The Masters of Illusion

The great management consultancy swindle

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of "Nietzsche and German Idealism". The annual recruiting season had long since gone. My life savings had dwindled into three digits. It came to me in a pub, over a game of pool. I was losing badly to a pair of undergraduates who had recently received offers from a prestigious management consulting firm. They were about 22-years-old; I was going on 26. As I gazed at the pool balls ricocheting around the table, it hit me that, instead of spending the next year watching daytime TV, I too, could earn some ready cash by offering strategy tips to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

The more I thought about it, the grander it seemed. The next morning, I sent out 10 CVs. One ended up in the hands of the founding partner of a small and enlightened consultancy firm based in New York. I landed the job by providing a credible response to this question: How many pubs are there in Great Britain? The purpose of that question, I realised after the interview, was to see how easily I could talk about a subject of which I knew almost nothing, on the basis of facts that were almost entirely fictional. It was an excellent introduction to management consulting.