The View From My Recession

Q: What’s the difference between a consultant and a succubus?

A: The succubus doesn’t charge by the hour.

Disclaimer: I know many fine, capable consultants and freelancers who are of inestimable value to their clients. I myself have occasionally been such a one. This is not pointed at them.

Now, having gotten that out of the way, I must say that I could not help smiling a grim little smile when I read this by Romenesko:

Now we know where NPR's "burger money" went

The hed on a 2006 Alex Beam column asked, "Where did NPR's burger money go?"; it was, of course, referring to Joan Kroc's $200 million gift. Former NPR arts editor Bill Wyman helps answer the question:

I worked for a nonprofit media company that was in a tough financial spot. An angel swept in and made all the troubles go away. That afternoon, the top newsman at the company got up to address us. "This doesn't mean you're all going to get Blackberry's," he said.

Instead, we hired consultants to tell us what to do with our windfall, and we managers spent with them many hours -- many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour -- we could have better spent doing journalism.
…

Months later, the consultants gave us our results at a company meeting. Suggestion number one: The staff should get Blackberry's. That's a true story.
…

The reason for my smile?

The first time I observed consultants fucking a company into the ground at close quarters was at an IT shop, years ago, just as I was trying to get my First Career off the ground.

It took them about eight months to metastasize from a desk in the corner to running the joint, which they accomplished by cutting a deal with a clique of the most incompetent managers I have ever met: the consultants would write a glowing report of those managers' brilliance and importance to the company, and recommend their promotion. In return, these newly-minted executives would let the consultants (White Evangelicals Good Ol’ Boys from Texas) effectively loot the place.

And even though they crippled my budding IT career, gelded the survivors and eventually destroyed the company, I could appreciate the morbid humor in the fact that their final report came with a perky "Dilbert" cartoon on the cover

(which I could not find online) about consultants who make money advising the Pointy-Haired Boss that his company is in trouble because he has too many consultants.


I had landed a tough but rewarding training gig and begun my Second Career when consultants ruined my life for a second time.

This batch was, oddly enough, also a pack of White, Evangelical testosterone-drunk faux-cowboys from Texas.

They began their reign by firing most of the women and minorities, and announcing to the rest of us that we were all lazy, godless scum who would now be offered the "opportunity" to work twice as hard for about half of what we were then being paid. (I seem to remember that the initial "Fuck you Yankee heathens, we have you now!" meeting ended with semi-compulsory prayer, but I might be wrong about that.) I believe they were eventually sued from ten different directions, but not before they made life so fucking miserable that virtually everyone with any talent was either fired or driven out of the company into unemployment.

There were other examples from my own past and from the experiences of friends and family -- all drearily similar, plus-or-minus any specifics of gender or faith -- from which I learned Many Important Lessons about life in the Real World of work.

I learned that a depressingly large number of organizations are run by vain and mind-blow-ing-ly stupid, incompetent people. You know these people. They are, as Unca Harlan so eloquently put it here, "...the guy on your job who has ascended to his position by Heaven knows what arcane ritual, but all he does all day long is fuck up your job."

I learned that with enough barrels of raw, ass-flavored flattery, consultants can con stupid people into believing the most Craptacularly Ridiculous management fads imaginable.

I learned that the irresistible impulse on the part of low-wattage management to bring consultants into their dysfunctional organizations stems from exactly the same witchbag of ignorance, superstition and magical-thinking that once led primitive physicians to apply leeches to the bodies of the sick.

And I learned that once that dynamic is locked into place, being smart becomes a fatal liability, and whoever bows the lowest to the New Absurd Religion shall rise the highest.

Time passed. I found a new job -- my Sixth or maybe Seventh Career. Consultants came and went, reorganizations came and went, executives came and went, and I learned to how to avoid saying things like --

“While I respect the evil capitalist genius of making millions by stitching together a handful of hackneyed, fortune-cookie aphorisms into a tiny book and selling it like snake oil, as anyone with half a brain can see, ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ is absolutely nothing but mass-marketed, pre-layoff, conscience-balming drivel”

-- to the woman who just spent a mint ordering the complete “Who Moved My Cheese?” "experience"; the video tape, the management “exercises”, the coffee mugs, the novelty condoms, the key-chains, the tea cozies, the scented stationery, the dessert topping, the bath toys, the cast album, the perfume based on the cast album, the vitamin supplements and, of course, a pallet-truck of those odious books.

And then one sunny day at the organization from which my Sixth or Seventh Career was most recently amputated, the umpteenth a consultant appeared to Save Us All.

Yay!

However, unlike the “nonprofit media company” in the article above, ours was not a case of hiring a consultant because an angel had swept in during our darkest hour to shower money on us which we were too stupid to figure out how to spend on our own. In fact, quite the opposite; the executives decided that in a time of radically shrinking revenues, the Smartest Move Evah would be to hire an Awesomeness Consultant at an hourly rate somewhere between "But aren't we broke?" and "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

We, too, spent "...many hours -- many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour" and after many months of slow agony what we had to show for it was a large cardboard sign that explained little, solved nothing and was widely considered to be a waste of time and carbon...and many photocopies of articles on Awesomeness from journals with Very Impressive Names.

To be fair, there were other, procedural improvements put in place that executives were assured would pay Big Dividends -- in four or five or seven or ten years -- but nothing came out of this consultant's Magic Bag that any one of a dozen other people who were already on the payroll could not have done just as well or better.

That is, if they weren’t already exhausted and distracted by executives who were already working them like rented mules doing the work of five people.

Because, y’know, budget cuts. And stuff.

I will say that while we were running out of just about everything from patience to revenue, the consultant always kept us well-stocked with gallows comic relief.

The consultant -- who told us one of the benefit to our organization was that they would "model good behavior" – regularly showed up late, and/or with a computer that didn't work, and/or without their materials, and/or booked into the wrong room… which may or may not have been set up to handle a group and a presentation.

The consultant -- who explained they were there to impart to us rubes their own famously meticulous attention to detail and excellence – regularly handed out reports and presentations that were shot through with absolutely hilarious errors – sometimes in 60-point Times Roman font and right in the title -- that any spell check program would have caught.

(Unless words like “Orgazanation” have recently been added to the English language and I just wasn’t told about it. Curse you, Stephen Colbert!)

Anyway, the punch line to this little parable is that, time and again, I was one of the people the consultant routinely pulled away from one of the dozen or so other Urgent! jobs I was already saddled with so I could fix their silly mistakes and pull their well-remunerated ass out of the fire.

Of course I was. Because I was "soooo smart".

And then, many months later during yet another one of our many, pointless, demoralizing, deck-chair-reshuffling rounds of reorganizing and belt-tightening, I was one of those selected to be kicked to the curb and into the Great Recession.

Because, y’know, budget cuts. And stuff. So very sorry. So very sad.

Thus my Sixth or Seventh career ended, one month short of my being vested.

The consultant, on the other hand, kept their sweet gig, and long after I was a ghost they were still billing my former employer at an hourly rate somewhere between "But didn’t we just lay a bunch of people off?" and "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

For all that I lost and will never get back – and I lost a lot – I was able to retain the many articles on Awesomeness from the journals with Very Impressive Names.

I find they are perfect for plugging the holes in my job interview shoes.

And that's a mostly true story.