Business Doctors - Management Consulting Gone Wild Read online

  He collected his thoughts, regained his composure and got himself mentally back in the room.

  “In all our earlier meetings right here in the Dungeon, you guys said it was a temporary phase and that we’d see the situation changing in a few months. It’s been over a year now and we have no idea how badly we’ve been hit.”

  Woody’s rage was palpable. He got up, and started pacing and circling the company – both to vent his anger and to circle the group as the eagle before going in for the kill. The deep rumble of his voice sounded concerned. He realized his team had been taking him for a ride and hiding the bad news. The fact that today none of them made any attempts at false promises made him shudder and realize how bad the business had turned. After all these years of keeping it all under wraps hoping for the tide to turn, they knew it was pointless to keep covering it up. They had been in denial for all these years. But the writing now seemed to be clearly on the wall.

  Alfredo, also from the drug business, had an uncanny ability to verbalize the darkest fears that everyone else had in their minds and as always, made no effort to curb it –

  “We lost three customers last month, and now four more, and all of them moved on to either Nortenos or Surenos – they are getting stronger all the time. And they get their shit directly from Zetas. The small time Russians are also quickly getting into the game. Looks like one fuckin’ big party that no one wants to miss out on…,” he summarized.

  “If this continues, in the next six months most of our top buyers will be gone. Looks like the beginning of the end for us. We are doomed, man, we are so freakin’ doomed. I knew I should’ve taken up that factory job my old man arranged for me when I was still a kid.”

  ‘Captain’ Jacob quipped - “And you should have done that, you wimp, coz you seriously lack the balls or the brains to be in the business…”

  Cutting him off, Woody said, “Ok. I get the message. We are in deep shit. And you know something else? You guys got us into it - and you are going to get us out of it.” Woody stopped walking around and collapsed into his chair.

  “Anyone got any brilliant ideas?” Woody opened the floor, tilted his head back on the headrest of the chair and stared at the ceiling. Traditionally, he had never really proposed solutions to any problems earlier and had always been at the mercy of his trusted men to bail him out.

  Jacob seemed to have an idea in mind and was the first to offer his thoughts. “We need to set an example to our existing clients. Let’s go out there and kill those who’ve left us. We have their names and addresses. We also know where to find them - and when we do, we’ll teach them right for messing with us.” Jacob was not known within the team for his IQ. He was great at hustling innocent young girls and boys into the flesh trade and had reliable sources for fresh recruits but lacked any real brilliance when it came to solving problems. Woody gave Jacob a killer look, but did not say anything.

  Raymond, the head of the casino business, was not privy to Woody’s expression from where he sat. Encouraged by the fact that the boss had not killed Jacob yet, he added, “We should also kill the cops who are targeting us -”

  “Don’t be an ass, Ray. That would take us down faster than the Titanic, moron!’ Alfredo argued, “We don’t have any great pull with the cops these days, most of our buy–ins have sold out. Don’t you know that killing a cop is like asking for a bullet through your brain.”

  “Why don’t we gun down the heads of Moe, Harry and Smithers - and also the guys who left us to join them,” a voice pitched in. The energy in the room reached a crescendo, every one incensed and upset, screaming for blood.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Woody roared. “I always suspected your brains were up your asses and now you’re proving it. Obviously, there isn’t anyone in this room who’s got a fucking clue about how bad our situation is and what we should do. I give you a day more to think about this. When we meet again tomorrow, you’d better have some ideas that won’t make me blow your brains out.”

  Subdued, the men made themselves scarce. Woody alone in the Dungeon, poured himself a large peg from the decanter and offered himself to the oblivion of the hard alcoholic beverage.

  * * *

  Woody, for a large, violent man, was physically gentle with his wife. It went against his nature to physically hurt a woman especially one as lovely as Angie.

  Given the morning’s tiff, Angie had dressed to kill, hoping Woody would give in to the temptation. From the raw animal, Woody transformed into a blue-eyed boy eager to please. Whether it was Angie’s smooth skin or the smooth single malt, it had the desired effect.

  Lying in bed after making love, Woody was sated but was still anxious about his businesses’ predicament. He clipped a cigar, lit it and inhaled deeply.

  Angie pulled the blanket over her nakedness, feeling suddenly lonely.

  Today was a rare night, when she had Woody for herself. With her hubby finding solace outside more often than at home these days, she was often left unsatisfied. The fact that Woody was a tiger in bed, made the desire more acute. Angie would often swallow her disappointment, her insides trembling with the need for fulfillment.

  Today, her expectations were different. Angie knew something was gnawing at Woody from within. But she also knew he wasn’t ever going to get her views or her help. She had tried on several occasions to offer her support, but Woody had, politely at first and more firmly in the past few days, asked her to mind her own business and not his. But Angie was made of firmer material and after tonight’s performance, decided to push her luck one more time.

  Eyes unusually bright, Angie twisted towards her husband asking,

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  Woody usually never discussed business with her. But these were not usual times. With huge discomfort, he cursorily explained the Dungeon’s proceedings. Laying bare his business problems was tough on his ego.

  Angie thought for a minute while her husband puffed at the cigar.

  “What do you do when you have toothache?” she queried.

  “What?” Angie’s question seemed totally disconnected from the serious topic that they had initiated. Her query made no sense. Was Angie displaying early signs of short-term memory loss?

  “You playin’ with me?” Woody asked.

  “Humor me, Woody.”

  “Well, I go to a dentist.”

  “And what do you do when one of your key men get held up in jail?”

  “I get my lawyer to bail him out,” Woody shrugged.

  “And when you want to know what you can do with the shitloads of money that your men used to get you in the good old days?”

  “My banker handles it. You know all this Angie, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “All I’m saying is, when you have a problem that you don’t fully understand, you approach an expert for help, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. So?”

  Angie did not respond and allowed Woody to think for a while.

  The extrapolation seemed easy, but it took him a while. “So if I’m facing problems in my business now, do you mean to say there are, er, business doctors who can help?”

  “Yes, there are. They are called management consultants. Sounds a little more sophisticated than business doctor,” Angie forced a smile, hoping it would diffuse the tension a little.

  “And where can I get myself one of them consultants?” Woody was curious.

  “There are plenty of them. Most of the big guys in the business will not even look in your direction when they get a whiff of who’s trying to seek their help. Their reputations are at stake. The smaller ones may not be worth approaching, as they may end up screwing your business worse than your own men. They’ll just speed up your downfall.”

  Over the years, Woody had figured out that his wife was bright, though he wasn’t always sure where she was coming from. He looked at her with new eyes.

  “Well? What do you suggest I do then?”

  “Well, I can draw up a list for you of the usual suspects and you can decide for yourself?”

  “Hmm, I am not convinced that this’ll help, but only to make you happy, sugar. It can’t possibly get worse than this.”

  Angie had been thinking of this for a few months and already knew what to do. Once Woody was asleep, she used the power that she had only recently discovered when during one of the many parties she attended, a nerd looking nouveau billionaire was attributing his riches to the knowledge he had gained from the internet. After that, she had spent her lonesome hours searching for everything she had ever loved. Coming up with the list of business consultants was the easy part – she took two names from the first page of the internet search results, two from the fifth and two from the tenth page on the list and made a mental note of her pitch to Woody the next day.

  The following morning, she got up early, changed to her pink sheer satin thigh length inners, and made breakfast for Woody. Woody got up to the breath of freshly brewed coffee

  “Well, well, well. Looks like I am rediscovering why I fell in love with you, darling”, he said with a gaping mouth as he rediscovered the lust for Angie, seeing her at her seductive best.

  “Oh come now Woody, don’t you have the meeting this morning to take care of? Here, I made a list of six business doctors you can talk to.”

  “Arrghhh…how on this blasted earth am I gonna decide who’s good? Couldn’t you have simply given me the best guys for our job?”

  “Patience, baby – here, let me help you out. The first two you see are the big fish. I don’t think we need to spend so much money. In any case, these guys are steeped in stupid concepts of ethics and morality.”

  “Yes, makes sense. Didn’t you say this last night too?”

  “Did I? Anyway, let’s move down the list.
The next two could be worth a check, but these guys are really wannabes. They are neither the top guys nor the guys hungry for business; if I were you, I wouldn’t even risk calling them!”

  “Alright, let’s get this over with – with this rate, I wonder if you are going to make a fool of me at the end of all this!”

  “Now we come to the real guys. They will probably give you the same expertise but at a fraction of the cost of the big guys. Plus most of them will be willing to at least talk to you. Of the two on the list, I have heard about the last name in the papers. You may want to start with them”

  “Huh, you could have saved me the time and just given their name in the first place. But it’s alright. At least we know who else is out there”

  Woody got up from the table and left to meet his loyal posse.

  Angie smiled. The inception was complete.

  * * *

  Woody walked into the Dungeon at 11:00 A.M.

  “You’ve had your time to think. Any ideas, anybody?” Woody scanned the group quickly. He wasn’t expecting brilliant bursts of creativity from the group.

  “Mr. Woody, Sir, I thought a lot last night and have a few more ideas to share,” started Ray, who had initiated the kill-em-all pitch the previous day.

  Unwilling to hear another boatload of stupid ideas, Woody cut him off short, “We won’t need them. At least not till we speak to the experts.” He paused expecting their reaction.

  “What experts?” Phil asked.

  “I am calling in experts who will help us get back in the game.”

  “Whaddya mean boss?” Ray asked. “You have a tie in with the Army, the Navy? Experts!!?”

  Good. The setup had worked. This was the moment Woody was waiting for. It was time to show them why he was the boss. This is where he could come in and share his wisdom with the rest of the team, in a language the idiots would understand.

  “Let me explain.” Woody sat on the edge of the table and looked intently at one of his goons. “Ray, what do you do when your tooth hurts real bad?

  “I use a spanner, and yank it out real hard. The big ones you get at Walmart for $19.99 work really well.”

  Woody shook his head in despair. Ray wasn’t exactly a top contender for Mensa membership. This was going to be more difficult than Woody had thought. He turned to Alfredo.

  “What do you do when one of your guys gets thrown into the slammer?” Woody looked at Alfredo optimistically.

  “I make sure we kill him before the cops have had a chance to interrogate him and get all our secrets out of him,” Alfredo responded coldly. There was no way his loyalty would permit the cops to use his own ammunition against him or his boss.

  Woody was close to losing his temper, but decided to give it one last shot. He addressed Jacob, “What do you do on pay day, when you get your hands on all that cash?”

  “No brainer, I blow up some of it on booze and stash away the rest in my backyard for a rainy day. I ain’t half as dumb as I appear to be, ya know. So, what’s with the expert story, boss?”

  Obviously this wasn’t going in the direction Woody had presumed. It all sounded so smooth the previous night, with Angie. Maybe it was the ambience. But Woody had no intentions of wearing sexy lingerie or getting in bed with his men, just to replicate the ambience from the previous night. He decided to move on to the main message.

  “Never mind. We’ll need to get in touch with the business doctors to see if they can come up with ideas to fix up this mess. Joe, here’s their contact information. Get them over for a discussion, pronto. And for heaven’s sakes, play it real quiet. I don’t want them knowing that they are getting hired by the underworld.”

  “Won’t they find out eventually?” Joe raised the least nonsensical point of the morning. He was Woody’s Man Friday. He wasn’t responsible for any specific business. But being the boss’s right hand man gave him an exposure to almost all businesses.

  “Yeah, I guess so. But let’s hook them in first. We don’t want them to leave the town before meeting us and never return.”

  Chapter 3

  Michael Schneider was staring out at nothing in particular from the window of his corner office in Santa Monica. It provided a fantastic view of the hills, which would be snow-capped for a greater part of the winter season. On clear days, the ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign would be visible, though the individual letters did not really stand out clearly due to the distance.

  Unfortunately, for Schneider, business itself hadn’t been as fantastic as the panoramic view. Sitting atop a plush thirty-storey tower, Schneider had chosen one of the higher floors. The swish interiors of the office, the great location and the impressive demeanor with which Schneider carried himself could cause any onlooker to be envious of his position. The interiors were done up in classy contemporary décor with pottery art pieces and authentic imitation paintings adorning the nooks and walls. There were open spaces and also a small recreation room to maintain the ‘fun’ factor. This was more of a ruse to project the image of a cool workplace and the room was the least inhabited place in the office. Despite all the apparent extravagance, Schneider was a worried man.

  The monthly business review meeting was expected to start in the next thirty minutes and Schneider wasn’t expecting any fireworks this month either. After having worked with leading management consulting firms in downtown Los Angeles, he had ventured out on his own in the late nineties to launch his own – Schneider Associates.

  In the initial years, business had been great. His clients were mainly technology startups around the area, flush with cash pumped in by venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. In a short span of three years, Schneider’s consulting team had grown from modest beginnings to twenty-five consultants working with roughly twenty clients per year. A boutique, as they called themselves.

  Each project, or study as Schneider liked to call it, could last from anywhere from a week to over a year, with team sizes usually ranging from one to a dozen, sometimes more. It was a strange business, but one that attracted top talent. Most firms hired their recruits directly from the top business schools and trained them to digest flexibility in everything - flexible team structure, flexible reporting bosses, flexible industry expertise and flexible functional roles. The only thing that was non-flexible was a firm’s demand on the individual’s life. But then who said management consulting was for the faint-hearted. The boutique firms were usually started by Partners hoping to have little less flexibility and a little more control – the team comprising of consultants that were already trained by the big guys.

  Recession had spread its net far and wide. The dot com bust was a major blow to the clients that Schneider served. Many of his consultants moved on to greener pastures, few and far to begin with. Fortunately, Schneider and his loyal team, whatever was left of it anyway, had managed to survive the downturn by taking on a wider range of clients across new industries. In a way that was a challenge – clients from new industries expected consultants to have relevant experience, and for a boutique of the size of Schneider Associates, given the constraint on the number of employees – which gave it the boutique feel – they were occasionally stretched too thin. But they did not have much of an option. Now, a decade later, the economy was staring at the possibility of a long hibernation and it seemed like history was repeating itself.

  Schneider was not worried about survival. He had come up the ranks the hard way – not that there was an easy way really, but only a few survived the way to the top. He was concerned about thriving. The recession had caused the exponential growth to flatten out, and Schneider was trying to find ways to keep the uptick going. His plans for expansion had already been choked by the gloomy market – those ideas, for now, were confined to manila folders that were safely put away, in anticipation of better days to come. There were no new projects and the existing ones were on the verge of being wrapped up.