Travels with Mammon

As the ungentle conversion of every man, woman and child into management consultants continues apace, we are fortunate to have Martin Kihn's highly readable, mordantly funny HOUSE OF LIES: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time to remind us how deeply this enterprise has come to penetrate our souls. So deeply have these "core values" (to use an egregious elocution of the consultant class) been inscribed into our hearts that to believe in anything else is now made to seem utter madness, suspiciously perverse, to partake of a dangerous agnosticism.

If you've ever been in a meeting where data was "socialized," attended an "off-site" for "team-building," you will no doubt gasp with laughter at Kihn's well-turned tales of consulting engagements gone awry, of destructive and unexpected outcomes engendered by the very consulting culture itself. Beginning with Kihn's discovery that a star partner at his firm is a self-promoting fraud, and ending with his unexpected ascension to Senior Associate status in the wake of a botched assignment where he was neatly snaked by one of the factions within the client firm, Kihn takes us deep into the necrotic, nervous bowels of the American business elite.

One of the best sections is Kihn's summaries of the top three business books of all time. They are as follows: Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors." His one word summary: "Differentiation." His ten word summary: "Power of buyers and sellers, Entry barriers. Substitutes, Industry rationality." He does the same for "In Search of Excellence" ("Open," "Spartan settings, open doors, fewer walls, fewer offices, Less Layering), and Built to Last ("Goals," "Big hairy audacious goals, childlike cultures, more demanding home-grown management).

Devastatingly funny too is Kihn's admission of the two fallback positions to use in a desperate client situation, what Kihn calls "Consultant's Panic Buttons: 1) Flatter the clients, and 2) Ask for their opinions. Then there's his dictionary of consulting terminology, "The Complete Consultant's Dictionary" which features such putrid locutions and constructions as "pushback," "skillset," "knowledgeware," "visioning," "work streams," "step change," "incrementals," "environmentals" and "journeyline."

Kihn's keen eye for outbreaks of humanity into inhuman corporate spaces, his awareness of the rapacity and amorality of a system designed to increase shareholder value at the expense of every other value, as an essentially feudal structure designed to benefit the investor class at the expense at every other class, and his descriptions of how consultants and their clients seek to reduce all human endeavor into the cold analytical siftings and sortings of multivariate models, is certainly a welcome counter to all the triumphalist business-as-salvation nonsense that is now shouted from the rooftops without respite at a staggering and struggling public.

For someone as insightful and apparently decent as Kihn it's a bit disheartening that, according to his bio, he writes for Fast Company, that egregious relic of the bubble economy, a column called the "Consultant Debunking Unit." Kihn is smart enough to know that it's not just consultants who need debunking (although they are a choice and appropriate target) but the entire neo-liberal corporate business ideology, an ideology which has swallowed our entire society and is salivating for and slouching after the rest of the world.

In such an environment it may not necessarily seem to be a coincidence that consultants use the term "black factory" to describe a "place where consultants go when they're doing an open-ended study that no one will ever read," and the CIA refers to secret torture facilities in the former Soviet Union as "black sites." It's also hard to believe that it is only a coincidence that our Vice President is the former principal of a firm which has been making money hand over fist since the open-ended declaration of the "war on terror." . Or that this President, who is the scion of a family with deep roots in oil, the stock market, the foreign intelligence and munitions businesses proactively started a war against a nation afloat on a sea of oil, is untroubled by torture, by "black sites," and the wholesale slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians.

Certainly, however, it is easy to believe, and Kihn shows, that management consultants have become tools of their tools, and like McNamara and the other Whiz Kids in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that they are more than willing to sacrifice the moral scruples they might have encountered in the occasional business ethics class on the latest Taylorite altar. That's funny as far as it goes.

And it may even be funny that management consultants abase themselves to the gods Downsize and Rightsize, Outsource and Offshore, and kneel slavishly before the latest, most fashionable most anti-human algorithm. We can certainly laugh and feel superior to these mendacious instrumentalists who work for firms that piously espouse such "core values" as integrity, honesty, quality, and even fun. But the fun stops when the ultimate client, Mammon, insists in the name of "client service" on our anxious and abject obedience.

Like most people born without trust funds – a great moral failing of most Americans in this country run by billionaire trust fund babies – Kihn has had to choose one of the two vexed "journeylines" provided by late capitalism: management consulting to the military industrial infotainment energy defense complex, or clerking for same. HOUSE OF LIES does reveal some of the dark practices of this roving packs of priests of the Dollar Almighty, and does succeed in letting some of the air out of the pernicious puffery the business class subjects us to in our every waking hour. For that, in these days of business triumphant, though we might want a more thoroughgoing critique, we must be grateful for every satiric sally, every well-aimed dart, every unmasking and demystification of the malign methods of the corporatocracy.