Illustrations by Stan ChowI revealed the horrible truth: none.
“None!?”
“Consultants eat badly and often,” I said. “We’re not an attractive bunch. And it would have been a career-limiting move.”
“A what?”
We were off to an interesting start.
In 2005, I wrote a book, House of Lies, about my four years as a consultant at a top Manhattan firm. It was a cynical guide to an unpleasant world, but Showtime saw something else–the seed of a comedy series of the same name (which debuted January 8). Don Cheadle plays me, or sort of: His character is named Marty Kaan.
And me, Marty Kihn? I’m back to being a “consultant,” helping Showtime’s writers portray the business. Selflessly, I also offered to spend long weekends with Cheadle, perhaps at his place, helping him get to know his character. “Mr. Cheadle prefers,” replied a sensible voice in his office, “to work organically.”
So I spent days yodeling on to the writers about recruiting events, evil partners, felonious expense reports. Then I saw the translation. Cheadle’s Marty is a devious, driven, elegantly dressed partner at a thriving L.A. firm who is irresistible to women. His apartment has a spectacular view of a painted L.A. skyline and is populated by a sassy cross-dressing son I don’t have (yet), with occasional booty calls from a pill-popping ex-wife I also don’t have (yet).
I was surprised at first. What an odd creative process–to keep the setting but change so much within, a standard consultant’s office that someone suddenly has sex in. But for all its extravagance, the show nails consulting on an existential level. It’s a brutal, nomadic, exhausting, morally dubious profession glued together with false intimacy and double-talk. People say things like “We’ll leverage these strong-form learnings into an impactful deliverable going forward,” rather than “We’ll use this info in a document.” Consulting burrows into your psyche. It harms your ability to be straightforward with anyone. With their roving sexual pain clinic, the writers employed Hollywood and advertising’s shared storytelling trick: They heightened power and imbalance. They showed people reacting to desire, not needs. But the core, amazingly, remained.
In the pilot episode, a client asks Marty Kaan a question he has no answer to, so he falls back on what I’ve called the “consultant’s panic button”–turning a question around, to ask what the client thinks. As I watched Cheadle perform as I once did, I recognized the frailty, the realness in the fake. There’s a poetry there, when actors pretend to be management consultants. Consultants have been pretending to be actors for years. We survive on stories.