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Archive for the 'Insider Views' Category



Introducing, my idol

Published on May 30, 2008

Dominique Mars of the glim-glam consulting firm Mars & Co. Yes. He is my idol. He is such a complete and total dickhead, you should see him in action. Even I haven’t mastered such an incredible and memorable introduction to my entire firm.
Now presenting the 20th Anniversary Presentation from Mars & Co.:


John

Published on February 2, 2008

“Do you mind if I stand on your desk?” I didn’t listen for the response.
It’s been one hell of a month. My new client, John, was helpful and full of data. In our fact-finding sessions he didn’t respond with the usual feigned concern and oft-repeated “I really have no idea,” that comes [...]


Receipts: Round One

Published on October 28, 2007

A few brash, young, Type A consultants (are there any other kind?) sent us a few of their receipts and I’d like to share a couple that we’ve received thus far. We generally reply to any editor submission we receive since billing 60+ client hours per week cannot practically be 60+ actual hours of work [...]


Shame on Bain’s Lame Claim

Published on October 7, 2007

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 [...]


[Insert your firm name here]

Published on September 6, 2007

Reading my all-time favorite magazine, Consulting Magazine, clearly the “Flagship Publication of the Consulting Profession,” I was alerted to a recent article which was a “one-on-one” with Scott Hefter of PRTM and may I point out that if you simply replace any reference to “PRTM” in the article with [your firm's name] you will [...]


Debunking Consulting Myths

Published on August 24, 2007

“Consultants distract, demoralize, and otherwise slow down your best people.”
Of course we do! We’re there to light a fire under people’s asses, to re-shape your company to be better than it was before, which was failing. Besides, if your best people were really the best, then you wouldn’t need us in the first place, now [...]


The IT Bathroom

Published on July 17, 2007

We have a guest posting today, with my own observations following. -MensaMember
Semi-Valuable Observations: The Men’s Bathroom
There has been a lot written on how to tell what is going on in an IT shop. Some theories talk about looking at the number of Dilbert cartoons that are posted on the walls of people’s cubicles or [...]


The Abbreviated Guide to PowerPoint

Published on June 27, 2007

Consultants are truly in love with their own bullshit, but there’s only one thing they love more: spewing all of this bullshit into a PowerPoint presentation, also known as a “Deck”, to share with their blind-sided clients. Given the common belief that a deck’s value is proportional to its size, the euphemism was almost certainly [...]


First-Year Analyst: Ignorance is Bliss

Published on May 14, 2007

I remember when I first started in consulting. My Firm was a large firm, very prestigious, and all of us were together in our ’start group’ with sparkles in our eyes, and our Type A engines all fired up. We thought we were the shit and that we were gonna be telling helpless, desperate executives [...]


The Translations of a Statement of Work

Published on March 26, 2007

FC_Consultant posted a comment in our Consultantese section of a fine example of consulting bullshit that is regularly spewed out by consultants. We felt compelled this fine piece of work into English.
STATEMENT OF WORK
TITLE: Transparency Initiative Support for Collaborative Relations Efforts
PURPOSE: The purpose of this task order is to provide policy analysis and assessment, and [...]