House of Lies Read online

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  for Julia

  When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”

  —DIOGENES LAERTIUS, Thales

  Management Consultants: They waste time, cost money, demoralize and distract your best people, and don’t solve problems. They are people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is and then walk off with it.

  —ROBERT TOWNSEND, Up the Organization

  Author’s Note

  House of Lies is not a lie. I only wish that it were. Management consulting is a notoriously secretive industry, for reasons both good (protecting clients) and bad (avoiding blame)—and it is not without its vindictive revenge monkeys. So I have changed every name, disguised every client, and guarded sensitive information. That said, all of the people, companies, and horrors recounted in these pages are real and have been re-created to the best of my ability.

  —M. K.

  Prologue

  My Story: Your Story: Her Story: History

  I will not use that pronoun again. If you have ever been in group therapy, you will know why. “Own the feeling,” they say, and “Don’t say you.” Using you is a way to distance oneself from the first person—from oneself, in fact. After you have spent two years and more in consulting, that is exactly what you want to do.

  So here you are, avoiding the truth. Every word that follows is the truth, by the way, though in the manner of good truth it will seem preposterous. You hope it seems preposterous, since that is much more entertaining than the alternative.

  Now, let us start with a little story. This is not a Liar’s Poker for consulting; this is a little story about consulting. Think of it like that.

  Here is the story: It starts in a meeting.

  “One hundred thousand… one hundred ten…”

  You are sitting across a table from two of the more powerful people—for the moment—in nonnetwork television.1 You know they are two of the more powerful people—for the moment—in nonnetwork television because, well, because they told you that they were. Plus, you have worked for them for more than two years now and have become used to that phenomenon known as the show-business ego. In truth, you have developed a bit of one yourself.

  Which brings you to this conversation.

  “One hundred fifteen… eighteen…”

  You are sitting at Twenty-ninth Street and Broadway in Manhattan, close enough to Madison Square Garden to be afraid of it. Nine floors down, past the bubbling piranha-filled fish tank, the Internet porn empire on the eighth floor complete with working first-aid station, the sad-looking family watchmaking company with its superannuated helpmeets, the absent-present doorman and his wrestling magazines—nine floors down is a store with a block-letter sign saying: NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. DEALERS ONLY. This store sells the world’s cheapest tuxedo shirts and gaudy pimp costumes and socks and underwear. You are not a dealer. You shop there all the time.

  One of the two more powerful people on Twenty-ninth Street looks up from his calculator. (He has been tapping for a while now.)

  “One hundred nineteen… one-twenty…”

  This is your boss, the man who hired you. He was two years behind you at Yale, yet he is much more famous, powerful, and outgoing than you. Let’s call him Nosering. His success does not really bother you, however, because he is a cable addict and a mess and has been fired from every job he has ever had. He has a kind of nasty habit of hitting on female superiors and then getting sued for harassment. And anyway, you really like him.

  Next to him is his partner, Cereal Boy, so named because he appeared on a box of cereal as a kid (great smile, golden curls) and still looks as he did then.

  Nosering looks up from his frantic calculations, gives a freighted nod to CB, then says, “We can offer you one-twenty… one-thirty… if you stay.”

  What he appears to be saying—$125,000, on average, per year, plus the same benefits—would double your current salary as head writer on the program Nosering dreamed up two years ago in a methadone stupor: the program you and your staff of four have written since the beginning: the program that more than tripled the (admittedly pathetic) ratings of its predecessor and was called “beguiling” by the New York Times, “addictive” by the New York Post, and “snarky” by the New Yorker. It got you personally onto the Today show, which your mother watches, and she has treated you differently ever since.

  You have no intention of staying. “What would that—what would I have to do?” you ask.

  “Just what you’re doing now—”

  “And,” adds Cereal Boy in his disconcertingly boyish voice, “you’d have to help out with Pop Quiz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pop Quiz,” says Nosering, “is a show; this pilot we did, just got picked up by VH1. We have a one-season commitment from them.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Starting last week.”

  “Do you have a staff? Have you hired anybody?”

  “We’re trying to hire you.”

  You are no math genius, but you’ve always been facile with numbers. So you calculate… one season, which is thirteen episodes, 22 minutes each, say 260 or so minutes of original material in maybe three months… something isn’t working here…

  “How big is the budget? For writers?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” says Cereal, who actually never seemed to like or appreciate you. (He went to Colgate.)

  “What I’m saying is—would I have to do this show alone?”

  “Uh, yeah. But you can do it.”

  “What’s the concept?”

  This is where Nosering really excels: the pitch. He jumps forward, feeling you slip away, knowing, in fact, you have already slipped. You slipped six months ago when you asked him to write you a recommendation for business school; you slipped when he did it. He lays out the concept with an enthusiasm for the truly mediocre that fills you with a kind of awe. His continuous torrent of hideous, unthinkable ideas—a show where nuns are hooked up to lie detector machines and asked if they’re attracted to pro wrestlers, a show where a real small town is filled with hidden cameras and a fake gang of terrorists pretends to take it over—is either pure genius or, perhaps, something else.

  Nosering’s pitch doesn’t really make any sense: None of them do. His point is that, somehow, it will be easier to write Pop Quiz than it is to write your current show (which you will continue running, by the way). You know something he doesn’t. You know that he thinks Pop Quiz will be easier to write than your current show not because it will be easier to write than your current show, but because Nosering is like all powerful people in this industry in having very little firsthand knowledge of, and almost no respect for, writing.

  You wait a moment, looking at the walls covered with eight-by-tens of pop culture icons from the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. T. Angie Dickinson. Flock of Seagulls. The Fix. Tattoo. Ed Asner. Pamela Sue Martin. They were not hung in irony. This is the late 1990s, and irony has been dead since 1991.2

  Without irony, you say, “What you’re asking is impossible.”

  “One hundred thirty, Marty,” says Nosering, already saying good-bye. “What else do you need?”

  “If this were ten years ago, it’d be different. But now I’m”—here you state your age. “I want to go to business school.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m interested in business.”

  “You can do business here. We do a lot of business. You can help Bob with the books.”

  “I don’t want to be an accountant.”

  “Do you even know,” asks Cereal with some belligerence, “what you want to do?”

 
; You’ve thought of this, of course. You are getting way too old to be working for guys like this. You don’t take drugs, are married, live in Queens. You are tired of being broke, of working with kids who want to go to L.A. and think your show is stupid and beneath them, kids with no discernible talent whatsoever whose every single word has to be rewritten late, late at night and yet who somehow from the depths of their pot-fueled pea brains find a method to look down upon you.

  You say, “I want to be a management consultant.”

  Cereal looks like you stole his favorite bowl.

  Nosering just exhales and stands.

  “What the hell,” he asks, “is that?”

  Part I

  Top-Tier Management Consulting for Absolute Blithering Idiots

  Part I opens the kimono with a hairy entrée into the global megaverse of top-tier management consulting, with these observations:

  1. A bloodcurdling litany of betrayal and alcoholism

  2. Behind-the-scenes truth about a very powerful, very short man

  3. A lighthearted look at global consulting behemoth McKinsey and its resemblance to a certain Renaissance warmonger

  4. Why your child will never go to Harvard Business School

  5. A consulting hymnal and songbook3

  The Rainmaker & the Perfect Storm

  No storm is perfect, of course—but the Rainmaker tries to brew one. He leaves in his wake such a tsunami of chaos and pillage that the total bill, in dollars and careers, will still be soughing through the eternal adding machine for years and years to come. The Rainmaker tears the heart out of your firm and crushes and pulverizes its testicles at a time when it has left itself for dead. But the wicked always make their way when business is gang-raping the good; this is how they prosper.

  Here is the story of a nasty little man and how he rips the soul from his department, pulls its lungs out at the roots, and leaves behind a legacy of victims so vast it is as though a minijunta storms the halls and opens its grab bag of tricks—people with lives to lead… people with children, for God’s sake, with babies… are tossed into the street—your mentor is tossed into the street—your mentor’s mentor is hurled onto a rotting pile of ex-consultants…

  But let’s not exaggerate. Let’s stick to the truth.

  This is the story of the Rainmaker and how he almost—but not quite—destroys your firm.

  You took a personality inventory in the tenth grade and it turned out the career you are most suited for is maître d’.

  So it is always with some envy that you follow the maître d’ at an exceedingly lavish restaurant—such as this one, in the Roosevelt Hotel on Fifty-fourth Street near Madison Avenue—to your table, where the Rainmaker sits in a small booth at the back with a nervous-looking man with a tan. The tanned man stands immediately to make way for you. It’s all a bit confusing.

  “Marty,” says the Rainmaker, not rising. “This is”—he says his name, which you forget before he’s finished—“he used to work at the firm.” He’s an older man, so he must be toiling as they say “in industry.”4

  There is some shuffling as you negotiate one another and the greetings and the seats. Then you settle and the perfect service descends with an exquisite cup of coffee. The Rainmaker’s coffee cup is turned upside down.

  “None for you, sir?”

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  He is famous for this: not drinking coffee.

  “So”—he turns to you—“I’ve been hearing good things about you. Very good. How are you liking it here? Oh, excuse me a second—Tina!—”

  Suddenly, he’s gone from the booth and projectiled across the precious ivory Aubusson to a slightly frightened-looking woman who just walked in. They shake hands, briefly, nodding—is it Tina Brown?

  Now, the Rainmaker is an important man and, like most important men in New York City, quite short. You tower over him, and you have never been accused of gigantism. He has absolutely no hair and always smiles and dresses impeccably in Thomas Pink shirts and the subtlest of suspenders, but, because of a certain schlubbiness of build, despite fastidious behaviors and careful courtesy, he always seems a bit rumpled up. He looks up at people but he doesn’t look up—rather, in… deep in… like the world’s most oily general practitioner with the vaguest sense of space. Squinting and smiling, underwhelming at first, and at second and third, but so so powerful you cannot imagine how he got that way—but there he is: a powerful, powerful man with a heart like a cuff link.

  You liked him immediately. He is the reason that you joined the firm. It is he who is King of All Media (Consulting Division), the best-known media consultant in the world and perhaps—not perhaps, definitely—the best-known consultant consultant in the city of New York. No consultant is truly famous, of course, but the Rainmaker tries… oh, how he tries.

  He was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, of all places; he was profiled in GQ. He is quoted all the time, and he wrote a book. There you were, working at your cable TV show, so miserable you couldn’t sleep at night, and you picked up a book on the New Releases table at the Sixteenth Street bookstore and read the inside jacket copy:

  [The Rainmaker] is the leading consultant to the world’s top media and entertainment companies. He is the founder and senior partner of the Media and Entertainment Group at [your top-tier firm], the largest and most influential consulting practice for these industries. His team of more than two hundred consultants are based in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Munich, Shanghai, and São Paulo. A graduate of Yale University, [he] lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Oh, to be one of those two hundred consultants! To travel to Shanghai and scurry around doing—well, you weren’t quite sure what, exactly, but how hard could it be? It’s media and entertainment, industries erected upon a pile of steaming crap. It seemed a dream come true, but did you have what it took, did you really have it?

  It turned out, yes, you did.

  It also turned out, no, the jacket copy wasn’t purely accurate. In the old British parlance, it was a tissue of lies. Seventy-five words—how many of them the truth? When you first read them, you were not in a position to know. Now, you are. Let’s take another look:

  “[The Rainmaker] is the leading consultant(a) to the world’s top media and entertainment companies(b). He is the founder(c) and senior partner of the Media and Entertainment Group(d) at [your top-tier firm], the largest and most influential consulting practice for these industries(e). His team(f) of more than two hundred consultants(g) are based in New York, Los Angeles(h), London, Paris, Tokyo, Munich, Shanghai(i), and São Paulo(j). A graduate of Yale University(k), [he] lives in Greenwich, Connecticut(l).”

  a. Probably true.

  b. Of the six major global media companies, he had been hired by only two.

  c. There was another cofounder, who was forced out of the firm under mysterious circumstances a few years earlier.

  d. There was no Media and Entertainment Group—the division was called Communications, Media & Technology (CMT), and Communications (mostly Telecom clients) was the largest category.

  e. Probably true, if you don’t count financial consultants (e.g., Allen & Co.) and technology consultants (e.g., Accenture).

  f. The other twenty-five global partners in the division would not appreciate his taking ownership of their entire staff.

  g. The biggest whopper of the bunch—at its peak, in late 1999, his retinue comprised three partners, three principals, four senior associates, about eight associates, and three consultants. Since senior associates, associates, and consultants were in the “general pool” and weren’t allowed to align to any one practice, he shouldn’t really count them. And since all partners are part owners of the firm, they don’t work for anyone, no matter how short. So instead of two hundred, there were more like three people working directly for him.

  h. A tiny office dedicated almost entirely to aerospace, not media.

  i. Office closed before the book came out.

>   j. He didn’t speak Spanish, much less Portuguese; this office, a strong one, was self-directed.

  k. Unlike every one of his colleagues, the Rainmaker does not have an MBA; his degree from Yale is a BA.

  l. True.

  The results can be summarized as follows:

  Number of words: 75

  Number of statements of fact: 18

  Percent that are probably true: 28

  Percent that are partially true: 11

  Percent that are false: 61

  This is not encouraging.

  There is more, however, a bigger lie than any of the above. It turns out that the book that bears his name and his alone, the one with the dubious jacket copy—well, he didn’t even write it. You know this because you met the guy who did. A popular twenty-eight-year-old Latin American fast riser, he was known around the firm as a total media junkie and introduced to one and all as “the guy who actually wrote” the Rainmaker’s book. This was not a secret at all. And why should it be? The Rainmaker, after all, should spend his time doing what he does best: making Rain. Chores like banging on a keypad, looking up old articles, researching, writing, and consulting—those were for, as Leona Helmsley used to say, “the little people.”

  You bought the book, that day on Sixteenth Street. You read it on the train to Queens, where you had been exiled by the necrotic gentrification of the entire island of Manhattan, which daily seemed to become more and more a theme park where the theme was no and the price of entry was a sweet trust fund. You read the book and wondered how a book so simply written could be sold in the grown-ups’ section; it seemed to be for curious fourteen-year-olds. But you were to be forgiven. After all, it was your first business book.

  Since it changed your life, this book “written by” the Rainmaker, you dwelled on it far longer than it warranted. You wrote a little summary, for future reference. You never know, you thought, someday you might actually have, say, breakfast, with the Rainmaker… at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown, say… and is that Tina Brown? No… no, after all, it isn’t Tina, but a larger woman with a remarkably similar honker.