by Martin Kihn
You all faced frontward, though there was no speaker and no presentation. Thirty-odd people, facing forward, talking to the backs of people’s heads or the air in front of them.
After a while, somebody took it upon themselves to say, “Let’s get started.”
Somebody else had to courage to say, “What’s this meeting about?”
Somebody else: “Shouldn’t we wait?”
“Who for?”
A very large man in a colorful shirt with various Caribbean islands named upon it said, “I think we all know everybody here. Except for you.”
He pointed directly at you. You felt like a Cuban, or something.
“Yes—my name is [your name]. I work for [your top-tier firm]. We’re working with Holly over at the IAD on an information assurance strategy.”
“Do you have clearance?”
You were afraid of this question. “Well—no. But I was told it was okay for this meeting.”
“Not even secret?”
Like information, people are categorized as unclassified, secret, and top secret. You were undeniably unclassified.
“No.”
Heads turned, necks craned, sclerotic crania contorted until thirty-some pairs of eyes were blearing at you—the man who was unclassified! How could such a thing be? Unclassified was hardly worth the effort of getting out of bed in the morning. Unclassified was an affront to all that is holy. Unclassified was an affront to this… very… meeting.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable—”
Somebody sitting up front interrupted, “It’s okay. This is only a scheduling meeting.”
“But we might say something—”
“I’m pretty sure it’s okay.”
“I could leave,” you offered, envisioning a nice cool drive back to the office park.
“You might want to—”
“No, really,” said your defender, who was a hard-looking woman in the light blue colors of the air force. “What is the purpose of this meeting?”
“You’re right,” said someone, “it’s to schedule the next meetings.”
“I don’t think schedules can be classified.”
“Depends what the schedule’s about,” said someone.
And then they’re off—discussing their absolute favorite topic: secrecy. They were all top secret. Everyone is top secret. Aldrich Ames was top secret. Robert Hanssen was top secret. That’s why they could betray the U.S. so spectacularly for so long. The screening system does not work—it’s worthless, in fact. Lie detectors and grilling sessions with clock punchers have no value. There is no internal watchdog; nobody is watching anything. Nothing about the system works, except perhaps the check to make sure you are a U.S. citizen. But the feeling of being top secret is so… so… apparently, so delicious…
You started to put away your notebook, recap your pen, as random voices were saying—
“Yeah, schedules definitely can be classified.”
“We haven’t even made a schedule yet.”
“But we’re going to. That’s why we’re here.”
“How can a schedule be secret?”
“It’s secret if we say it’s secret.”
“But it doesn’t have any secrets—”
“I’m just telling you about policy.”
“A schedule is just a bunch of dates.”
“Dates and topics—”
“Whatever—there’s no secrets in a bunch of topics.”
“There could be.”
“I’m just saying, you know, let’s not take that chance.”
By this time you were at the door, your computer bag slung over your shoulder, your cell phone in your pocket.
You opened your mouth but said nothing.
And then you left.
5:42 p.m. Thursday.
Good-bye!
As your wife pointed out once, consulting is a job where you work very hard for three and one-half days. And then—not work. Travel, talking in the office, sitting at your desk looking wistfully out the window at the MetLife Building getting scrubbed by rock-hard jets of heavy water… your three and one-half days are over, over…
There is satisfaction in your parting, which happens in fits; those living farthest from the client site check out first, as early as 4:00 or 4:30 p.m. Your flight is under two hours, so your window is not quite so wide; your unwritten departure time is after 5:30 or so. Each departure from the team room—first Martha, then Baloo, then Jeff and Jack together (Jack never drives)—is like two fingers parting, a balloon set free. You get your own cubicle for five minutes as you pack up.
Something you often forget is your power cord, so you roll it up now. No power cord makes working on this “secret project” over the weekend rather difficult. So you’re rolling the black IBM ThinkPad T23 power cord up when…
“Hey,” says a voice behind you.
You look up—and it’s Geraldo. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt with [Client] sewn in white thread over the left breast pocket. It’s kind of a sharp shirt.
“Hey.”
“You guys heading out?”
“Yeah.”
“You always leave on Thursday, huh?”
“Yeah—otherwise we wouldn’t get any office life. We’d never see anybody at the firm.”
“So you’re in New York on Friday?”
“Yep.”
You stand up—you’re really kind of in a hurry now. The plane, the traffic, the car return—all will take time. Geraldo, too, is taking time.
“I’d like to go to New York,” he says.
“You’ve never been there?”
“Nope. Never been out of Illinois much. My mom moved to California.”
Bags up, jacket on—you’re ready to go, but Geraldo intervenes. You look at your watch, nakedly.
“You’re in a hurry.” He notices.
“You here next week?”
“Well—that’s what I wanted to say. I—I’m leaving [Client]. This is my last day.”
“What?”
“I want to work outdoors. I’m not an inside kind of guy.”
“Walk with me to the elevator?” You’re pushing past him now, moving down the corridor, though he is not following.
“That’s okay, man. I just…”
You stop and look directly into his eyes, as a dominant dog or a mother would do. And you wait.
He says, “You can’t help this company, can you?”
“No.”
“Nobody can. Nobody can.”
You chew on that for a moment, approaching the elevators, realizing they don’t work, looking for an unlocked staircase and a way out of this treacherous debilitated place.
Four hours later a black Allegro limousine pulls up outside your apartment in Queens. Your cell phone is off. It is 2217 in military time, and you are all in military time right now. The lights are on upstairs, and downstairs where the landlady lives. Her name is Olga and she is a fourth grade teacher born in Serbia. She lives with a seventeen-year-old daughter so absurdly beautiful you actually make an effort to avoid her.
“You have a voucher?” asks the driver.
“I don’t need one.”
“You need a voucher.”
“Not really.”
You open the door and get out. The air is some version of wet, like a dog’s nose.
There is a dog at the top of the stairs as you climb them. There is a wife attached to the dog with a brown leather cord.
Part IV
Analyze This: A Minute History of Classic Consulting Texts
Part IV presents a welcome final chapter in this seemingly endless litany of woe, with these tips:
1. How to summarize any business book in just a single word
2. The tiniest version ever of the greatest all-time consulting book, Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy
3. Mercifully brief descriptions of every other great consulting classic—all three of them
4. How to turn vague feelings into actual money
<
br /> 5. A strangely unsatisfying ending
Strategy Is a Contact Sport
Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.
—PETER DRUCKER
You have always believed all books about business could be summarized in a few sentences, and you often wish that they were. It would save you the trouble of having to wade through them and then summarize them free for the people.
For instance, take the most famous consulting book there is—the book that is credited with legitimizing academic consulting, giving top-tier management advice-mongering a patina of Harvardesque credibility. That book is, of course, Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Porter was, and remains, a professor at Harvard Business School, and he published his landmark framework in 1980, two years before In Search of Excellence. It was to be a grand decade for McHarvard…
Competitive Strategy introduced a simple—some might say, butt-obvious—way of looking at any industry and figuring out why some companies were making a go of it and others were just wilting by the side of the road, looking stupid. He pointed out that companies are either low-cost providers or they are differentiated and can charge more. To make the low-cost idea work you had to be certain your costs were lower, as the Japanese were beginning at the time to demonstrate with admirable zest. To make the differentiation ploy work you had to have something special. Companies lacking either were said to be “stuck in the middle” and, implicitly, doomed.
Unless they called in the consultants to (a) cut their costs, or (b) jack their differentiation.
Porter also identified the so-called five forces that worked their magic in any industry; these were the currents that determined how attractive the industry was to investors, and explained why the winners were winning and the also-rans were gaggling back in the chicken shack.
No consultant uses the forces in her daily work, of course; and no consultant applies them to any actual analysis. You’ve never encountered a situation where they helped you to understand anything, even during business school, where the standard cases are all written by Porter’s alma mater and some indeed by Porter himself. Perhaps this is so because Porter’s wisdom has seeped into the fabric of the nation’s moneymakers and integrated with their pulse. Who knows?
But it is important for a top-tier management consultant to know what the five forces are. It is not important to have read Competitive Strategy; reading of any nature is discouraged by the top tier; however, you have read it and, as you said, it is your notion to take this bullet and now summarize the work for the people.65
You are the people.
One-word summary of Competitive Strategy: “Differentiation.”
Ten-word summary of Competitive Strategy: “Power of buyers and sellers. Entry barriers. Substitutes. Industry rationality.”
There they are—did you see them? The five forces, in the form of a ten-word summary!
Again, for the challenged, Porter’s five forces:
Barriers to entry—or, why pharmaceutical companies are so f——ing rich (answer: patents).
Substitutes—are you special? Oh yeah?
Power of buyers—is Wal-Mart your biggest customer? Uh-oh.
Power of sellers—when you bargain with them, do they just laugh?
Industry rationality—is everybody crazy, or just Crazy Eddie?
Now you don’t have to read the book.
Another book you don’t have to read is this one—House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time. It is absolutely critical that you buy a copy or two, of course, just to have around the house, like a quilted blanket or a nice warm puppy. But mucking your way through all the blather may not be necessary. That is why it occurs to you—the writer you, not the nonreader you—to provide another Competitive Strategy–like summary of Lies for the people. The hoards. The throngs in their thongs with their bongs.
There was a time when you wanted to be a poet.
Essentially bone-lazy, you look for a substitute to the tedious chore of rereading your own rantings—and you find, to your joy, there is one. Microsoft Word 2000 includes a feature called “AutoSummarize,”66 which, according to Microsoft’s own voluminous documentation, “identifies the key points in a document for you to share with others or quickly scan.” Perfect!
The feature gives you the option of cutting the text down to 25 percent of its full length—hardly a help, in this case—or trimming even further… down to five hundred words, even one hundred words (less than 1 percent of the original). You decide brevity is the soul of sloth and choose the latter.
The results exactly as they are generated by Microsoft Word 2000’s AutoSummarize are presented in the box following.
Microsoft Word 2000 [9.0.4402 SR-1] AutoSummary of House of Lies (Up to Here) in One Hundred Words or Less
“Have you guys worked together?”
Value a company? Working.
Never used consultants
Number of McKinsey consultants in 1999: 10,000
Home Depot’s consultant is McKinsey. The team.
Consultant’s Panic Buttons
2. The Consultant’s Dictionary
“Right.”
“Right—”
“Right—”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“Left, right?”
“Right—”
Core values
Core Values. Right?
“[Your top-tier firm’s name.]”
1. Client Service
McKinsey’s four core values, paraphrased:
1. Client Service
Value = Money
“Right? Right?”
“Right now?”
Those people are not consultants.
Consultants—top-tier and otherwise—exist. “Name?”
“Name?”
“Never?”
“You guys consultants?”
“The client.” Consultants:
(1) Marriott points
(2) Starwood points
“Airline points?”
“Right.”
I work for [your top-tier firm].
Although missing much of your style and élan, this summary gets across something—the essence, perhaps, that which is beyond words and so cannot be summarized in words. Eccentric spacing, the eclectic dialogue—“Name?” “Name?” “Never?”—the indentations sensical perhaps only to a Dadaist or a small child… the relentless emphasis on core values and client service… no, you must admit, your skepticism has melted away and you are sold. AutoSummarize gets you in a way only your mother has before (and sometimes you wonder about her).
Value = Money…?
Even your cynicism comes through. Only your cynicism comes through. Wait a minute. Is this the book that came out of you? Is that what you are up to? Now that you think about it, AutoSummarize has shamed you… it is as though you are being mocked by a bug-ridden slab of code.67
This is business cruelty.
This is business poetry.
Tinybizbooks—A $48.99 Value ($68.44 Canadian)
Business books,” a wise healer and sage once said, “are boring. They are bloated compendiums of half-baked ideas committed in fourth grade prose. Their purpose is to transform a commonsense concept or two into a consulting career through the catalyst of hollow jargon.”
Process theorists would point out that the consulting career is the end state toward which the business book is directed—that is, the book is a process or node, not an end in itself. Which is perhaps why they never seem to end. How many times do you suspect the creeping onset of senility as you turn the page of a well-regarded B-book and think, I’ve read this book before—but then you haven’t. It’s just that the book is freeze-dried, reprocessed essence of B-book… it is a line extension, not a book; a collection of words, not a meeting of the minds; a cont
ract deliverable, not a poem in prose.
Silence is the legitimate greeting for such works of commerce. And silence is their farewell song.
With some exceptions. These are the so-called classics—the books that sold millions and became influential and turned their ex-McKinsey authors into personal cottage industries. These are the “must-reads” that nobody you know has ever read. Perhaps they are a previous generation’s wisdom; perhaps people simply like to have them on the shelf, knowingly nodding, like a T-shirt stenciled au courant.
You decide to read them. There are only three; it’s not a large chore. The three titles are, of course, In Search of Excellence, Reengineering the Corporation, and Built to Last. And it turns out the first and third of them are actually the same book—far-ranging studies of “excellent/visionary” U.S. companies and what it is they do differently. They appeared at the beginning of long run-ups in the market (1982 and 1994) and were conducted during the darkness before the dawn, so their tone is messianic in its hopefulness. “People feel inspired by the very notion of building an enduring, great company,” write the authors of Built to Last. And so they do. Reengineering took a different tack, injecting some Germanic fatalism into American business by suggesting nothing less than wholesale “revolution” (guided by the author’s consulting firm) to restructure their companies; many, rightly, saw it as an invitation to dismissal so bleak its words might as well have been written on pink slips.
Nonetheless, they are what they are: American consulting classics, written by and for consultants or those who employ them. And no discussion of early-century top-tier management consulting would be complete without a free synopsis of these works. Therefore:
In Search of Excellence:
Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1982)