Consulting Hits Home

As the semester began this week, seniors attended class in tailored suits, carrying briefcases instead of bookbags and putting away notebooks to pore over company fact sheets. Recruiting season had arrived, and the nation's most prestigious consulting companies had come to campus once more to snatch up the young consulting talent. It wasn't long before I began to feel left out.

Don't get me wrong--I don't want to be a consultant. After all, if I can't even solve my own problems, how could I possibly be qualified to solve someone else's? No, I wanted to hire a consultant. My plan would be a bit expensive, perhaps, but the costs would quickly be recouped by the benefits of maximized efficiency. So I hired a few consulting companies to deal with my personal life.

Case 1: My first problem was choosing classes for this semester. To handle the project, I hired the Cambridge Strategic Mismanagement Group, a firm renowned for its academic expertise (a fact I inferred from the cool pens they handed out at the Career Fair). Before long, opportunity was knocking on my door.

"There are three major factors to consider when strategizing for global growth in the spring semester course market," CSMG's founding partner, Benedict Arnold '97, explained to me as he unfolded several 20 by 24-inch bar graphs onto an easel in my bedroom for a colorful client presentation. "Costs, customers and competitors. This seminar on early Hebrew literature might look interesting, for example, but when we perform a cost-benefit analysis, we see that the amount of boredom actually increases as the course progresses, while your projected grade decreases. The course's consumer base is suspiciously small, so before pursuing this niche market, it is essential to study the competition." The consultants then embarked on a fact-finding mission to interview the guy downstairs, a near Eastern languages student writing his thesis on Mesopotamian divorce contracts. When the student gave the class rave reviews, citing its absorbing material, CSMG advised that I avoid the class.

Instead, Arnold offered me a carefully tailored package of options designed to maximize both my grades and my personal global growth: Economics 985k, "Research in Financial Markets," Economics 2423, "Asset Pricing," Economics 2535, "Advanced Topics in International Finance" and Economics 1030, "Delay of Gratification." "But I'm a literature student," I objected. Arnold chortled. (Consumer studies have shown clients prefer consultants who chortle.) "That's just the sort of narrow-minded thinking that can sink a perfectly stable company," he said. "When everyone else is expanding into new markets, do you want to be left behind?"

Case 2: Another top-level assignment in which a consulting company could determine my strategy for growth was in my morning routine. Each morning, I am faced with a crucial decision: make the bed, or leave it messy? Fortunately, Monitor Lizard Corp., from whom I had purveyed several cool desk toys at the Career Fair, was here to help.

Staff consultant Joseph McNamara '96 suggested that I prioritize my global goals. "In a globally competitive market, you need to think broadly about the sheer range of factors that will affect your efficiency," he consulted me. "A key strategic variable in this case could be the exchange rate of the Swedish kroner." I asked him to explain. "This is a different world," he informed me, "a world that requires us management consultants to operate in a genuinely border-less fashion. We must be able to embed these programs into a complex, sustained, multi-year effort to change the way your corporation functions at all managerial levels." I told him that I was interested in deciding whether to make my bed.

"That's what I just said," he chortled. "We must be able to embed these programs into a complex, sustained program of detailed operational plans that reflect the nuances of the various national and regional environments where our clients work." As he chortled some more, I made my bed and passed him my credit card.

Case 3: I am faced with an evening in which I have nothing to do. I could, of course, read for my newly-chosen Economics courses. Or I could use my time to cover my roommate's entire desk with toothpaste. As a globally competitive client, I am not intimidated by this emerging market of available time. No, I am challenged by the prospect of expanding my personal business. But how to do it? It was a case for McFlimsy and Company.

The options were endless, but McFlimsy can handle complexity. Demonstrating his firm doesn't merely attack its projects head-on, but also thinks outside the box to rout out additional sources of inefficiency, research associate Pontius Pilate '98 chortled and informed me, "That outfit makes you look fat."

As a globally competitive client, I did not appreciate this consultation. Of course, The Harvard College Guide to Consulting had warned me: "As you can imagine, clients don't always want to hear what consultants have to say." I informed Pilate his strategy was inhibiting my global growth. Pilate chortled again and made several more rude comments concerning my personal appearance. After consulting with a rival consultant from the same company, I decided to terminate the client-consultant relationship. Pilate, glad to wash his hands of it, went downstairs to consult my neighbor on Mesopotamian divorce contracts.

My experiences with consulting companies have taught me well, and I am now planning to start my own consulting company, offering consultation to my classmates on how best to consult consultants in order to develop one's own consulting skills. To promote my services, I offer you this free advice: After watching your classmates make multiple, diverse and often repeatedly stupid decisions in their own lives, do you really want them telling you how to run yours?

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.