Getting Drunk in First Class

Main Entry: ¹bane
Function: noun
1 a : KILLER, SLAYER b : POISON c : DEATH, DESTRUCTION d : WOE
2 : a source of harm or ruin : CURSE  

Now here is a company who understands consulting!  Bain knows how to mislead with statistics.  Some version of the following graphic is always the bain.com hood ornament:

And the accompanying tagline is:

“Companies that outperform the market like to work with us; we are as passionate about their results as they are.”

And what they meant was:

“Companies with excess cash like to hire us; we are as passionate about their thick billfolds as they are.”

WORK WITH : HIRE :: RESULTS : THICK BILLFOLDS

The first time I pulled up the Bain homepage, I knew I couldn’t have been the first to notice this misleading, salacious, sexy bitch of a graph.  Sure enough, a search for “Bain claim outperform” shows that this marketing maneuver is now a poster child for the correlation vs. causation logical fallacy.  If you’ve ever been swayed by the compelling evidence that global warming is actually caused by the global decline in modern sea pirates (http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/), then you should strongly consider hiring Bain to analyze your operations data.  They might just find that your recent profit windfall is due to the periodic alignment of menstrual cycles in your firm.

Right after deciding that Bain’s marketing department was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, I realized that this marketing might be brilliantly effective in its use of a selection bias.  Consider the pitch they made to Bain management:

“Leaders dumb enough to be impressed by this pseudo-statistic will hire us.  Since they have flagged themselves as retarded, we can clearly boost their valuation with balance sheet tricks.  And if this fails?  Then we will not pitch any more work to any client who doesn’t outperform the market enough to prop up our far-flung claims.  After all, the claim doesn’t say, ‘outperform the market 4-to-1 after working with us’.”

Here’s another bullshit quote from a recent bain.com homepage:

Creating Unstoppable Growth
Chris Zook’s book shows managers how to find hidden assets in their company to help renew their core and fuel profitable business growth.

Yes, the book examines how to conceive a profit Godzilla chud-baby using hidden intangible elusive contra-assets. Fucking Unstoppable. Yes, this is possible.  Chris Zook studied Unstoppable at http://www.unstoppable.com/ and learned it had something to do with your “core”.  You like fuel?  How about growth?  Controversial: Yes.  Hell yes.  Fuel the fire.  Grow the fire.  Fire the assets.  Renew the assets.  shhhhhhh - grow. 

What?

Bain’s marketing department needs to watch There’s Something About Mary and learn from the 6 Minute Abs Case Study (© HBS Press) because tomorrow, readers, we will form the Infinite Growth consultancy called Kurse.  At Kurse, our clients outperform the market 16 to 1.  Our dicks out-measure the average by two standard deviations.  Kurse works on the world’s most challenging problems by serving clients including Jack Welch, all of the Fortune 100, the United Nations, all companies working on the cure for cancer, and many of the universal laws of physics.  Kurse and Kompany has no need for marketing campaigns because Kurse’s deliverables are sprinkled with pixie dust.