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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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House of
Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time
by Martin Kihn |
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Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Sloppy Readers who enjoy the “Consultant
Debunking” column in Fast Company
will relish Martin Kihn’s new book, House of
Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time.
The title, of course, conveys the premise of the book. In what’s meant to be
a humorous style, Kihn describes what it’s like for
a young person to join a consulting firm and be thrust onto a client whose
business they don’t know, and working for an employer that speaks words full
of buzz, but not necessarily meaning. I wanted to like it a lot, but found
myself more frustrated by cleverness that went nowhere and distractions that became
annoying. One doesn’t fly to At
his best, Kihn is funny. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 6, “The Complete Consultant’s Dictionary,” pp.
93-98: Imagine you are listening. It gets worse—now, imagine you are listening to a consultant. She is dressed in the
McKinsey uniform of black outside, white inside, and she is standing on a
slightly raised dais in a cavernous hail with some company’s logo woven into
banners draped across walls in the darkness. An audience surrounds her; some
sit behind her at a long table the length of a darkened stage, populated by
clean water pitchers and august old men and women at rest. You are in a large
and hugely silent group of, say, three hundred people in stadium seats facing
her. She is pretty and for that and other reasons you find yourself
interested in what she has to say. Looking down at some notes
on the dais, she takes a sip of water from a glass and replaces it. Then she
begins to speak. She says this: Thank you for coming. Today I’d like to
socialize our sanity check and robustify the straw
man we set up to drive your strong-form learnings
going forward. As you know, when we ramped up the pod and began to iterate
on the so-what’s, we architected a baseline without boiling the ocean or
reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day—net net—our
key take-away was that the environmentals in this
space are target-rich, and with the right earnings we could chunk out a deck
that laid out the red light/green light to top-line growth. We knew this gap
analysis was far short of a grand unifying theory, but we liaised with the
stakeholders and put a chinning bar up. After a few revs, we got some
reasonable pushback that—while our hypotheses were sufficiently outside the
box—they were also sporty, and perhaps even off the reservation. Our worry
bead at that point was that we were populating a deliverable, but we were not
far enough along the curve—and may even, frankly, have been building a mag-a-logue that couldn’t pass the red-face test. Off the
record, it was largely PIOUTA and FHA. [long
pause for laughter] So we did a process
check—and a bio break or two [more laughter] —and we decided ourjourneyline was suboptimal. We got no sat from the
client team. A realization came that we were noodling
around in la-la mode while we were in reality being incentivized
to plug in our skillsets and knowledgeware
to drive step change. We were visioning the incrementals,
though we had been tasked to blue-sky rich change and drill down to the bogey
of really opening the kimono. Once we understood the
disconnect, we had a food fight with the summers on the farmer’s math [titters]
. . . and we did
what we had to. The stakeholders threw up on the process deck, and we were on
receive. We needed to vision this wasn’t the moral
equivalent of being the stuckee on a cactus job in
a pre-Excellence ecosystem. No—we needed to make a five-forty to keep
our cadence true north. [pause
for water and approbation] The pod remained convinced
there was a burning platform, but didn’t have the bandwidth to go into a
black factory and blow up the paradigms with a white paper. Ultimately, we
fell back on our core competency—we did a bounceback
into crunch mode, and reached for your internal capital to take on a brain
dump and data dump. With all the air cover we called in, the engagement
became a kind of deathmarch into la-la land. But we
didn’t want to end up as new alums. [she
chuckles, alone] Our journeyline
took on a lot more granularity. We got better visibility into the real
drivers of our exposure, and decided it was game over if we didn’t change the
optics. So we did that, and some client education. We knew this particular knowledgeware could have knock-on effects—and could even
hockeystick into an advance, or some after-work. It
was determined by the SAs to pro-act and risk the pain zone. They pinged
the practice area internal thought leaders and got some key parachutage into the critical path. After that, we were
able to avoid a showstopper by assembling a series of work streams to craft a
deliverable with a true end state vision. [she looks directly at the audience,
pausing for effect] What we need now is your
buy-in for the warm handoff and a warm fuzzy—not to mention the call up for afterwork! With a triumphant flip of
her mane—it’s a magnificent golden umber—she steps back to greet the applause. And it comes. . . slowly at first, then with more vigor
as the old men and women at the long table begin to bang their raw claws
together like carpet beaters and—yes!—it is a triumph.. . a speech for the ages. . . and you join them—how could you not?—as
the approval rolls over the crowd like a wave of despair.. The one question you would
have is: What did she say? You look at the program. It
says that her name is Meredith, she went to HBS and
works at McKinsey for the Rainmaker. She studied speechwriting with Barbara Minto in What do these people know
that you do not? For to you— to you, her speech was indecipherable. Words and
phrases held together, but only for a moment, and the moment’s gone. Much later, when a
sympathetic partner takes pity on you, you will learn that the only
difference between these enthusiastic speech lovers and yourself is a slim
pamphlet entitled The Complete Consultant’s Dictionary: Words &
Phrases You Need to Know to Talk Like a Top-Tier Management Consultant. The
pamphlet contains fewer than two hundred critical words and phrases and their
English translations—words and phrases all consultants know, and use to
distance themselves from the truth. Each profession has its jargon, of
course; it’s a mechanism for inclusion and, more important, exclusion.
Private languages are used by gangs, by married couples with their baby talk
and cooing, by pediatricians and bartenders and venture capitalists. “Ce sera notre problème,” says theorist Jacques Lacan,
“quand nous aborderons lafonction du transfert, de saisir comment le transfert peut nous conduire au coeur de la répétition. (You
don’t speak French and have no idea what this means.) Consultants are no
different. No, actually, they are—for their jargon must exclude without being
unapproachable. It must function along very slender dimensions, creating a
patina of authority and internal wisdom while also seeming quite clearly to
say something to the listener, the industrialist, who has his own
language of choice. If you’d had your
dictionary with you that day, you would have been able to translate
Meredith’s speech into English. It would have read something like this: Thank you for coming. Today
I’d like to tell you what we have been doing. When we got here, we believed
you were in a troubled industry and we could probably figure out some way to
help. But we showed you a few ideas, and you didn’t like them. [long pause for laughter] So we did some soul-searching and
decided to try again. [pause for water and approbation] We still felt like you were in trouble.
To cover our asses, we called in some additional partners, even though we
knew this probably meant more work for us. We also did some actual
research—we didn’t want to get fired. [she chuckles, alone] We figured out you weren’t
happy with the $1,500 team dinners, so we cut down and scheduled many
pointless meetings with you to make you like us. Also, we found someone in
our firm who knew something. After that, we put together a slide show we hope
you’ll like better. [she looks directly at
the audience, pausing for effect] What we need now is your
agreement that we can stay! You see—entirely clear.
Well-structured, even. Encore. I don’t know whether to classify House of
Lies as a memoir, a business book, a parody or humor, and since I laughed
especially at the language, as in the excerpt above, I can mildly recommend
this book to you. Without the humor, this would have been rated DNR (Do Not
Read). Steve Hopkins,
July 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/House
of Lies.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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