Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting [Hardcover]

Lewis Pinault (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2000

At once a riveting narrative, an alarming cautionary tale, and a treasury of useful advice, Consulting Demons is a rare insider's view of the lucrative world of global management consulting

FOR RECENT MBA GRADS AND other aspiring consultants, Consulting Demons is an unvarnished front-lines look at the life of a consultant, containing essential tips on how to get ahead and a perspective on the industry's brutal infighting that can engulf even the most civilized consulting firm.

For current executives and potential consulting clients, Pinault reveals what your consultants might be thinking and scheming, and explores the unscrupulous lengths to which a consulting firm will go in order to protect and increase its lucrative fees.

For the general business reader, this is a rollicking yarn that's brimming with vignettes drawn from a consultant's daily work, including such typical consulting activities as "benchmarking" (deep-cover corporate espionage), business transformation ("mass brainwashing"), and client entertainment ("global debauchery").

With the insouciance and voyeur's delight of Liar's Poker, coupled with a richness of information and content possible only from an insider, this riveting and illuminating work offers the most complete look at an industry that continues to be tightly closed in spite of its burgeoning success.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With the ubiquitous term consultant now being bandied about as practically every second person's job description, Consulting Demons is a book for everyone. At once an entertaining account of one man's personal odyssey through the various levels and organizations of the corporate consulting world, an informed opinion given to fresh-faced MBAs choosing this profession as a career, and an ominous warning to clients not yet privy to its inner workings, Consulting Demons is a compelling read.

Earning an undergraduate degree in political science at MIT, Lewis Pinault channeled his interests in space development into areas more salable in the late 1970s, namely, ocean engineering and Japanese. Hired directly out of college by a Japanese shipbuilder, he spent the next few years living in the conglomerate's dilapidated dormitories, mastering the language and gaining valuable project management experience. Pinault's introduction to the alluring world of corporate consulting came through company contact with consultants from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and a year later he'd been willingly sucked into the vortex of a fast-paced, all-consuming 12-year consulting career. His ensuing adventures led him throughout Southeast Asia, in and out of BCG, the MAC Group, Gemini Consulting, Arthur D. Little (ADL), and finally Coopers & Lybrand, and through a number of less-than-professional exercises in client scamming and industrial espionage (otherwise known as benchmarking).

Having left the sanctums of global consultancies to pursue his original aspirations in science and the law, Pinault has written an exposé of considerable force. Part autobiography, part cautionary manual, the book presents a dark picture of the world of management consulting; in fact, each of its chapters ends with a "Consulting Demonology" tract, including such topics as "Client Beware: Consultants' Spycraft Charms" and "Red Spots and Other Ruses Consultants Use to Close on Large Fees." Though Pinault's tone is sometimes rather arrogant, it serves to reinforce the nature of the consulting game, one that this book portrays as risky and lucrative for the consultant but extremely costly and often not worthwhile for the client. If you're already a bona fide member of the ever-growing management consultant population, read this book and measure your worth as a successful trickster or unknowing drone. If you're thinking of becoming a consultant, read this book and think again. If you're a client about to sign a pact with the devil (or its demons), beware. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly

This expose is sure to incite envy and lust for the power and influence consulting entails, while simultaneously inciting dismay at the underhanded tactics consultants apparently use as a matter of course. Pinault, an international player in a number of major consulting organizations, narrates the story of his life as a participant in a number of corporate takeovers, reengineerings and project startups. The book is heavily dependent on dialogue, which lends an air of freshness and reality to business subjects often bound in stilted, academic prose. The story begins with Pinault's background: he tells how, having hoped for a career in space technology, he detoured into the study of Japanese and began his career working for a Japanese shipbuilding firm. This was followed quickly by his immersion into the international Boston Consulting Group. With the exception of a few detailed descriptions of actual consulting projects--the manufacture of disposable diapers is one--most of this account describes Pinault's rise up the consulting ladder, his struggles with the demands and stress of the job and the machinations of various consulting firms competing intensely on several continents. Pinault's work was sometimes skullduggerish, and he gleefully relates tales of his "benchmarking"--i.e., covertly, duplicitously discovering other companies' trade secrets--and low-bidding competitors' clients. Interspersed throughout are pithy guidelines that condense consulting into simple lessons: e.g., "Cases that begin to show obsession with large quantities of data... run a high danger of fractured expectations." This is two books in one, the narrative refreshing and illuminating, the guidelines terse and educational. At times, both serve to highlight the shady, sometimes questionable activities that seemingly permeate this professional culture. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 284 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness; 1st edition (January 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066619971
• ISBN-13: 978-0066619972
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,171,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Loved This Book, February 13, 2000

By 

Avid Reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting (Hardcover)

A brave, significant work. By breaking the consulting industry's omerta, its own Sicilian code of silence, Lewis Pinault has taken a professional gamble to be much lauded, exposing the inherent skullduggery of a business gone unexamined for too long.

Pinault's "Consulting Demons" does for management consulting what Michael Lewis's "Liar's Poker" did for investment banking and Po Bronson's "Nudist on the Late Shift" did for Silicon Valley. In fact, Pinault's wry wit, engaging prose, and lucid insights invite comparisons with the best work of Lewis and Bronson. Yet unlike Lewis and Bronson, Pinault actually made it to the top of the profession he chronicles. This lofty vantage imbues his work with added credibility and authority.

The book is a thoroughly enjoyable read for the layperson, but for anyone considering a career in management consulting, it should be required reading.

Really two books in one--half memoir, half Machiavellian primer for career advancement--Demons triumphs on both levels. Pinault balances tales of swash-buckling success with monumental failure. The Shell snafu in particular is palpably frightening. Scarier for a professional than any Stephen King novel could be. As the incident unfolds, you'll find yourself screaming at the book, "Lewis, don't give that PowerPoint presentation!"

Yet this work is much more than just an "emperor with no clothes" expose of the oftentimes insidious world of the globe-trotting, management consultant. It treats its subject with remarkable compassion and fairness.

As a cautionary tale about the self-destructive effects of deferring one's true calling for the lure of fatter and fatter paychecks and sacrificing personal development for professional advancement, Demons will resonate with readers of all stripes who, feeling trapped in Faustian bargains with their careers, seek to throw off the shackles of modern corporate servitude and reclaim their passions.

Lewis Pinault's debut book is the harbinger of an extremely promising writing career. I can hardly wait for his next book.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Account of a Big League Consulting Career, June 27, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting (Hardcover)

In the interests of full disclosure, I would like you to know that I worked as a consultant and later as a project manager at The Boston Consulting Group in Boston from 1971-74. As far as I can remember, I neither experienced nor heard about any of the sorts of problems raised by the author. In fact, senior members of the firm frequently encouraged me to be concerned about ethical issues, and made it easy for me to follow the right course. I have headed my own management consulting firm for the last 22 years, where I can made my own calls on ethics. So I am probably biased in my review. Forgive me for that, but this book called out to me to be read and reviewed.

This book should be required reading for anyone about to enter a business career. The reason I say that is because it exposes the reader to the kinds of ethical choices that can arise in consulting, investment banking, law and many other high impact professional careers. If you have your moral compass in front of you, you will probably make different (and possibly better) choices than Mr. Pinault did. If you don't, you may stumble into some places where you will later wish you hadn't gone.

The book is also promoted as a source that all clients should consider. If you think of some of the stories as being "what can go wrong during a consulting assignment," that can be valuable. But the book is hardly a thorough look at how to buy and get value from consultants. Here is where I graded the book down one star. I think the blurb and the subtitle are misleading on this point.

I drew a different lesson from this book than the author did. I thought that he was a victim of stalled thinking. Whenever a potential ethical problem arose, it seemed to me that he viewed the question as being one of whether he could duck the pressure put on by a colleague or not. Instead, he could have stepped back and considered how an alternative solution could have been designed that would have ethically fulfilled the same purpose for the client and his consulting firm. For example, you need not interview all of your client's competitors flying a somewhat false flag (as he and his teams sometimes did) to find out how your client is doing. There are plenty of public sources that are available to you, and these may even be more reliable in some cases. Also, the client needs enough information to make the right decision -- not every bit of information that can be gleaned (by fair means or foul).

So as you consider your future career, be aware that you need to take responsibility for your own actions. Ask yourself how you would feel writing a book about them and sharing what you did with your parents, children, and grandchildren. If you don't like the answer, come up with a better one. If you can't find that better answer, quit and take up with another firm or another line of work.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Skillfully Seductive, April 28, 2002

By 

Leonard Chen (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting (Paperback)

Very few recent business books have been written with such a superb combination of thrilling drama, industry confession, and informative insight. As I read this book I was equally captivated by the stories of corporate "spying" hidden under the cloak of strategic industry research, as well as by the careful analysis of the management consulting industry.

As a consultant currently working at a big Five (or Four) firm, and as an MBA hopeful, I recommend this book to anyone who is remotely interested in working in the consulting industry. Mr. Pinault provides a peak into the lives of consultants, spinning a web of glamor as well as well emptiness. His confessions are honest and almost vulnerable. Simultaneously, he provides a historical account of this very private and elite profession.

What's most intriguing to me is the effect the book has. On the surface, the book appears to be an industry expose and confession. However, the effect, at least for me, is not one of repulsion but of attraction. I can honestly say that, after reading the book, I want to be a management consultant even more than before. I wonder if Mr. Pinault still has a love/hate relationship with the industry.