlos! You made him up. Fabricated. You had finished the piece, turned it in, and your editor said: “We need a quote here, something sexual and Latin, you know. Make the guy named Carlos or Antonio or something—those guys know women.”

  “I know women.”

  “Not like those Latin guys—it’s a different league.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Carlos.”

  “Then make him up.”

  Now, this editor might deny this assertion, but you were there. And so you made Carlos up, put words in his mouth and thought, What’s the harm? You cashed the $1,500 check and moved on…

  As for Passage 2,62 you would never go so far as to assert its much-admired author, Gary Hamel, capable of misrepresentation, lying, quote fabrication, fictionalizing, mendacity, or even simple laziness. But it is a very common practice to pepper business books and articles with case studies and references to walletfuls of unnamed “clients” running around unspecified “large manufacturing companies” and “midsize professional services businesses” with a “global footprint.” Such characters are useful because they hint at vast shadow networks of power and place the author at the dead center of the storms of influence—and they are totally uncheckable. When you worked briefly at Forbes in the early 1990s you realized there is nothing less truthful than the public face of management. Except, perhaps, the public utterances of management consultants.

  It is as though a man were to stand in front of you and say, “I have a rather large penis.” Can you prove him wrong?

  It is this collision of puffery with puffery that makes consulting for the U.S. government so entertaining.

  About a year after you joined the firm, you were sent to work for a division of the U.S. intelligence services known as the MPO, for Maryland Procurement Office. At first this name does not excite you. It seems you will be sent to some warehouse to count staples and order office supplies; in fact, you try to wriggle out of the assignment. But your power has, and had, its limits; it had, and has, nothing but.

  It turned out MPO is the old-style alias for the National Security Agency, or the NSA. As opposed to the CIA, which is legally enjoined from spying on U.S. citizens and focuses its activities upon gathering worthless “intelligence” on foreign countries, mainly from paid-off sources in the field and undercover operations, the NSA is a high-tech global information-gathering posse. The NSA is the nation’s eavesdroppers, wiretappers, encrypters, decoders, and database protectors. The agency, commissioned in the 1950s, underwrote most modern ele
ctronic cryptography and is in charge of defending the classified computer networks from outside (or inside) attack. And it is out of the closet—there is a big sign on the highway south of Baltimore that says NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, NEXT EXIT and a National Museum of Cryptography just outside Linthicum, Maryland, that has a large and well-stocked gift shop.

  So you found yourself, during three hot summer months, earning full commercial consulting wages from a branch of the NSA known as the IAD—Information Assurance Directorate. There is no arm of human endeavor more besotted by acronyms than the U.S. intelligence services. Like consultingspeak, acronymitis is the tribe’s way of putting up signs outside their tree house reading KEEP OUT and MEN AT WORK.63

  You showed up in a nondescript office park in Linthicum, Maryland, within sight of the decrepit IAD office park, and you entered a windowless office. This was your home for the next three months. Clean-cut, heavy right-wingers with no discernible work task dropped by from time to time, poked their heads in, nodded, said something about the heat, a barbecue, buying a car at CarMax or an auto mall, and then they left.

  And that first week there was a meeting where you learned something about secrets.

  What the meeting was about… it was related to scheduling meetings or discussions over the coming months. Something about the SPIRNET, which is the computer network for the defense community containing information classified as secret. There is a top secret classification, of course, but most working military information—battle plans, weather reports, satellite imagery—is merely secret.64

  The meeting took place in a government-issue conference room in Maryland. Folding chairs and very long, slightly wobbly brown tables with thin legs. A collection of military types from all branches and civilians, many of whom—this being a hot day, this being the U.S. government—were wearing Hawaiian shirts and shorts. There is no dress code for civilians; there is no code but to be out of shape, out of sorts, and dull.