strategery

Your humble blogger participated in a panel discussion at a "global strategy conference" over the weekend that was run by a Management Consultancy Group That Shall Remain Nameless.  The audience consisted of a lot of CEOs, corporate officers, and at least one business coach. 

Seeing as I'd just edited a book related to this topic, you'd think I'd have known what to expect in discussions about business strategy.  However, with my limited exposure to, you know, the for-profit sector, this was quite the eye-opening experience.  Management consultants are kind of like think tanks -- they matter a great deal, but no one is precisely certain why they matter so much. 

Chatham House rules prevent me from revealing anything that was said, but after 24 hours of exposure to cutting-edge management consultant practices, I am confident that I can pass on Ten Timeless Tips for How to Excel at, and Even Enjoy, Management Consulting. 

Ready?  Here we go:

1)  Market Every Piece of Advice as a Product.  Did you noticed that this list is called "Ten Timeless Tips"?  That's mine, baby!  [NOTE:  the Ten Timeless Tips may be updated at a future point in time.]

2)  Know And Repeat Your Buzzwords. This is an absolutely crucial aspect of the job.  The more business jargon you employ, the more your clients will need you to interpret what the jargon means.  For example, at the conference I attended, there was a lot of talk about the need for a "granular" perspective. 

For extra fun, try using neologisms from The Simpsons as your buzzwords.  Example:  "You need to embiggen your strategic perspective!" 

3)  Only Speak When You Have 14-Foot Graphics-Laden Screens Behind You to Amplify Your Points.  Otherwise, just nod sagely.  Bonus tip:  if you're having difficulty finding good graphics, just use this. 

4)  In Every Coversation with a Client, Mention Your Last Trip to China. This is tricky, as you have to be casual about it, while still drivng home the point that you are intimately familiar with the world's fastest-growing market.  Here are some possible ways to get this point into casual conversation: 

• "I was talking to one of our clients in Shenzhen On Monday, and..."
• "I was sunbathing in Chengdu a week ago..."
• "When I went bass-fishing in Chongqing last month..."
• "A funny thing happened when I went to a cockfight in Harbin on Tuesday...."
• "If, like me, you ever find yourself in Tianjin biting the head off of a live chicken...."

5)  Wear Lifts/Heels, and Stand on Risers Whenever Possible.  Remember, height is positively correlated with success in the business world.  To send a non-verbal cue to your customers that you deserve their money, try to sky over them. 

6)  Use Factoids To Distract Amaze Your Audience.  To drive home a point that might encounter pushback from the audience, be sure to snap off a statistic that seems related to your point.  For example, if you're trying to convince your customers that Western Africa is a more promising market than Western Europe, you can say, "Did you know there are more live births in Nigeria than in W. Europe?" 

Some other possibilities:

• "Did you know that in Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for any distance less than 30 miles?"
• "Did you know that the most popular first name in the world is Muhammad?"
• "Did you know that the first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum?"
• "Did you know that Jedi is an official religion in Australia?" 

7)  Put a Modern Spin on Old Cliches.  Example:  "To paraphrase Keynes, 'In the long run, we're all liquefie-- I mean, we're all liquid.'"

8)  Get Your Clients To Work For You.  The point of being a consultant is to get your client to give you the necessary information to do their job better.  Anything that gets them to reveal more local knowledge to you is useful and labor-saving.  Example: breakout sessions!

9)  Synergize!  Mention the various ways that multimedia campaigns can augment and properly orient your business strategy.  Oh, and say Web 2.0 a lot.  Example:  I already built buzz for this post using Web 2.0 -- a series of Twitter tweets.  How awesome is that? 

10)  Leave them wanting more... in exchange for $$$$.  Example:  I have many more tips for those who truly want to know the Management Consultant Way.  Just send a check for $10,000 to the offices of Foreign Policy and you'll receive a registered letter containing the rest of them. 

Denis McDonough is the director of strategic communications for the National Security Council.  I mention this because whatever McDonough has done in the first six months at the NSC, getting Michael Crowley to write this glowing essay about Obama and the NSC in The New Republic was the cherry on top. 

Here are the key paragraphs: 

Whether he is shaping the White House's message on Iran, or personally cajoling Asian leaders to crack down on North Korea, or brokering power deals among NATO allies, Obama has, in effect, been his own national security advisor and secretary of state. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, who had world events thrust upon them, Obama seems to be more in the mold of Richard Nixon or George H.W. Bush--a president involved in foreign policy because of, not in spite of, his priorities and personal interest. "He's very engaged, very hands-on," says his longtime foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, now chief of staff at the National Security Council (NSC)....

To this administration, process is not simply the poor cousin of strategy. Process is what allows harmony and progress amid multiple challenges and viewpoints. Senior Obama aides call it "regular order"--a system that gives the president a diversity of views with minimal infighting and back-channel maneuvering, little leaking to the press, and no public airing of dirty laundry. "Regular order is your friend," says Denis McDonough, director of strategic communications for the NSC. "The system only works if you have adult behavior."

Thus far, the system has confounded skeptics who predicted melees among big-name advisers and conservatives who warned that Obama lacked the experience to govern in such dangerous times. "The level of harmony is just striking," says James Goldgeier, a national security aide in the Clinton White House and a political scientist at George Washington University. There are signs, however, that the administration's approach to foreign policy, however well-intentioned and well-executed, is vulnerable to unexpected challenges--the very kind that are likely to multiply the longer the president is in office.

Read the whole thing. My take is that, while based in reality, Crowley's essay has the whiff of someone who talked to a lot of White House officials (including the NSC staff) but not a lot of other foreign policy figures. Goldgeier's quote is the only outside evaluation.* No one outside the White House is quoted by name. The evidence for foreign policy harmony and NSC control over the policy process comes from... NSC officials. 

Just to be clear, I don't think Crowley is telling tall tales.  The occasional gaffe aside, Obama's first six months on the foreign policy job have been pretty decent --- especially compared to the first six months of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.  But it is odd that in an essay on Obama's foreign policy process, there's very little about Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, or Timothy Geithner in this essay. There's no discussion of reports about Clinton chafing -- and trust me, there are reports about this stuff. There's very little about their reaction to Obama's decision-making process.

On the whole, I hope that Crowley is correct. The best way to ensure a high quality of American foreign policy is to have a president actively engaged in the process, and this piece suggests that to be the case. Still, the only thing I was sure about after reading this essay is that Denis McDonough is very, very, very good at his job.

Well, there's one other thing I'm sure about -- I would have loved to have listened in on this phone conversation: 

[I]n at least one instance earlier this year, Holbrooke received an angry phone call from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel after the diplomat was perceived to have stepped on Obama's public message about the war effort.  

Sounds like a job for the Undersecretary of Go F**K Yourself.

*Oh, and given that Goldgeier was a foreign policy advisor to Obama during the 2008 campaign, I'm not sure I'd call him impartial, either. 

Please do check out Foreign Policy's Book Club discussion of Tom Ricks' The Gamble, his excellent and contrarian follow-up to Fiasco.  Here's a link to Marc Lynch's take, and that is followed by Christian Brose.

My take just went up.  The point I want to stress: 

[T]he ways in which the architects of the surge got their way seems like an exact replay of how the architects of the invasion and initial occupation got their way -- operating through bureaucratic backchannels and endruns, ideologically simpatico think tanks, and -- of course -- Dick Cheney's office. For those of us who want the policymaking process to work, this looks like another fiasco. Petraeus's decision to co-opt the Sunni insurgents, for example, was made without consulting the president. Doesn't that echo J. Paul Bremer's disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military without consultation? Petraeus, Odierno, and Jack Keane might have been right on the merits, but to get their way they bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CENTCOM commander, the State Department, and the NSC interagency process. The Gamble argues that these actors were impediments to the right strategy. All well and good, but what is to stop another cluster of bureaucratic "insurgents" from bypassing the chain of command and telling political leaders what they want to hear on, say, Afghanistan, North Korea or Iran? Is there a need for another, more ambitious version of Goldwater-Nichols?

Go check it out -- and Ricks will respond to all of these comments at the end of the week.