Customer Reviews

Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Management consultant in an integrity crisis This book can save users of management consultants millions of dollars. But they can also miss making millions. The stories in the book appear to be true. They show that some of the most important and prestigious consulting companies are far more interested in making money than solving a company's problems effectively and with integrity. The author however also states correctly that good consultants have three unique advantages 1 intensive concentration on a problem 2 no blinkers as the persons working in the company 3 experience of similar problems and their solution elsewhere. These unique advantages when combined integrity can deliver important benefits. The quality of the individual consultant is very important regardless of whatever the most reputable consulting company may claim. Many clients once they decide to start a project want to start quickly which makes it often impossible for the consulting company to make suitable persons available. Therefore a company that engages consultants at short notice takes a high risk as there is no time to properly organize and staff the project. The book documents a considerable lack of integrity in consulting companies and among consultants, with the author being a frightening example. The book is also useful reading for consulting companies that wish to operate at a high level of integrity. An interesting issues is strategy development and gathering information about competitors. The book gives dramatic examples of how is "stolen". Every company worth its salt is benchmarking the performance of its products against the competitors'. Reverse engineering, that is dissecting a product of a competitor and figuring out how one can do the same or better is an accepted practice. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was proud of the ideas he had "stolen" from others. Headhunters often search for candidates among competitors. Where does legitimate information gathering stop and stealing starts? This is not the kind of issue on which this book gives any guidance.

Interesting book, but as my title suggests, as a non consultant, I had to force myself to finish some chapters. The mind numbing greed of these global big name consulting firms was matched only by the glaring ignorance of even the basic principals of business by their clients. After 17 years of living and working in Japan, I enjoyed some of Pinault's observations on life, love and business with the Japanese, others seemed quite contrived and the product of a somewhat overfertile imagination out to perpetuate the endless myths about "doing business with the Japanese". All in all, I learnt a lot about the consulting game, however I probably could have learnt just as much by reading a 5pg summary of the book.

How often do we get an insight-packed business book, of the highest relevance, with an epigraph from Carl Sagan! With a strong narrative to boot! Pinault is to be congratulated for facing up to his own indiscretions, while laying bare the more outrageous goings-on of the hyper-competitive consulting industry. From my own internship experience I know this is the real stuff, and likely only to get worse, not better, if not examined and somehow constrained. Fascinating is his choice, and well-demonstrated ability, to layer in some of the best consulting advice in the public domain, in the midst of relaying his starkly revealing story. Taken together, this is a book that has it all: a dramatic story, a deeply intriguing, still-evolving central character, never-before-revealed facts and insights, and a great probing perspective on what the future may hold for the future of consulting, confronting massive eCommerce, IPO, and recruiting changes. This will be the consultant's bible you love to hate, on the shelves of consultants, clients and students alike. It's also a great social commentary for the early 21st century. Can it be an accident that this `Lewis' Pinault went to the London School of Economics, like Michael `Lewis' of "Liar's Poker" fame, to write a breakthrough industry expose? And for all of us, he serves up an even better `dish:' a deeply personal account, based on partner-level experience. When Pinault writes the `New New Thing' of consulting, addressing the key technology issues now screaming upon the scene, I have no doubt we will be thrilled and enthralled. My friends and I are suggesting this as required reading for all students at the Business School.

As an IT consultant moving to Japan, I picked up Pinault's book in Houston and finished it during my first month in Tokyo. Consulting, and Japan, has changed a lot since Pinault's memoirs were inked, but his trick's of the trade are still valuable tools and his hilarious and memorable stories and anecdotes had me laughing to tears. Perhaps the greatest merit in reading this book is just to witness his intellectual power in use as he works the client cases and navigates his way through the politics and to the pinnacle of consulting. A very sharp and focused glimpse into a world few of have a change of getting to see for ourselves.

This book gives an insider's perspective on high-level strategy consulting focusing largely on its negative aspects. Even if you do not share the author's skepticism of consulting, this is still an invaluable read, especially if you are considering a career in consulting. Although it is a mostly negative account of consulting, the author offers very astute and very useful insights into how to be a successful consultant in subsections called "Consulting Demonology" interspersed throughout the narrative.

This book may be considered dated because of when it was published and because it is an account of the author's experiences in the late 80's and early 90's. However, in the final part of the book the author gives some insights into the future direction of consulting, many of which have turned out to be in the right direction.

This book should serve as a warning to students whose primary interests are not business-related. Many consulting firms recruit such students in the misguided hope that academic success in any subject translates into business success. This ultimately results in mostly negative experiences for the academically-inclined recruit as well as the consulting firm and its clients. Unfortunately, the rare success stories are used to justify the continuation of this practice. Ultimately, this book serves as a testament to the simple fact that the best career to choose is one you are passionate about. If you are passionate about business - read this book and learn about the ins and outs of successful consulting. If you are not passionate about business read this book and understand it as a warning that you should pursue a career outside of business.

Consulting demons is quite a personal diary instead of a technical book about how the consulting world gets on.

Pinault simply assumes that his experience as a consultant could be applicable to any other person in the business, but naturally this is hardly true.

The only really interesting parts are the few pages of "demonology" at the end of each chapter, but the information contained herein is scarce and easily retrievable from a top consulting company website.

However, a good entertainment, but more in the realm of narrative.

By nature secretive and arcane, the world of business consulting long cried out for the same sort of confessional trenchline expose other big-business engines received in Michael Lewis's "Liar's Poker" and Frank Partnoy's "Fiasco". Enter Lewis Pinault, former Asia golden boy turned fed-up burn out, who sheds an unsparing light on the secrets of his trade in this 2000 book.

The result makes for a bracing, funny, often invigorating read. Working for some of the top names in business consulting, including Boston Consulting Group, Coopers & Lybrand, and Arthur D. Little, Pinault tap-danced his way past many moral and factual chasms as he enriched himself upon the ignorance of his employers' clients.

"Simply put, consulting is at its most organized, intimidating best when it is working to maximize its take from the client," he writes. "Its key vulnerabilities, on the other hand, are rooted in using some of the most impressive people in the world to do too many questionable things too fast."

Pinault went from being a physically fit MIT grad with big dreams to a flabby, jaded late-night partier. He was largely a success by his own reckoning, sometimes spectacularly so, but to what end? Pinault found himself in the company of not a few sleazeballs and some intensely demanding bosses and potential bosses. One tells him to pick a restaurant for dinner, and that his choice will factor into whether he gets hired; another has him cut short a Hawaiian vacation to spend an hour with him in Colorado.

Such pressure can create an environment where bad ethical choices are like a tough hot dog you have to eat for lunch. "For many in the field, the life of consulting is simply a careful calculation of how long normal living might be deferred to assure a certain threshold of financial return," Pinault notes.

The practice of consulting is not wholly corrupt. Rather, it just requires an "eyes-wide-open" outlook going in. In this vein, Pinault presents some handy rules of thumb at the end of each chapter, each set relating to the chapter's story. For example, consultants may befriend contacts within a client company for the purpose of pumping them for valuable information, then abandon them and make sure the contact gets no credit in the final report, so the consultant can appear all-knowing. Billing "cascades" are often the true goal of a consultant's final report, setting up an avenue toward the next lucrative contract.

All this was interesting, but it was Pinault the human train wreck whose the book's real source of fascination. Running a boot-camp-style refocusing meeting at Dutch electronics giant Philips, Pinault tells his frustrated audience they must think more about sales and less about product perfection. "I am not a shoe salesman", an engineer replies with heat, and a bell goes off inside Pinault's mind.

A sometimes smug tone, an offhand explanatory style, and Pinault's use of pseudonyms throughout made me dock this book a star, but it's certainly readable even to a layman like me. Even if it isn't the whole story about consulting, it's a story about the dark side of business and the human heart worth both the reading and telling.