Consulting Demons : Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting

Diversity and esoterica I had in spades. I grew up in Rhode Island in the boom years of the 1960's, when everything interesting seemed to be happening all at once, but somewhere else. The youngest of six children, I benefited from parents with a staunchly liberal, New Deal view of the world and social justice, and brothers and sisters engaged in every part of the causes of the time. Several of them would embark on academic careers, and all would at least try to live out of state if not overseas. Though working-class poor, my parents encouraged the gathering of new experiences and a high investment in education.

While most were caught up in one way or another with Vietnam, however, I developed an early and obsessive interest in the space program. More than anything else, I wanted to be a scientist astronaut, or perhaps an astrophysicist, and explore other worlds and solar systems. The moon landings seemed but a small first achievement, and between Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and Star Trek, I had all the fuel I needed to imagine humanity's future role in space. A little weirdly, but telling for my interests in international space development then and today, my personal hero of 2001 was space-bureaucrat Heywood Floyd, not the odyssey-making astronauts, and the concept of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets intrigued me as much as any alien slug-fest featuring Captain Kirk. I was fortunate to have my choice of colleges, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I hoped would in turn give me a choice of jobs in the space program. But the late 1970's proved a dismal time for space development. Much of NASA's energy and budget was then consumed by trying to get the intractable space shuttle off the ground, and I was angered to find American popular, governmental, and commercial interest in space at an all-time low. Midway through MIT I chose two new directions which I hoped would one day lead me to an engaging career in the use and exploration of space. I started an ocean engineering major and internship program and enrolled in a domestic year-away program at the University of Chicago, to take up intensive Japanese studies.

In ocean engineering I hoped to find the excitement and experience of exploration-driven technology development, something I planned to use when prospects for space development turned around. I loved the oceans, and inspired in part by Arthur C. Clarke's own celebration of both the oceans and outer space, I took up scuba diving and fully embraced my new medium. In Japan, I expected to learn something about large-scale project finance for civil engineering projects and hoped to tap that country's competitive strengths for application to space development, once the treaty law barring Japan's own space launches expired.

These were towering ambitions for a poor, struggling student, but I had blundered into the right time and place for combining engineering and Japanese skills. Harvard's Ezra Vogel, with Japan As No. 1, had just hit the best-seller lists, and study of Japanese management techniques would soon become an institutionalized fad. After Chicago I returned for two more years at MIT and cross-registered at Harvard in Japanese language, business, and government, finally finishing inpolitical Science at MIT so that I could combine credits in both disciplines and still manage to graduate, in 1982. I had managed to squeeze in some fledging German into my poly sci degree, and while waiting on job applications, I took up a United Nations scholarship to do a summer internship in technology transfer at the UN complex in Vienna, Austria. Days before I left for Europe, I was offered and immediately accepted an open-ended job with the Japanese steelmaker and shipbuilder Nippon Kokan, where I would become one of the conglomerate's first foreign professional hires. I arranged to fly directly from Vienna to begin work at NKK's shipyards in Kawasaki at the end of the summer. My three years with Nippon Kokan were a key formative experience for me both personally and professionally, molding much of what would drive and sustain my later, largely unexpected commitment to consulting. Combining some of Japan's most challenging living conditions with exposure to one of the world's most stimulating urban cultures, all the while propelling me through extraordinary new responsibilities, in these years I became at once professionally confident and alive to Tokyo's many attractions, and desperately eager to find a means to enjoy them.

Like many of the traditional Japanese industrial giants, Nippon Kokan firmly believed in isolating its new male employees in bachelor dormitories, where conditions were spartan at best. The idea was to build a certain sense of equality and camaraderie, reduce any last pretensions to a private life, and encourage early marriage to company-approved spouses.