House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time

by Martin Kihn

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 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!

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management, Biography, History, Media Tie In, Finance

281 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Martin Kihn is a writer, digital marketer, dog lover, balletomane and spiritual athlete. He was born in Zambia, grew up in suburban Michigan, has a BA in Theater Studies from Yale and an MBA from Columbia Business School. His articles have appeared in New York, the New York Times, GQ, Us, Details, Cosmopolitan and Forbes, among many others, and he was on the staff of Spy, Forbes, New York and Vibe. Until recently, most of his writing could be called satirical or snarky, meticulously researched and office-based.

In the late 1990's, Kihn was Head Writer for the popular television program "Pop-Up Video" on MTV Networks and was nominated for an Emmy for Writing. He lost to "Win Ben Stein's Money," decided to quit writing and got into business school. Ironically enough, the tragicomic world of American business, where everybody seemed to be speaking an impressive language that was not quite English, and not quite clear, provided him with a whole new vein of source material, and his writing career really took off.

Kihn's first book was a humorous expose of the consulting industry called "House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time" (Grand Central 2005), based on the three years he spent working for a large consultancy. The Economist said "a more entertaining book about business is unlikely to appear for a long time," and Salon.com called it "exceedingly smart and funny," echoing Publishers Weekly's reviewer, who declared the book "highly intelligent and deeply funny."

Former co-workers and pinheaded career consultants were less amused, however, spamming Amazon.com with one-star reviews and all but sabotaging the book's chances in the marketplace.

Enraged but unbroken, Kihn reemerged a few years later with a grotesquely satirical stunt-memoir called "A**hole: How I Got Rich & Happy By Not Giving a Damn About Anyone" (Broadway Books 2008). The premise of this reality TV-type firebomb was that a guy who is too nice to get ahead in business (aka Marty) decides systematically to turn himself into a pricktard and reap the rewards. Film rights were sold to Warner Brothers, where it is in development, and Booklist raved "Kihn's got a great ear for dialogue - and a comedic sense worthy of Second City."

For reasons that elude the Author, "A**hole" became a publishing phenomenon in Germany and Austria, sitting for months on the Der Spiegel bestseller list and causing his German publisher to proclaim him "the David Hasselhoff of satirical non-fiction." Notes from his legion of German fans lead some to suspect Kihn's gossamer irony was lost in translation.

Kihn is married to the singer-songwriter Julia Douglass. Her most recent projects include a series of brilliant one-minute animated songs about cooking called ChefDoReMi.com. After twenty years living and working in New York City, the couple recently relocated to Minneapolis, where Kihn works as a digital marketing strategist for a well-known agency.

"Bad Dog: A Love Story," marks the emergence of a mature writer at the height of his powers. At its heart is an intensely charismatic, terribly-behaved 90-pound Bernese mountain dog named Hola. After a shattering personal crisis, Kihn decides to train Hola and together they earn their Canine Good Citizen certification from the American Kennel Club. It's a journey of redemption, as together man and dog reclaim their lives by working toward a common goal.

Reviews

[Chris Infanti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up after seeing the first episode of the Showtime show it inspired...and I'm kind of conflicted about how to rate it. So first off, full disclosure: I've been a consultant for the better part of 6 years now, with 1 year or so in the type of environment the author describes (management consulting). Kihn describes his two years as an associate at a top-tier firm...never named in the book, but only took a little Googling to find out it was Booz Allen. It's written in a comedic style, bouncing from topic to topic (client engagements, travel, the ubiquitous influence of McKinsey and Harvard Business School, to name a few) with some existential flights of fancy thrown in for good measure. Even though it's obviously exaggerated for laughs, a lot of his observations rang true, and he actually does a good job of explaining what a consultant actually does (still mysterious to many of my friends).

That being said, the book drags in a bunch of spots (especially a tiresome look at business books towards the end). The chapters where he describes client engagements are where the book is at its best...Kihn strikes a nice balance between letting you in on the details of the work while being sure to highlight the absurdity of said work whenever he can. The final chapter where he details his stint at an auto parts manufacturer that led to his undoing is especially entertaining.

In summary: this is probably a 3 or 4 star book if you're a consultant and feeling jaded at work, but dock it a star if you're blissfully unaware of what exactly Mitt Romney did for a living before he shifted gears to public service.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you buy a cookbook, you don't want to read about gardening. If you buy a book that promises to tell you how "management consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time" you want to read juicy stories, true examples, and some tips on how to protect you from consultants. Too bad Kihn's book title is grossly misleading. There is not a single case study or proof of a consulting company lying to its clients in his book.

The author gives his account of life as a (junior) consultant. He does so in a very funny and engaging fashion. Kihn reveals many aspects of how consultants feel every day and what they encounter both as team members as well as on the client's site. Thus the book is a good read for people who think about entering a consulting career, though less for managers who engage consultants. Beware - just because Kihn did not like the consulting business does not mean that the reader or job applicant might not like working in the consulting industry. Many of his dislikes might be related to the company he worked for...a company he never dares to name in the book. For example, Kihn loathes team dinners with his colleagues, while most consultants I know love team dinners because they allow everybody to relax and summarize the day's work over drinks and food. Kihn is at his best is when he talks about the consulting life with regard to hotels, rental cars, and maximizing frequent flyer miles.

The book could easily stand on its own feet with a more honest title like "My short life as a management consultant - some truths of a less than glorious career" or similar. It is surprising that Warner Business Books and their editors would allow such a gross mismatch of the current book title and content.

[Paul Bachner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very Disapointed

I was a big fan of the television show and not a fan of consultants, so this book would have seemed ideal to me, but it never delivered on its promise. I was hoping for fun stories of big consulting jobs with nothing to show, but 90% of the book is just the author whining about how much he dislikes his job and the bad morale after the dot com crash. They weren’t really strikes,more like vignettes with no a-ha moment or insight.

Don’t take my word, listen to what the author wrote (inside the book)
“Another book you don’t have to read is this one—House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time. It is absolutely critical that you buy a copy or two, of course, just to have around the house, like a quilted blanket or a nice warm puppy. But mucking your way through all the blather may not be necessary.”

Save your time and skip this one.

[Linda]

Wrong ISBN - I am reading the current version with the way-cool Showtime cover.
But learning something and chuckling along the way.
Martin Kihn is a master with language. Dry wit, understated. And I'd say that even if I were not doing publicity for him.
Love this. And love the Showtime series (at least so far) based on the book.
There's a lot of food for thought in here. You could take some serious business advice (the Seven Rules of Client Confidentiality and the Two Panic Buttons) and you can take those same items as satire. It's useful. And funny at the same time.
A win-win! ;-)

[Trinh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious! Feels like a consulting version of Leveraged Sellout. For a more "insider" read I'd strongly recommend "Consulting Demons" by Pinault.

[Y. · Rating 3 out of 5]

PSA - this book has very little in common with the TV series, besides the "management consulting" bit, so don't bother if that's what you're looking for.

Yes, management consultants have a bad rap, perhaps deserved (maybe perhaps not). But the thing is, companies that hire these types of consultants (i.e., from the big three or so consulting companies) are largely those who can more than afford to throw away millions of dollars. (especially because they squirrel away their money overseas, and don't pay taxes?) And so they do, maybe to fix certain parts of their businesses or gain some type of efficiency somewhere... but also to "validate" the personal agenda of whomever solicited these services, no matter how indefensible the agenda is, business-wise. So yeah, MCs steal your watch and then tell you the time, but sometimes you give/gift them your watch for them to tell you the time.

I'm not a super fan of management consultants myself, but I feel like Kihn "humanized" these employees a bit.

[Ankur Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely accurate representation of the nuances of corporate consulting with the hilariously bang on specifics

[Rajesh Israni · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are over half a million management consultants around the world, and they all gripe when asked the single common question wherever they go: "What is it that you actually do?". Well, they are capable for entering in any organization, monitor its business & people for a period like an big-brother, and then using graphs, algorithms, slides and a jargon render an image that the client had already known but had never accepted it. Its like giving a $100 bill to some bystander on the street and requesting him to show you the mirror and tell "how you look?" The bystander then takes the $100, looks at you and says: "You look screwed. Pay me more and I will show you what the damage is and how to fix it". By the time you have paid the fees to know how you look, you are out-of-money and most probably out-of-business or out-of-job. So, "Problem Solved!". They smartly expedited your fall and relieved you completely of the enormous stress you carried. They didn't solve your problem, but eradicated the problem itself. How about that, isn't it genius?

Martin's book is witty, dark humored and an entertaining business book on the management consulting world and is inspired from his years of experience working as an consultant in an unknown top-level consulting firm. Martin Kihn holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree from Yale. The book can be looked upon as a biography of a Management Consultant who has just entered the consulting world fresh out-of-college and is trying to understand his new profession and the people around him. In doing so he learns about the nature of client-consultant relationships, the extra-perks that come with being an consultant, and the several disadvantages of having to perform more than 100% while working in an environment where you feel out-of-place every moment of your job, have several eyes monitoring your every job-activity, and have to guard their words and actions very closely.

Martin talks about the different types of individuals (roles) and their personalities that are stereotypical in consulting firms, starting from "Associate consultant" to "Partners and Sr. Partners".

Martin weaves in candid tales from his consulting experience to explain the inner and outer workings of consulting firms. Like, the clients who bring ambiguous problems along with their extra baggage of internal politics, then there are the firms Partners who suck the remaining life out of the team with their Team-dinners (despised by every consultant). They use it as a forum to blast their egos and reminiscence their glory by sharing past tales of so called successful projects.

The author decribes his consulting employer as an unbalanced organization with no functional structure and a legacy of old-fashioned political hierarchy. He uses different situations and stories that represent the traits of consultants and throughout the book spats dirt on McKinsey by comparing it against other consulting firms. The resulting picture that builds is that McKinsey is the biggest crook in the management consulting world.

His work environment is a secluded corner in the clients warehouse. His personal life is almost as bad as his professional. His overall life completely dispels the glamorous myth of the globe-trotting and points-collecting consultant.
He has become a road-warrior, remains away from home for weeks and goes through the torturing ritual of airport security, hotel, car rental and airport check-ins/check-outs every week.
He calls his hotel as "Homstel", which is another way of saying that the Hotel has become his Home.

In summary, the book can be looked upon as another rock being hurled in the hailstorm of consultant bashing with lots of humor, entertainment, information and real-life stories of consulting. Nevertheless, its a book for everyone and would certainly humor you regardless of which side of the fence you are - client or consultant or spectator alike.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Q:
He’s getting giddy. You wonder if you have ever seen anyone so tired. He’s so tired, Mr. Ribbletropp, that’s he’s shot out the other side of tiredness into a land of strange objects. Like slides. (c)
Q:
At 20 percent growth per year, starting at its current base of about ten thousand consultants, McKinsey will employ every single man, woman, and child in America as soon as May 2060. Fifteen years later, the firm will have to look to other planets for its customers, for every person on Earth will be a McKinseyite. (c) LOL!
Q:
They run the model. In any consulting engagement, the model—pronounced The Model—is the nexus of power. It is an Excel workbook, or multiple workbooks, that is built carefully over a period of weeks with an elaborate cross-mesh of references and formulas so complex it is only really understood by its maker, and often not even by her. The model is a holy thing, like Nomad in Star Trek. It accepts your offerings and issues its cryptic response, which is never questioned, only puzzled over. (c)
Q:
McKinseyites dress in black. They wear black suits and crisp white shirts and thin black ties and walk together like the men in Reservoir Dogs. They are the Men in Black. Long after others abandoned jackets and ties, they persist. BCG, Bain, Booz Allen Hamilton—the three B’s they consider their closest competitors—all three have built B-business-casual workplaces. But not McKinsey. They are taller, smarter, better looking, and better dressed.
But are they really better?
Their work is certainly simpler than your firm’s. Despite being the only management consultancy with a full-time graphics “guru” on staff, McKinsey churns out presentations as plain as any on the planet. There are few words on the page, in large fonts. There are graphs and boxes here and there with straight lines and a minimal use of color. Clip art is vanquished. Curved arrows and “starburst” patterns so beloved of cubicle jockeys are avoided. Every inch of every slide says “We are strategic thinkers. We are the avatars of Truth. We are the Oracle. These are our words.”
...
For simpler slides, true or not, have the advantage of being much easier to create. The clean boxes and fourteen-word messages seem to say “We leave all the really complicated hard work we did off the slide, because you couldn’t understand it. Here’s the bottom line.” (c)
Q:
She laughs a lot—an awful lot for someone who is so obviously a miserable wreck. But then who are you—? (c)
Q:
Consulting Craft Skills for a Well-Stocked Tool Kit
1. Ability to give—and, more important, to receive—erroneous feedback from colleagues and partners
2. Ability to speak with authority about topics of which you are ignorant
3. Intimate knowledge of the consultant’s “lingo”
4. Knowledge of basic mathematics, specifically:
a. Subtraction
b. Addition
c. Multiplication
d. Nonlinear multivariate logistic regression (optional)
Q:
They hired a consultant. That consultant haunted the halls for a few weeks talking to the war-wounded and the battle-weary… and she reported back that what everybody needed was not an end to the madness, no, what they all needed was a week in the woods of New Jersey with their top-tier colleagues from around the world telling one another in excruciating detail just exactly what it is about them that makes them so difficult to work with. (c)
Q:
“What do we know about Jason?” you asked her in what you hoped was a calming tone.
“Fuck all. Nothing. We know his name is Jason and here’s his number and we’re calling him.” (c)

This is one best-ever speech:
Q:
She says this:
Thank you for coming. Today I’d like to socialize our sanity check and robustify the straw man we set up to drive your strong-form learnings going forward. As you know, when we ramped up the pod and began to iterate on the so-what’s, we architected a baseline without boiling the ocean or reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day—net net—our key take-away was that the environmentals in this space are target-rich, and with the right learnings we could chunk out a deck that laid out the red light/green light to top-line growth. We knew this gap analysis was far short of a grand unifying theory, but we liaised with the stakeholders and put a chinning bar up. After a few revs, we got some reasonable pushback that—while our hypotheses were sufficiently outside the box—they were also sporty, and perhaps even off the reservation. Our worry bead at that point was that we were populating a deliverable, but we were not far enough along the curve—and may even, frankly, have been building a mag-a-logue that couldn’t pass the red-face test. Off the record, it was largely PIOUTA and FHA.
[long pause for laughter]
So we did a process check—and a bio break or two [more laughter]—and we decided our journeyline was suboptimal. We got no sat from the client team. A realization came that we were noodling around in la-la mode while we were in reality being incentivized to plug in our skillsets and knowledgeware to drive step change. We were visioning the incrementals, though we had been tasked to blue-sky rich change and drill down to the bogey of really opening the kimono. Once we understood the disconnect, we had a food fight with the summers on the farmer’s math [titters]… and we did what we had to. The stakeholders threw up on the process deck, and we were on receive. We needed to vision this wasn’t the moral equivalent of being the stuckee on a cactus job in a pre-Excellence ecosystem. No—we needed to make a five-forty to keep our cadence true north.
[pause for water and approbation]
The pod remained convinced there was a burning platform, but didn’t have the bandwidth to go into a black factory and blow up the paradigms with a white paper. Ultimately, we fell back on our core competency—we did a bounceback into crunch mode, and reached for your internal capital to take on a brain dump and data dump. With all the air cover we called in, the engagement became a kind of deathmarch into la-la land. But we didn’t want to end up as new alums.
[she chuckles, alone]
Our journeyline took on a lot more granularity. We got better visibility into the real drivers of our exposure, and decided it was game over if we didn’t change the optics. So we did that, and some client education. We knew this particular knowledgeware could have knock-on effects—and could even hockeystick into an advance, or some afterwork. It was determined by the SAs to pro-act and risk the pain zone. They pinged the practice area internal thought leaders and got some key parachutage into the critical path. After that, we were able to avoid a showstopper by assembling a series of work streams to craft a deliverable with a true end state vision.[she looks directly at the audience, pausing for effect]
What we need now is your buy-in for the warm handoff and a warm fuzzy—not to mention the call up for afterwork! (c)
Q:
You, in fact, are taking notes. You’re always taking notes that you will never look at again. It is a method of distancing yourself from the unpleasantness around you, and it’s common. You have noticed that the tenser the meeting, the more frenzied is the note taking—all around. When the partner breaks out the notepad, that is a sign the meeting has become a disaster. (c)
Q:
For years after the firm was founded, Bain consultants had no business cards—and not because they couldn’t afford them. McKinsey consultants are referred to even in some internal documents only by a first name and an initial, like recovering sexaholics. To your knowledge BCG has never publicly admitted to having a single client. (c)

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Representative of the inanity of life as a mgmt consultant. Hilarious and depressing.

[Enzo Nicolini · Rating 2 out of 5]

El libro que inspiró (con harta libertad) la serie homónima con Don Cheadle sobre la vida de un grupo de consultores de estrategia no es de ficción (al menos no formalmente). El escritor Martin Kihn (en la serie se llamaba Marty Kaan) es un guionista de TV con formación en teatro que en un momento decidió darle un giro a su carrera y hacer un MBA en la U de Columbia. De ahí entró a trabajar a una consultora de estrategia que no se nombra pero que según la leyenda sería Booz Allen, y escribió este libro para vomitar de manera satírica todo lo que encontraba absurdo del rubro en que se había metido: el vivir entre hoteles, las comidas obligadas con los otros consultores del grupo al final del día, cómo el tandem McKinsey - MBAs de Harvard dominaban la economía gringa en el siglo 20 y cómo ahora dominan la del mundo, el distinto status entre consultores de estrategia y los más técnicos (ej. de tecnología), cómo engrupir con matemáticas de grandes números y presentaciones marketeras, etc.
No es un gran libro, pero entretiene, sobre todo a los que hemos tenido la oportunidad de lidiar con esta estirpe profesionalmente.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and entertaining peak into consulting life, highlighting the various absurd characteristics of this industry. As a management Consultant myself, I reckon it's more entertaining when you this line of work, as some things can seem unstructured, rambly or random for an outsider (from staying in hotels every week, adhoc requests, corporate jargon, points, making up stuff and repackaging existing data). It was great for me though, a nice reminder to not take this work and yourself too seriously.

[Wekoslav Stefanovski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rambling, with no structure or point. Yes, the emperor has no clothes, but everybody knows that. It's kinda truism that management consultants have, at best, dubious results. So what?

And what's the need for all the diatribes that constant travel is a pain-in-the-ass, and that points are a scam? And "What's the deal with airplane food".

A few of the case anecdotes were fun and easy to read, but the rest has the quality of a seldom written and never read teenage diary.

[Jong Rak · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an entertaining read. Does the book hold serious literary value? I don't think so. But neither do all the other business books that have sold millions of copies. Marty provides some serious cynical commentary into the world of consulting and the ending is poignant. Great book to keep you away from doing what you're supposed to do.

[Sneha Bhargava · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s probably the shittiest book I’ve ever read, there is no storyline. Snippets of conversations and words have been put together in the form of a book. If someone were to ask me what did you just read, my response would be a book about consulting that didn’t make sense. A McKinsey way is a better book about consulting and I rated that a two I believe.

[Anthony L · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book seems so erratic with barely any connection to its title that I come here hoping to get some enlightenment on what it is all about. Discovered that it has something to do with a show not shown in my part of the planet. Still, I doubt it would help. So, my advice is don't waste time bothering to read it. It is erratic, disorganised and really quite pointless.

[James Cowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really should be a part of business school reading lists. A decent business education that pulls back the veil of, not just management consulting, but the deification of business 'titans'. You could read this book and come away sounding like you actually know what you're doing - which is the point.

[Matt Rennie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gift from my boss at work. This was an interesting read. I felt like it marginalized what the profession does, however, it is done in humor and should be treated more so as a humor book vs. a business book. At the same time, there are some tricks and tips in here that I found valuable.

[Antti Haapalahti · Rating 3 out of 5]

The pacing of the book was somewhat off beat in some locations, and would liked to get more detailed story on especially the last chapters, but overall a peek to a life of a consultant should not be overlooked upon.

[Glenn Burnside · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satirical, cynical, hard to gauge how much is true and how much is farce. Obviously the TV show diverged wildly from this source material. Reading this and "The McKinsey Way" at the same time is a fascinating study of seeing the same facts spun in two very different directions.

[Rabea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast read and terribly amusing. It humanizes consultants and contextualizes consulting so well that you’ll probably work with consultants more effectively if you read it. No, the book does not contain PowerPoint add-ons or templates. I haven’t watched the show.

[Oneeb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent book - gives some insights into the consulting word but written from a pessimist's point of view while highlighting the flaws in consulting industry with toxic partners and ruthless clients.
As a management consultant, I understand how difficult the job is but the pros outweigh the cons.

[Tom Mcquillen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a little cynical - massive chip on the shoulder about McKinsey, and a lot of whining.

[Jose Mari · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a good way to laugh at things you do

[Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally amusing, but ultimately not funny enough or interesting enough to justify reading it. Very few commonalities with the Don Cheadle/Kristin Bell show.

[Norman Xiong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of truths, didn't like his style of writing.

[Atlegang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Confusing Book

[Nirali · Rating 2 out of 5]

Glad to report that after a long time I have come across another book with a better tv show than the written material itself.

[Marshall Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good satire and things to think about

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Working for one of the firms mentioned in this book (though not myself a consultant), I was really expecting to spend a lot of time smirking and laughing at how true it was. And sure, I did some of that, but what I ended up doing more of was missing the energy of the tv show that's based upon it.

I mean, look: I know it's not fair to compare a pay-TV show to a nonfiction book. But this is management consulting! What other profession could possibly share stories so crazy, you'd swear they couldn't possibly be true? And yet I feel like the real Marty Kihn ends his story where it gets the most interesting. And because it's a nonfiction book and not a TV show, I won't know what happens next unless he writes a sequel: is he still consulting? Where did his next engagement find him (in the hierarchy especially)? What happens next?!