This was probably the last mistake this particular consultant made at The Butchers...

His first was to turn up for work wearing a brown suit – at The Butchers you always wore dark grey or dark blue suits and you always wore white shirts – not grey, not blue, not striped – only white! Seeing this new consultant arrive for his first day at work, our project manager exclaimed, “Jesus f—kin’ Christ, if you wear brown, you look like sh-t! And who hires sh-t?” At The Butchers you either had to fit in or get thrown out. This unfortunate individual never quite got the hang of The Butchers’ unique culture. He le ft us a few weeks later, apparently to pursue a career outside management consulting.
Over the years, The Butchers did try to evolve. They bought a number of other consultancies to broaden their service offering. In America, they acquired a Total Quality specialist, B……. Associates. I believe that acquisition was quite successful in that it allowed The Butchers to dress up what they did in a cloak of respectability –
namely, Total Quality. In Europe they tried a similar approach and took over a well-known and widely respected human resources consultancy, J………. However, if I remember correctly, within a year, most of the employees of this consultancy had left in disgust at The Butchers’ business approach and the consultancy was declared bankrupt. The Butchers’ culture of highway robbery was so deeply entrenched, that it was difficult to change.
Often The Butchers would be on the verge of disappearing from the market, then the economy would start to stagnate, cost-cutting would come back into fashion and The Butchers would suddenly reappear. In one year in the mid nineties, for example, economic growth in the West started to falter, share prices generally tumbled, but The Butchers’ share price went the other way and doubled, seemingly defying economic gravity – ‘popping’ people was clearly back in fashion. And in 2002, when other consultancies were laying off thousands of staff, The Butchers’ owners were able to report a 53% increase in turnover and forecast further growth. As the chairman, was quoted saying, “The operational consulting that R…… Consulting offers to clients continues to be in strong demand.” (3) Moreover, in 2004 I had a meeting with a senior executive at The Butchers. We discussed the ‘good old days’ and he explained that although they had possibly tried to become more professional, actually very little had changed since I was there almost twenty years earlier.
2. MANAGING BY FEAR AND GREED
Given how awful The Butchers were at that time, you might wonder why anybody would ever work for them. But The Butchers were very smart and were experts at bringing a certain type of person into the company and then controlling them by a well-balanced mixture of fear and greed. Many consultancies seek to recruit from top business schools and leading universities to get the best talent. Some even pay new recruits signing on bonuses of ten to twenty thousand dollars to attract the brightest and the best. In one year, for example, Accenture were offering graduates signing-on bonuses of $15,000.(4) The Butchers had a quite different approach. They hired 22
people who were immediately available and who needed jobs. Talent, education, skills and experience could, of course, be useful at The Butchers, but they were not necessary for you to be offered a job. The Butchers needed cannon fodder, what we called ‘billing fodder’, and they didn’t seem to care too much about the quality or capabilities of their foot soldiers.
When they wanted to recruit, The Butchers put advertisements into middle level newspapers offering exciting careers in the fast-moving and challenging world of ‘International Management Consultancy’. In their ads, they just gave a phone number to contact and never mentioned their company name. When you rang the number in the ad, they didn’t ask who you were, what your qualifications were, what work experience you had or anything. They just took your name and phone number and told you to attend an interview a couple of days later at a hotel near whatever airport their recruiter would fly into.
In most companies and consultancies, you would normally have to go through two or three rounds of interviews lasting at least an hour each and even do a series of written tests before being offered a job. However, when you applied to work for The Butchers, you had just one interview and that interview usually lasted about ten minutes –
sometimes fifteen, but never more. The Butchers’ recruiter had a busy schedule. You were asked a few questions about your background and then told how wonderful a career in “international management consulting” would be.
Ninety percent of those interviewed were offered a job. Within a year, up to seven out of every ten recruits would have left in disgust or would have been fired. But The Butchers didn’t give a damn – they would just hire more billing fodder.
While most organisations have an annual staff turnover of about five to ten percent, at The Butchers staff turnover was up to seventy percent some years. But as they only needed people to go around timing how many minutes clients’ staff took to accomplish each activity in their work, The Butchers didn’t care too much about recruits’ qualities or skills – as The Butchers managers used to joke, all they needed were ‘warm bodies’.
Another favourite Butchers saying was: “we’ll take anyone who can walk and chew gum at the same time”.
The starting salaries paid by Butchers were pitifully low. However, right from the beginning you were told that, once you reached a certain level in the organisation, you became eligible to receive bonuses or ‘ melons’ as they were referred to, presumably to suggest how big and juicy they were. Nobody ever actually said how large the melons were, but the picture painted was of really considerable lumps of money.
In fact, even the highest performing consultants would generally not reach the melons level till after about two years. So given the fact that up to seven out of ten Butchers employees left within their first year, very few ever got close to anything with even the slightest resemblance to a melon, or any other type of fruit. I believe that the melons must have existed at the project manager level and for the people we called Lead Analysts – those who sold Butchers projects – because they were constantly talking about how much money they had made, how much real estate they had bought and how soon they would be able to chuck it all in and escape from The Butchers.