by Martin Kihn
“How’s the low-carb thing going?” Jerry was trying the Atkins diet, which was sweeping through the engineering building like a virus with no discernible effect at all.
“One hour,” he says.
You go over to Tina’s office but the door is closed. Tamara is reading her Bible, as she likes to do. “She’s in there,” she says.
“Can I go in?”
“Always.”
So you go in. Maybe you should have knocked. Tina is gazing dreamily out the window in a most un-engineer-like way, and for the first and last time you startle her. But she recovers fast.
“What’s up? You want a doughnut?”
“I’m trying to avoid the carbs.”
“You don’t need to do that. I tried Atkins, you know. Me and George [the company president] did it together. I lost like two pounds, but George gained weight. He gained five pounds!”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“It’s possible. What’s up?”
“I’m almost finished with the Casanova thing. I’ll have it for you this afternoon.”
“Okay, I’ll put together a conference call. We’ll get the program management people on it. We’ll have like a minisummit. You can present.”
This was kind of rare—a junior consultant presenting to a senior client management team.
“Maybe you should do it? I could support you—”
“No way. It would look biased. Just—you can be objective. Just present the findings to the team as your fact-finding and that’s that, okay?”
In truth, you don’t like it and you don’t really want to do it.
At lunch you mention to Jerry that he looks a little skinnier. This is a statement that always brightens people’s days in the West, though apparently not in India. In Dearborn, Jerry says, “You’re just saying that.”
“No, really. There’s a difference.”
“Thanks, man.” You stop for a moment, probably both thinking that if you’re not careful you’re going to end up as friends or something crazy. It’s a nice moment.
There’s a TV on, as there always unfortunately is in American corporate cafeterias, and it’s tuned to the channel where all the bad news is told. This is every channel at this moment. Either the Supreme Court is sending poor people to jail for life because they stole a videocassette or the A.G. is holding people in secret locations for no reason or the whole country is put into Orange Alert on a whim, to no effect, until the alert is lifted and it’s time to stage a fake “dirty bomb” attack on downtown Seattle. Mind control did not go out with Mesmer.
“Five men of Middle Eastern descent are wanted today for questioning by the Department of Homeland Security,” says the TV. “They were seen crossing the border from Canada in a white van…”
You say, “Why does every bad person drive a white van?”
“What?”
“The sniper in DC, these Arab guys, even—what’s his name?—Ted Bundy, they all drove a white van.”
“The sniper had a station wagon.”
“That’s my point—everybody thinks they’re driving white vans, even when they’re not. What is it about that type of car that seems so scary?”
“You never know what’s going on in a van.”
“Good point.”
“There’s a lot of open spaces.” He pauses. “So what’s up with Casanova? How’s that going?”
You mention to Jerry that you’re just about done with the presentation, should be done later that day, which is a Wednesday.
“Have you showed it to Tina?”
“Not yet.”
“If you want I can look over it for you, just for a second set of eyes.”
“Okay.”
“Just in case there’s anything from the process point of view I can add.”
“Okay.”
“So you’ll send it to me today?”
“Yeah.”
“Coolio.”
A couple hours later you finish up the presentation, and it’s nine pages long, and you e-mail it to Jerry with the following note:
Hi, Jerry—here’s the Casanova presentation for Tina. she’s going to present to her team in PM [program management, ed.] and figure out what to do from there. let me know what you think.
And then, around six or seven, not having much else in the hopper and a little on the tired side you leave for the hometel, which is a Ritz-Carlton. The service there, as you have said, is so good it makes you feel guilty. But it’s cheaper than the Hyatt and, gosh, you deserve it, right?
And you sleep.
And you wake up.
And there you are, sitting in your cube, gently typing up another couple slides for the program management training analysis you’re working on, when one of your [top-tier firm] colleagues from another building shows up, looking kind of pinched or panicked… and then everything slowly falls apart…
“Marty,” he says, “John Jacobs is looking for you.”
John Jacobs is the senior partner overseeing the team in the other building, and you have never even met him.
“Right.”
“I’m dead serious. He said to me, ‘Are you Marty?’ and I said no, and he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be him right now’?”
“What? Why?”
You honestly cannot think of a single reason why John Jacobs would have such a thought.
“I don’t know, man. I should go”—and he leaves, like a cockroach scattering from a light.
And you wait.
You peer down the hall.
You continue to wait.
John Jacobs is looking for you?
Twenty-one minutes later John Jacobs appears, and his face is red.
“Are you Marty?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Come with me.”
He walks ahead of you down the corridor, past the drinking fountain and the vending machines. You are surprised to see he is quite young—early forties, maybe—and he wears flashy suspenders like an old-time rich guy. His hair is sandy and he’s got a gut; a large kid turned into a big man. He says absolutely nothing.
Walking ahead.
It is now that you notice he is carrying something in his left hand, some papers. And suddenly you realize what this is all about.
He opens the door to a small conference room and holds it for you, nodding you in. There is a videoconferencing unit in the corner of the room and a speakerphone setup in the middle of the table, but both of these are unplugged with their wiring dangling. The door closes and you are alone together, sitting, breathing.
“Did you do this?”
He shows you the papers he is holding.
“Yes.”
“What were you thinking?”
“What happened?”
“Answer my question.”
This is to be a hostile interrogation.
“Tina asked me to do this. I talked to people and put together a report.”
“You put together a report?”
“Yes.”
“This one?”
“Yes.”
“Who was supposed to see it?”
“I was going to give it to Tina today. Later today.” You have no idea why—but you think about your little puppy, Hola; she wouldn’t understand this, any of this, nor care at all.
“Then how did I get it?”
“I don’t know.”
He looks out the window of the conference room at the hallway and the plant, then he gets up and sits down again. He lets out some air, and shrinks.
“Think, Marty. Who did you show this to?”
“Jerry.”
“Who’s Jerry?”
“He’s my main client team member. There’s Tina, who’s the main client, and she gave me a team—a couple of teams—and Jerry is the one I work with the most closely.”
“You sent this to him?”
“Yes.”
“Electronically?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“He wanted to—he… he asked to see it…”
“Is he an expert in this software?”
“Not really.”
“So again—Marty, help me here, what’s the point of sending an electronic copy to this guy? Because he asked to see it?”
Somehow your sending the document to Jerry seems like the lamest logic in the world, and you are ashamed. But it is vague shame, which you feel all the time anyway, like a permanently guilty man on the run from a crime so horrible you didn’t even commit it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m just having trouble understanding—it’s… you don’t have any idea what happened, do you? Do you?”
“No.”
He gets up and sits down again. You wonder if he has hemorrhoids in his anal cavity.
“Kelly van Dyne got a hold of this document—and she was very angry. She sent it all around her team last night and they had an emergency meeting to figure out what was going on. So they pretty much decided we were out to derail this Casanova thing however we could—and she elevated it. She called the VP, who called George Venarchik at home.” George Venarchik is the president the North American business. There are, as you have said, a few people in an organization with the power to say ‘You know, I don’t think we need these consultants anymore,’ and the consultants disappear. George is equivalent to two or three of these people.
“So I get a message from Venarchik this morning,” he continues, “asking me what the hell is going on.”
“My God.”
“Yeah. So I had to talk to him. I’m running around meeting with Kelly—I’m going over after to talk to her team—this is a train wreck, Marty, this is a very bad situation—do you get me?”
“My God.”
“Kelly van Dyne championed this software. She got Venarchik to go along with it. It’s a lot of the reason she got herself promoted. You didn’t know any of that?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ.”
He stops again and looks kind of sad. Angry people often have a melancholy timbre as their anger ebbs away; it can only be sustained in the young, and the very religious.
“Okay,” he says, standing up again. “I need to get out of here.”
“What can I do?” you ask hopelessly.
“Don’t send out any more documents.”
And he leaves the room.
Your nine pages assessing Casanova were not very laudatory. You pointed out that while Casanova was supposed to be able to reduce resources working on nonapproved projects, redeploy them to productive channels, assign people at the beginning of a project, and provide tools for continuity of effort, significant questions remained. For instance, would it be configured to provide the promised functionality, especially since it was to be only partially enabled? What kind of additional burden would the software place on team members in terms of data entry? You pointed out that the software was supposed to adjust resource loads at the first sign of trouble, reduce the number of reports generated, maintain links to process records, and cut down on performance variation—but it wasn’t clear, even to the people implementing the suite, how it would define “trouble” or whether the built-in templates were the right ones. Also, it would generate more reports, not less.
You quoted actual people in your assessment. “Casanova can’t do financial tracking and program budgeting.” “The reporting requirements look onerous.” “The templates as they are now are unusable.” “It doesn’t look much different from MS Project.” “Nobody knows what the ‘Big Picture’ looks like.”
In summary: “A persuasive ‘business case’ for Casanova does not yet exist.”
You are not productive that day. You don’t even call your wife, which is a sign you are taking this very hard.
Sometime in the afternoon you get a call from the guy in England, who has a sweet voice, really, but has some awfully bad news to deliver to you. There is something about the way he says “Hi there, Marty” that fills you with a liquid dread.
“Hello.”
After some words you don’t later remember he says, “Do you know they had a meeting about the Casanova situation today?”
“Who did?”
“The senior team. Jacobs was there. They got Tina on the phone and they hashed it out. Anyway, the point is—the outcome is—they’re going to have to roll you off the project.”
A thousand doves fly out of a very tall tower.
“Okay,” you say.
“They’re going to need you to go back to New York.”
“Okay.”
“They need you to do that tonight.”
“Oh.”
You look at the stuff on your desk. There is a lot of pulp, reams and reams of paper, mounds of documentation and white binders you have collected from the engineers.
“I’m sorry about this, Marty.”
“All right.”
You gather up your stuff and leave the building. You will never see Tina or Jerry again. They don’t call you or send an e-mail, and you have no idea what ultimately happened with Casanova or the [Client] Company and at this point you don’t truly care.
You don’t lose your job, but for some reason your hitherto rapid ascent seems to have slowed. There are people around you who say, for a time, it has stopped.
You write this book.
A couple months later you read in the Wall Street Journal buried deep in some story about the problems in the U.S. car business how Kelly van Dyne has left the parts company for personal reasons and there is a surprise appointment for VP, a woman.
Her name is, of course, Tina.
Epilogue—or, “Is Consulting for Me?”
One Year Later…
I lied—I’m back.
To sum up: I did not lose my job. In fact, my firm reserved a special punishment for me, one more horrible than any I could have imagined as I flew home in tears from the car parts debacle and started to update my résumé. My performance appraisal was launched and the particulars of my conduct in the Midwest thrown up for scrutiny; John Jacobs himself was contacted, spoken to at length. I don’t know what was said, but there was more than one occasion when—frustrated by the white-collar recession strangling New York, choking off my chances for escape—I actually (ashamed to say) picked up the phone to call Nosering and Cereal Boy to beg for my old job back.
But my wife stopped me. She tried to be cheerful: “At least,” she said, “we don’t have any kids.”
As I braced for the inevitable “counsel out” and budgeted myself for six months’ unemployment, something quite unexpected emerged from the appraisal room.
I was standing outside the door, behind which the partners were mulling me over, and I was waiting for the worst; John Jacobs appeared at the door, looking gloomy. He shook his head when he saw me, and then came up.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Okay.”
He lifted his right arm and—in a moment of blind panic—I thought he was going to bitch-slap me. But he delivered two soft pats onto my back, thumph thumph.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“For what?”
My wife and I celebrated my promotion to senior associate with a night out at Sizzler’s. My dog was very happy, but she was always happy. Some time later, the phone rang in my new window-free office on a Friday morning and the firm’s business school recruiting person said, “Marty, we need you for an event tonight.”
“I don’t do events.”
“That’s a problem—we need you to help out. It’s a panel at Columbia, just uptown. It’s called Is Consulting for Me?”
“I have a problem with events, Jennifer.”
“It’s on your development matrix. You have to do it or you’ll get a ding. You need to Build the Institution more. Come on…”
“I’m going to the ballet.”
“You’re going to Columbia.”
So I’m sitting in a large room at the top of the tallest buil
ding on the Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights, behind a long table decorated with three microphones, three water pitchers, and three empty notepads and pens. To my right is a partner from Chicago I have never seen before, who is wearing an overripe dark blue suit; to my left is a principal with a high-pitched voice and matching black luggage under his bloodshot eyes. All three of us could use a shave, and an amphetamine.
The room is thronged—packed—festooned with some two hundred eager young people in the business line, looking for work. The economy has turned around a bit, but not quite enough—not enough to wet the creeping dread within this room of future victims. Rumor is McKinsey has picked up its hiring for second-years, and Bain is adding Columbia to its target list. This is not good news for [my top-tier firm]. So recruiting Jennifer has scheduled a series of hard-sell sessions disguised as “forums”—sessions such as this one, tonight, called Is Consulting for Me?
The format is question-and-answer. The three of us represent status (partner), experience (principal), and the real world (me). In the prebrief Jennifer said, “The message is upbeat. The firm is expanding again.”
“What if they ask about the layoffs?” I mentioned.
“There weren’t any layoffs.”
“Yes there were. They were massive.”
“We had some bar raising in the regular appraisal process. That’s the word, okay?”
I looked at the partner, but he couldn’t meet my eyes.
The questions start with the usual softballs from the teacher’s pet types—question such as “What’s the most rewarding client you’ve worked for?” and “What’s the most satisfying thing about being a management consultant?”
The partner is obligated to answer such questions, which he does with practiced aplomb. “I’d have to say the time I was called in to a major turnaround situation in Canada…. ” “I think the satisfaction of seeing a client grow and deliver value because of some advice you’ve given….”
Whatever. I’m in the middle of scanning the crowd, wondering (not for the first time) why so few good-looking people go to business school, when a reddish youngster right up front points directly at me and says, “I have a question for Martin.”