PulpLit.net

House of Lies

House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time
by Martin Kihn

I should preface my comments by saying that I’ve never been a management consultant, and only know vaguely about the industry from a BCG cocktail and a brochure for Bain I looked through once (excerpt: “Become a consultant! See the world!”). However, from what little I do know about the industry, Martin Kihn’s depiction of what it is like to be a consultant is quite accurate.

Indeed, House of Lies (HoL) is basically Kihn’s memoir about his work in management consulting shortly after graduating from Columbia Business School. Well, “memoir” is strong: really HoL is a collection of essays around the subject, with a full chapter and appendix on “consulting terms,” as well as chapters on the relative merits of Starwood points, mission statements, and company team building retreats.

The book is written in the second person, a refreshing change, and takes great pains to eradicate all specifics about which firm Kihn worked for. As Kihn explains in an author’s note, because management consulting is an industry “not without its vindictive revenge monkeys… I have changed every name, disguised every client, created composites of individuals, and guarded sensitive information.”

However, use of the Wayback machine on Kihn’s website martinkihn.com reveals that Kihn worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. And, according to his description of the job, he did what it seems like most consultants do: traveled a lot, did crazy amounts of work, and received good pay.

What was lacking was any real evidence to support the title, which seems to be Warner Business Book’s overt attempt to sell a typical albeit well-written memoir as an expose about management consulting. The opening flap claims that management consultants “… really knew nothing, trashed businesses, destroyed careers, and at best only wasted time, energy, and huge sums of money.” But the book has only one example of something which even smacks of anything close to those claims, an incident when Kih asked the employee of a tire manufacturer how he would prepare some data for a report, and promptly uses that employees recommendation. However, this strikes me as more of a standard business practice then an unethical action on the part of a consultant.

The only other example Kihn offers of genuine client/consultant interaction is when Kihn, working for a car parts manufacturer, presented an honest and well though-out appraisal on a software implementation of ambiguous worth, which had political ramifications within the clients firm. The waves the project made ultimately got Kihn taken off the project, another example of a normal aspect of a business environment. Instead of revealing some dark secrets from within the industry, Kihn spends most of the book essentially complaining about the lifestyle a consultant leads, which is strange considering he claims he left the life of a head writer for a television program to go to business school and become a management consultant. Perhaps he was unaware what the life of a consultant was really like before he made his decision, and this book is the result of his disappointment.

Indeed, I met someone who worked with Kihn at Booz Allen and confirmed that Kihn was a nice guy but perhaps not perfectly suited to be a consultant. ToL, from that perspective, may be really a telling depiction of how grueling and nightmarish a job can be when it offers little of the rewards which you need to feel fulfilled.

Perhaps the greatest use for Kihn’s book is to educate people like himself, who are unaware of the sacrifices necessary to be a management consultant, and for whom knowing what being a consultant really feels would help them make a more informed decision about whether to become one.