House of Lies
How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
In the bestselling tradition of Liar's Poker comes a devastatingly accurate and darkly hilarious behind-the-scenes look at the wonderful world of management consulting.
Once upon a time in Corporate America there was a group of men and women who were paid huge fees to tell organizations what they were doing wrong and how to improve themselves. These men and women promised everything and delivered nothing, said they were experts when they were not, sometimes ruined careers, and at best, only wasted time, energy, and huge sums of money. They called themselves Management Consultants….
Welcome to the world of Martin Kihn, a former standup comic and Emmy® Award-nominated television writer who decided to “go straight” and earn his MBA at a prestigious Ivy League university. In HOUSE OF LIES, he brazenly chronicles his first two years as a newly-minted management consultant: featuring his struggles with erroneous advice, absurd arrogance, and bloody power struggles. Hey, it’s all in a day’s work— and it pays really well!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Complete with an appendix of terms like "brain dump," "pulse check" and "swag" (an acronym for "smart wild-assed guess"), this somewhat disjointed, highly intelligent and deeply funny debut memoir skewers a segment of the economy that nearly every white-collar worker has learned to fear and loathe: consultancies. Kihn, who has been nominated for an Emmy as a comedy writer, went to Columbia Business School and has spent the last few years working as a consultant; he writes the "Consultant Debunking Unit" column for Fast Company. Kihn argues that many consultants know little or nothing about the firms they're hired to help; furthermore, he contends, they often offer companies information that companies already have. For him, the consulting industry is a shell game, imparting an air of authority and expertise rather than actual authority and expertise. To achieve the illusion, Kihn says, consultants use mechanisms ranging from legions of Harvard MBAs in Oxford shirts to reams of incomprehensible blather presented as winning corporate wisdom. His reconstructed dialogue from within his (unnamed) firm and from his time serving clients is alone worth the price of admission, as is his relentless taunting (by name) of McKinsey, Deloitte & Touche and others.
