Chapter 4
The Consulting Toolkit: Speaking Authoritatively About Nothing
The myth that consultants are hired for their expertise is demonstrably false. They're actually hired for rapid fact-finding and convincing presentation skills, not deep knowledge. The ability to appear expert-like is essential to survival in the industry.
Consider a disastrous meeting with senior liquor industry executives, where a consultant is completely unprepared but discovers two essential "Consultant's Panic Buttons": flattering clients and asking for their opinions. These tactics save the day when both buttons are pressed, causing the clients to argue among themselves-the consultant's dream scenario where "you can check out and look concerned."
Another incident reveals how consultants operate without information: during an emergency call with a client named Jason, two consultants have no idea who he is or what they're supposed to discuss. They survive by asking for his feedback instead.
This skill-speaking authoritatively about topics you know nothing about-is complemented by mastery of consultant lingo. The "Complete Consultant's Dictionary" contains fewer than two hundred critical words and phrases that consultants use to distance themselves from truth. This private language functions along slender dimensions, creating an aura of authority while seeming to say something meaningful to clients.
Key entries include "bandwidth" (partner attention), "boil the ocean" (do too much), "deck" (PowerPoint presentation), "deliverable" (what you're paid to provide), "drill down" (look closer), "face time" (being seen), "going forward" (in the future), "leverage" (use), "low-hanging fruit" (easy wins), "offline" (later), "pushback" (resistance), "robust" (good), "socialize" (float an idea), and "value proposition" (why anyone should care).
The most telling entry might be "we"-defined as "them, the client." Consultants habitually use "we" when referring to client organizations, creating a linguistic fiction of teamwork and belonging that masks their outsider status.
Chapter 5
The Feedback Charade: Corporate Mind Games
Consulting firms operate on a foundation of contradiction - preaching management best practices to clients while systematically violating these same principles internally. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in their elaborate feedback systems, which have evolved into complex theatrical productions designed to provide corporate cover for personnel decisions that are fundamentally arbitrary.
The epitome of this performance is Feedback Camp, a mandatory pilgrimage to a secluded facility in the New Jersey woods where consultants gather to master the art of critique. The process begins weeks before arrival, with participants completing extensive online questionnaires - rating themselves across dozens of metrics while colleagues do the same. These assessments cover everything from technical capabilities to interpersonal skills, creating a data-heavy veneer of objectivity.
The camp itself is led by a Mormon moderator whose relentlessly positive demeanor masks the underlying tension. His mantra of "hear it and act on it" becomes a repeated chorus, even as participants privately acknowledge the futility of the exercise. The forced enthusiasm creates an almost cult-like atmosphere where skepticism is viewed as resistance to personal growth.
The consulting industry's fixation on "teamwork" reveals itself as particularly hollow during these sessions. Consultants are trained to seamlessly integrate with client teams, adopting their language and concerns - "we need to improve efficiency" rather than "you need to improve efficiency." Yet this linguistic sleight-of-hand masks the reality that most valuable consulting work happens in isolation, with individual analysts crunching numbers and crafting presentations.
The "Listening Styles Inventory" administered at camp provides telling insights into the consultant mindset. Participants consistently score exceptionally high (9/10) on analytical listening - the ability to process information critically - while scoring dismally low (3/10) on empathetic listening. Rather than address this imbalance, the facilitators simply note it as an occupational characteristic.
The absurdity peaks during team-building exercises that would seem juvenile in a summer camp context. Consultants in business casual attire navigate contrived challenges like the "Acid River" crossing and the "Web of Pain" - metaphorical obstacles created by other consultants specifically hired to train consultants. The forced metaphors and manufactured camaraderie produce painful moments of artificial bonding.
The aftermath reveals the true purpose of this elaborate feedback apparatus. Four weeks after camp, a consultant who openly questioned the value of these exercises finds herself terminated. Her official feedback cites a "failure to listen effectively" - a subjective criticism impossible to dispute. The much-touted "360 Degree" feedback system, where employees nominate their own reviewers, creates an illusion of fairness while facilitating predetermined outcomes.
This entire mechanism exemplifies how consulting firms employ complex processes to obscure simple truths. Behind the sophisticated terminology and rigorous-seeming frameworks lies an uncomfortable reality: employment decisions often reflect office politics and personal relationships rather than objective performance metrics. The feedback system serves primarily to provide documentary support for decisions already made through less transparent channels.
Chapter 6
The Consulting Lifestyle: Hotels, Points, and Misery
The consulting lifestyle is defined by constant travel, hotel living, and the peculiar status economy of loyalty programs. Consultants gather in hotel lobbies around 7:45 AM to carpool to client sites, with driving arrangements signaling hierarchy-associates drive while partners are chauffeured. Hotel life involves "torpor management strategies," as consultants struggle with exhaustion. Common mistakes include relying on digital alarm clocks, turning on heating units, closing window shades, not calling spouses, skipping oral hygiene, and ordering in-room movies only to fall asleep minutes later.
Loyalty programs-frequent flier points, elite clubs, automatic upgrades-dominate conversation among consultants worldwide. During recruitment, firms highlight that consultants "get to keep your points," presenting it as compensation for constant travel and a way to enjoy "free vacations in exotic lands" that might even "repair your marriage."
The reality is far less glamorous. One associate spent countless extra hours flying indirect routes just to earn top airline status, only to receive an itchy, unwearable airline-logo bathrobe as his reward. The Hertz loyalty program proves equally disappointing-after renting a Taurus four days weekly for twenty-eight continuous weeks (and paying an annual membership fee), you earn just one free weekly rental. When attempting to redeem points, the process becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy and confusion.
Team dinners reveal the rigid hierarchy of consulting life. Everyone keeps their coats on-a tactic for escaping early. The wine list is pathetically printed on the back of the regular menu, and the waitress is disinterested. The highest-ranking partner dominates the conversation as protocol demands. The rigid airtime allocation at team dinners is precise: partners command 75-78% of all conversation, principals get about 20%, while associates are limited to agreeing or laughing.
Despite consultancies claiming to be non-bureaucratic, team dinners reveal a "rigid, pitiless system of caste unseen outside Delhi since 1951." The only topic guaranteed to animate exhausted consultants is hotel points-the currency of their nomadic existence.
Chapter 7
The Client Relationship: Secrecy, Expense, and Distrust
Consultants operate under strict confidentiality rules established after World War II. They're forbidden from revealing client names to anyone-not spouses, parents, friends, or even religious confessors. The rules permit telling only the general industry and nearest large city to one's spouse. Client confidentiality extends to never discussing client problems in public spaces like planes, restaurants, elevators, gyms, or crowded trains.
This secrecy creates friction with clients, as demonstrated in a meeting with Barbara, a hostile client executive who dislikes consultants. When she directly asks about previous clients, a consultant refuses to name them, citing confidentiality. Barbara suggests consultants maintain this secrecy not for client protection but because "you're making it up"-it's easier to seem impressive without providing specifics.
This tradition of secrecy permeates the industry-Bain consultants historically had no business cards, McKinsey refers to consultants by first name and initial only, and BCG never publicly acknowledges clients. This secrecy parallels fabrications in magazine writing, suggesting that business literature often contains unverifiable "case studies" with unnamed clients that position the author as influential but can't be fact-checked.
The standard 20% added to professional fees for travel and expenses can be substantial-around $2,000 weekly for associates and $5,000 for partners. These expenses irritate clients more than the actual fees, as they perceive consultants living lavishly at their expense. To defuse this tension, consultants should never "flaunt" their expenses: avoid mentioning hotel names, call car services "cabs," never reference "team dinners" or "business class," and certainly never use a Ritz-Carlton pen in the client cafeteria.
Consultants typically work intensely for three and a half days before departing client sites on Thursday afternoons. The ritual of leaving-packing up equipment, saying goodbyes-provides a momentary liberation from the grinding routine of client service.
Chapter 8
The Business Book Racket: Recycled Ideas in Fourth-Grade Prose
Business books have become a cornerstone of the consulting industry, yet they largely represent "bloated compendiums of half-baked ideas committed in fourth grade prose" designed primarily to launch and sustain lucrative consulting careers through sophisticated-sounding jargon. This phenomenon gained significant momentum with Michael Porter's landmark 1980 book Competitive Strategy, which effectively legitimized academic consulting by wrapping it in Harvard Business School's prestigious credentials. Porter's fundamental framework identifies companies as fitting into one of two viable strategic positions: low-cost providers or differentiated premium providers. According to this model, organizations finding themselves "stuck in the middle" are essentially doomed without expensive consultant intervention to help them either aggressively cut costs or enhance their differentiation.
Porter's "five forces" model - which became the foundation for countless strategic analyses - purports to explain industry attractiveness and company performance through five key factors: barriers to entry, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and industry rivalry (rationality). While this framework appears comprehensive on paper, the ironic reality is that few consultants actually employ these forces in their day-to-day client work. Nevertheless, consultants must demonstrate fluency with Porter's concepts to maintain their intellectual credibility in boardrooms and client meetings.
A careful examination of three consulting classics - In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman), Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy), and Built to Last (Collins and Porras) - reveals how these supposedly groundbreaking works merely repackage the same seven fundamental business concepts with different terminology over decades. Excellence and Built to Last follow nearly identical formulas - both present studies of successful companies published during economic upswings, identifying similar characteristics but using different labels. Meanwhile, Reengineering took a more dramatic approach by suggesting corporate revolution during the early 1990s downturn, though its core messages about efficiency and process improvement were hardly novel.
This pattern of recycling ideas continues unabated with each new generation of business books. Authors transform remarkably simple concepts - like "good companies have good leadership" or "successful organizations focus on their customers" - into consulting careers through increasingly hollow jargon and pseudoscientific frameworks. Books with titles like Blue Ocean Strategy, Good to Great, and Execution package familiar wisdom in fresh terminology while claiming revolutionary insights. The industry's literature functions primarily as sophisticated marketing material rather than genuine intellectual contribution, perpetuating the cycle of consulting influence while adding little substantive knowledge to the field.
The success of these books relies heavily on timing and presentation rather than content. They typically emerge during specific economic cycles - optimistic books during booms, transformation-focused texts during downturns - and gain traction by telling executives what they want to hear while providing consultants with new buzzwords to justify their fees. This self-reinforcing ecosystem has created a multibillion-dollar industry built largely on repackaging common sense in increasingly complex terminology.
Chapter 9
The Consulting Reality: A Case Study in Corporate Politics
A case study about consulting at a Midwest auto parts manufacturer reveals how consultants often become unwitting pawns in corporate politics. The consultant meets Tina, a former mechanical engineer positioned just below VP level in a company with no female VPs. Tina has become known for solving major problems and is competing for advancement against marketing executive Bill and rising IT star Kelly van Dyne.
The consultant is assigned to assess "Casanova" software for Tina. During this assignment, he meets Jerry, an unassuming but crucial character who becomes his unofficial guide. Jerry introduces himself as "a guy you probably need to know" and reveals his expertise in product development processes. When the consultant mentions his Casanova assignment, Jerry becomes visibly concerned, cryptically warning him to show any Casanova-related work to him before giving it to Tina.
In week three, Tina unexpectedly takes the consultant to meet Kelly van Dyne, the rising IT star previously mentioned as Tina's potential competition. Kelly bluntly asks if they're "just fact-finding or out to kill the project" and expresses concern about consultants gathering potentially misinformed opinions from engineers.
The consultant's Casanova assessment disaster unfolds when his critical report, which he had shared electronically with Jerry, somehow reaches Kelly van Dyne-who championed the Casanova software and secured her promotion through it. Kelly circulates the document to her team, triggering an emergency meeting and escalation to the company president. The consultant is promptly removed from the project and sent back to New York that night.
Months later, the consultant reads that Kelly van Dyne has left the company "for personal reasons" and Tina has surprisingly been appointed VP. This reveals how consultants often serve as tools in corporate power struggles rather than objective advisors, with their work manipulated to achieve predetermined political outcomes.
Chapter 10
The Consulting Paradox: Knowing Better While Doing Worse
One year after his career-threatening mistake, the consultant receives an unexpected promotion to senior associate - a development that highlights the industry's peculiar relationship with failure and success. He finds himself representing his firm at a Columbia Business School recruiting event called "Is Consulting for Me?" The setting is emblematic: bright-eyed MBA students eagerly seeking wisdom about their future careers, while seasoned consultants navigate between candor and company messaging. When students ask pointed questions about differences between firms and whether he enjoys consulting, he delivers the standard corporate lines about "great exposure to business realities" and "smart colleagues" - all while privately amazed at how naturally these platitudes now flow from him, "almost like the truth."
This transformation from skeptic to spokesperson reveals a deeper pattern in consulting. New associates often enter with idealistic notions of driving meaningful change, only to gradually adopt the industry's conventional wisdom and rhetorical style. The process happens so subtly that many don't notice their own metamorphosis until they find themselves confidently asserting things they once questioned. The industry's language - with its emphasis on "value creation," "strategic alignment," and "operational excellence" - becomes second nature, even as its actual meaning grows increasingly abstract.
The consulting paradox manifests in multiple layers. At the individual level, consultants simultaneously maintain two conflicting mindsets: they privately acknowledge the limitations and occasional absurdities of their work while publicly defending and promoting it. They recognize the artificial nature of many consulting frameworks, the frequently recycled solutions, and the inherent conflicts of interest - yet continue participating in and perpetuating these very practices.
This cognitive dissonance is sustained through various mechanisms. Financial rewards play a crucial role, with rapid salary progression and bonus structures creating golden handcuffs. Status and prestige serve as powerful motivators, as consulting positions offer access to executive circles and the cachet of working with premier firms. Professional networks and career opportunities provide practical incentives to maintain the status quo. Even those who initially plan to stay only briefly often find themselves extending their tenure, drawn in by the combination of these benefits.
The paradox extends beyond individual behavior to shape the entire industry's character. Consulting firms position themselves as agents of transformation while often resisting internal change. They advocate for operational efficiency while maintaining elaborate hierarchies and time-intensive processes. They promise to deliver clarity and insight while frequently obscuring simple truths behind complex frameworks and proprietary methodologies.
Perhaps most tellingly, the industry thrives not because it consistently delivers measurable value, but because it serves essential functions in modern business culture. For consultants, it provides status, learning opportunities, and career advancement. For clients, it offers political cover for difficult decisions, external validation for predetermined courses of action, and a way to navigate organizational politics. This symbiotic relationship ensures the industry's continued growth despite - or perhaps because of - its inherent contradictions.
The consulting masquerade persists as a self-reinforcing cycle, where even those who see through it eventually become its defenders and promoters. This perpetuation represents perhaps the industry's most remarkable achievement: its ability to not just survive but flourish while maintaining these fundamental contradictions at its core.
