The room smelled of nothing – ascetic, bare, walls painted magnolia, neutral, deafening in their silence. A telephone conference gizmo sat on the fake maple desk in the middle of the room. Expensive, highly polished video conferencing equipment reclined nearby. On one wall was a giant screen for slide shows and for looking at someone’s ugly mush over a wireless link.
I waited for the chap with whom I was to have a meeting. I could have been in the garden, or at the beach, or sticking stamps into a stamp album, yet here I was, in the late autumn of my career, sitting in a business meeting with a management consultant of considerable worth to the organisation.
I have a natural antipathy towards management consultants, and have had for a very long time. I have found that they have a tendency to put out their hand in friendship and steal your watch. They pick your brains, pinch your ideas, and pass them off as their own. They ask you what you want and need and how you think you might want to get it, then they turn round and give it to you for £1,500 a day. They speak a language all of their own, and that language is an affront to anyone who has read Dickens or JK Rowling. This chap was no exception.
When he arrived, I found that he was affable enough and so keen he almost thumped a tail. He was tall and spare, in his early thirties, but he was already losing his hair. Unusually, in these days of dressing down to look ‘smart casual’ and looking nothing like it, he wore a suit and tie. He gave the appearance of an earnest representative selling a range of pharmaceutical products to business, which was telling, because he had once been one. He had since made progress up and down the oil industry, or, as he explained it ‘horizontally and vertically’. He had turned to consultancy to ‘widen his horizons’ before he became an ‘oil stereotype.’
He explained his company’s mission (how that word has been misused) as being ‘on the other side of the deliverable – an holistic approach’. Before I had time to deconstruct that remark, he started discussing what he had achieved for his other clients. He told me that some of them had ‘no culture of empowerment’, that some were ‘big companies in grandiose thought but small scale in actualité,’ and that some were ‘too choosy’ and ‘could not afford ‘five nines’ protection against risk.’
Later on, when I brought up the subject of risk and reward in contracts, he warned me to beware of ‘scope creep in any efficiency model’, and that he was ‘driving forward to look at leveraging benefits from an incentivised approach.’ After a very long period in which I didn’t get a word in edgeways (I had lost concentration, drowning in a sea of waffle, and was thinking about caravan holidays), he finally suggested that ‘centralists don’t have the bandwidth to know what’s going on.’ That woke me up.
‘Not only centralists,’ I reminded him. He couldn’t see the irony.
After an hour and a half of this tomfoolery, I asked him a critical question; ‘What would happen if we took all of our business away from you?” His eyes widened as he considered the impact of my words. Slowly, he opened his mouth and spoke, with all the gravitas of a funeral director. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be in the upper quartile of risk criticality.’
