There goes my bonus....

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Yes, my bonus did come through.

Side note: Did you know that people (like the above model) who appear to be breathing through their mouth (aka "mouth-breathers") are generally perceived as having lower intelligence? What does it say that most fashion pictures of women have them posing with their mouth open?

What am I doing? Well, nothing.

I fear I'm losing the ability to actually get things done. After years of making slides and doing analysis, I am starting to wonder if I could actually get something done. Like grow a plant from a seed to harvest.

At one point I was an entrepreneur, and every day I got stuff done. Actual products, actual service, actual value to clients.

A friend of mine is opening up a store in Manhattan - over the weekend we talked about his business plan over beers. I looked through the financials, the marketing plan, the exit strategy, and saw it was pretty light. This stuff isn't this guy's strong suit, he admits. But he wasn't worried, because he just knew, with total confidence, how to bring customers in and make them happy. And I believe he will succeed, because of his confidence and competence.

I walked away from the bar thinking that if a consultant were in his shoes, they would craft a beautiful business plan... but they wouldn't know how to actually get customers in and how to make them happy.

McKinsey: Obfuscation through Excessive Analysis

One common characterization of McKinsey work is that they will do all sorts of ridiculous levels of analysis, even if the outcome isn't cogent to the actual case. A harsher view would say that McKinsey hangs audacious ideas onto that analysis to push the client into pursuing their recommendations, even if they won't work in reality (i.e. "Ted Airlines").

Consider the article that fell into my reader today:

Consultant Ninja Analyis: Power curves have interesting properties that I remember from undergraduate circuits class. McKinsey's going to use an interesting mathematical formula to tie economics and nature together. Great, let's see what they do!

Consultant Ninja Raction: All this lady has done is sort a few statistics according to size. Once you sort a population by size, it almost inevitably follows a pareto distribution. And a pareto distribution can almost always be fitted by a power curve function.

If this consultant wrote "bank crises by size show us that you should focus on 'Build flexible business models'" she would be challenged by the client. If she instead writes "a power curve analysis with an R-squard of 0.96 shows us that bank crises are dynamically unstable. Therefore you should "Make the system the unit of analysis'", the client, who can't possibly understand her 2 weeks of work in a 60-minute meeting, would blandly nod his head.

Bottom Line: A common (and fair) criticism of consultants it that we whip up terrificly complex analysis for the purposes of intellectually bullying clients into just blindly going along with the larger message we construct. McKinsey is guilty of it here.

PS. What the hell is the Y-axis on the banking chart, anyways?

Dilbert Slays, one day at a time

Mealy-mouthed consultant speak

Sent in by a reader...

"My visit started with meeting the President of XXX. We had a fascinating dialogue about XXX's strategies for global expansion - in both the YYY and ZZZ sectors - and the balance between current imperatives and longer term globalisation trends. We honed in on the importance of being "authentically local" as a critical success factor, which has played out in a win in India and the challenges they have in deciding where to place their geographic bets. They have a similar need to reinforce long term relationship development versus campaigns or transactions, which is analogous to our own drive toward client centricity. We also discussed the importance of the expansion of their services business as a counter to lower sales as well as the very active management of their pipeline given the volatility of their customer base. XXX is an account where we have taken a steady approach over the past couple of years to develop C-suite relationships and it is clear we have an interesting platform for the future." - Internal Communique of a major consultancy

What the hell does all this mean?

Mealie mouthed consulting speak comes from...

Source: ThisIsIndexed, via ChangeThis.

If I hear the word "thought leader" one more time...

"global scale," "leverage key capabilities," "uniquely positioned." Sigh. My brain rots at the overuse of abstract terms without really the speaking truly understanding what they mean. It's really just poor intellectual & verbal discipline.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it

If you want to know why your tax dollars are going to subsidize Amtrak, the Washington DC Union Station rental car return lot provides an insightful anecdote.

Channeling Yogi Berra is not a way to profitably run a business.

Reasons not to stay in Consulting

Mrs. Ninja is also a consultant. Yesterday upon arrival at her hotel she received a fruit basket, a warm welcome from the staff who greeted her by first name, and the below card.



How depressing.

Consulting Vignettes

A realistic view of consulting. Why did I wake up upon landing at one of these airports this week?



Fuck, I'm bitter. Can one give up bitterness for Lent?

How not to Chart Data

Disclaimer: When wrapping up a project my bitterness always increases.

Ok, so when I see this report by Fed Economists, I just react.

What's wrong with this?

1. Each graph, individually, is nearly impossible to read (no sort, legends are super small).
2. All the graphs, taken together, are DEFINITELY impossible to read.

This is some Fed PhD economist (and a macro one at that, the most dismal of the economist scientists) you know, the type that probably barely sees the real world but loves huge sets of numbers.  He started with a table, with 12 rows (categories) and 11 columns (categories, 9 years plus 1 total), and created a bunch of charts that are totally undreadable.

Understandable Data + This Guy's Effort = Data that is Impossible to Understand

Information Visualization people like me win these battles every time, but it feels like we're losing a war out there.  For every well thought-out, well-structured chart, I see thousands that look like this.

Signs of Crunch Time

Vision narrowing.... [priorities: work, call wife, sleep, eat, in decreasing order]

Project Manager irritability rising.... ["What the hell, guys, are you two talking before making your pages?"]

Oakenfold on repeat... ["We're live at Gatecrasher at Lockerton Hall.... nice one brother.... I SAID NICE ONE!"]

Stimulant use skyrocketing... ["Here's your key - you're the last platinum member to check in tonight." - "Thank you, and can you please send a pot of coffee to my room."]

Wife unhappiness increasing... ["This is the 2nd valentine's day you've missed because of work. Where's my present?"]

Conference Room Smells interacting... ["Should we just leave this pizza in here for the morning?"]

Client timeline shortening... ["Let's shoot for a Wednesday draft"]

Partner involvement growing... ["I haven't seen a deck in a while. Can you please send the most recent version over?"]

Countdown metric unit shrinking... ["96 hours until we're done."]

Cursing off the chart... ["fuck." "shit." "dammit." "damn, why doesn't that add up?"]

Car rental abuse appearing... ["Hmmmm, it redlines at 7000 RPMs. I wonder if it has a governer?"]

All positive precursor signs of hyper-productivity. [Yes, all these are 100% true.]

My current project

I think our kickoff deck exactly followed the first 5 panes.

Hat Tip: Bnjammin

I just get so scared, scared of being a nobody

Kevin Gao is right, I was being a jerk. His case study example is flat out wrong, but I don't need to pick on him about it.  We all make mistakes - me, more often than most as my wife can attest - and it doesn't help to be arrogant about it.

I am suffering a bitter week, since I have an all-day meeting on Friday at the client site, which, due to the location, requires me to take a Friday night red-eye flight home. Oh, and guess who gets to fly out on Sunday night to the client for a Monday morning meeting? Me! The joys of client service.

A Warning Sign for my Consulting Career...

As I opened the mail today, I came across a very worrying letter addressed to my significant other.

Is this a sign that I'm on the road too much, and that my marriage is in danger?  Shit.

[Ed note:  In case you can't make out the poor resolution of the picture, it's a personal thank you note from a Nordstrom's Handbag Salesperson.]

Even in the Midst of Cost Modeling Hell...

... it's possible to find serene moments of bliss before the cruel, crushing reality of Excel and Access returns.





It's possible to find serene moments of bliss.

Earth Day 2008

"I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted to breathe smoke."

What will you do?

Sometimes a Picture is worth a thousand words

Especially when you're flying to DFW...

Anyone else sick of Hans?

Left-leaning presentation? Check.
Presenting at the uber-cool TED conference? Check.
Funky Scandanavian accent? Check.
Ugly glasses? Check.

Hans Roslings' charts on gdp vs. lifespan and carbon emissions vs per capita gdp are everywhere. Walk into Google's Mountain View campus and the flash application ins on a screen. Garr Reynolds loves the guy. Another consultant called his presentations Porn for Consultants.

I don't get it. Yes it's 5 dimensions of data (time, life span, per capita income, region, population size). Yes it has cool colors. Yes it shows that the US is greedy.

But he puts out two of these charts in 2 years and everyone falls all over themselves thinking he's a genius.

I've got to create a couple of these every 6 weeks, shown on printed paper, with incomplete or garbled data sources. GDP per year? I'd love to graph data like that. Try figuring out a company's last 10 year's of overhead costs:
- Adjust for accounting change
- Adjust for computer system change
- Adjust for acquisition
- Adjust for improperly allocated overhead
- Adjust for restated 10Ks
- Adjust because Susan in accounting can't pull the data that way
- Assume because Frank doesn't feel comfortable giving those reports to the consultants

GDP vs life expectancy and size for population? Hell, I'd give that to an analyst and expect it back in the afternoon.

Consultant Ninja, the Change Agent: Motto

If you don't throw some hammers around, you're never going to break that glass house that you live in.