#59 My Contempt for Management Consultants
2001. Poland, a few miles from the old East German border. A hotel that felt more like a bunker. Paint peeling from the walls. Spring, but the thermometer in the room showed 16 degrees.
I'm on assignment from Acando, the consulting firm I work at. We're doing a pre-study for an intranet for a large pulp and paper company. With me is an experienced colleague, a management consultant with a past at Andersen Consulting (today known as Accenture).
We visited three different plants to understand their goals and challenges, and get a sense of what they needed. At this particular site we did some interviews and held a 2-day workshop with representatives from various parts of the plant. I was fairly fresh out of school, and with a brief academic career behind me. Rigor in research and requirements gathering was important to me. It still is.
At dinner on the evening of day one I was seated next to the managing director, a former management consultant. A rather loud character. A Swede sent there from the head office to run things. He had a hard time hiding what he really thought about his co-workers, and at some point the conversation turned to wages. Poland was cheap. But not forever. He leaned back and told me, almost proudly, that he had a fully worked out plan sitting in his drawer. Whom to let go when the time came. What parts to move to other countries.
I asked him something. I don't remember what. Something polite. He shrugged and changed the subject.
I was young, but I understood the financial realities. Still, there was something in the way he talked about it. The ease of it. Like he was describing a filing system, not people's livelihoods.
The second day of the workshop turned out great. We had really good discussions, and the paper roll covering the walls was full of post-its, comments and drawings. Rich data that would be crucial for the analysis and eventual design I was tasked to do.
By the end of the session we said our goodbyes. I started carefully taping the post-its to the paper so they would stay in place during the flight back to Gothenburg. This was pre-camera-phone, and almost pre-digital camera. Halfway through I heard paper ripping behind me. I turned around and saw my colleague tearing down the paper from the wall.
I just stared at him, unable to speak.
– What? This? We won't use this. This was just to get buy-in. We'll just use the off-the-shelf version of Lotus Notes anyway.
He continued tidying up the walls, squeezing the material into the bins. Totally shameless. Not even bothering to hide that we were not going to bring it with us.
I think about that trip from time to time. The MD with his drawer full of plans. The colleague with his hands full of other people's work, headed for the bin.
Not cynicism, exactly. Something worse. Casualness.