Management Consulting I
George started his sales career in New York selling Rainbow vacuum cleaners in the tenements of Spanish Harlem north of 96th Street and east of 5th avenue. The Rainbow vacuum sucked air and debris through a chamber filled with water and was also available with wet mop and floor waxing attachments. His pitch included demonstrating the floor waxer where he would furiously polish the victim's kitchen floor working up to a climax where he would feign an over enthusiastic shout "Look at that fuckin' shine!", He would then begin offering massive apologies for having gone off the deep end.
Somehow George transitioned from Rainbow to running his own data processing consulting firm and at one point sold a major project to Manufacturer's Hanover Bank in New York City. He sold them a package that he had dreamed up that purported to detect and remedy weaknesses in day-to-day operations. It was of course complete horseshit. Not only did the Bank buy this piece of crap but the leading national computer publication at the time (DataMation) featured the project with a full cover layout and lengthy article.
The product that George sold to an embarrassing number of senior executives was a hypothetical construct that had no relationship to the real world and offered no benefits whatsoever. Working with George installing these packages made it crystal clear to me that incompetence is deeply rooted at all levels, including the top level, for all sectors of industry and government. George had a fire and brimstone sales pitch where he would threaten executives with total devastation if they did not allow us to come to their rescue.
The package was a lengthy questionnaire filled out by all employees asking them to check off what they were responsible for, what tasks they performed and what training they had received. The responses were matched up against profiles that were supposed to serve as ideal models having been produced by efficient top performers. In fact, George, with no computer experience whatsoever, had made up the profiles. When the questionnaires were tabulated, George would present the results to the client's executive committee by frantically pacing back and forth, screaming about the 3 sins (omission, duplication and ignorance) that were about to scuttle the ship. Omission was any of the bogus items on the questionnaire that no one selected; duplication was any item that had been claimed by multiple employees; and ignorance was any training that went unchecked. It is of course impossible for 2 people (let alone several hundred) to complete a questionnaire without there being omissions and duplication. Coupled with this is the fact that no employee wanted to fill out the damn questionnaire and English was not the native tongue for over half of the employees having recently immigrated from Cambodia, Russia, Philippines, etc.
The beauty of this was of course that the results of the tabulating inevitably made it seem as though the end was near despite the fact that the actual operation was running along smoothly with no more problems than any other organization. There was nothing wrong but George would exclaim such horror as he would work his way through the results the executive members would be terrified. He would always pretend that he had only been handed the final results just prior to the meeting and was looking at the findings for the first time as he reviewed it in front of the executives. Eventually he would spot something really juicy and feign being overwhelmed by shock and shout "Look at that fuckin' duplication!".