Rating: 
Summary: Part "inside scope" part "wild ride"
Review: As an IT consultant moving to Japan, I picked up Pinault's book in Houston and finished it during my first month in Tokyo. Consulting, and Japan, has changed a lot since Pinault's memoirs were inked, but his trick's of the trade are still valuable tools and his hilarious and memorable stories and anecdotes had me laughing to tears. Perhaps the greatest merit in reading this book is just to witness his intellectual power in use as he works the client cases and navigates his way through the politics and to the pinnacle of consulting. A very sharp and focused glimpse into a world few of have a change of getting to see for ourselves.
Rating: 
Summary: I wish I had written this book!
Review: I admire Mr. Pinault's courage to "burn the bridges", especially in the very secretive world of management consulting. I have been inside the private club of the Big Five in three different countries for seven years now, and I was amazed to see how much I could relate to Mr. Pinault's experiences. It is a fast-paced life, with a lot of fun and hard work, very talented young and ambitious people, and endless opportunities for learning good and bad things (specially lying). But as in Medicine sometimes, ethics are frequently twisted in search for easy money and a quick path to the top. Besides any orthographic errors, I think this book does a good job on exposing the dirty side of the business for both clients and consultants wanna-be. Consultants can be a valuable and necessary help in some cases, but clients need to make sure that they are in control, or they may become the next milking cows. For the MBAs out there, it is a good chance to loose your innocence, because the glamour comes for a hefty price on your values and personal life. First question to make yourself: "what makes me a this Big Time Consultant (as the partner made clients believe that I am), only a week after I joined the firm?" Let me know if you find the answer...
Rating: 
Summary: A SLOG FOR NON CONSULTANTS
Review: In the interests of full disclosure, I would like you to know that I worked as a consultant and later as a project manager at The Boston Consulting Group in Boston from 1971-74. As far as I can remember, I neither experienced nor heard about any of the sorts of problems raised by the author. In fact, senior members of the firm frequently encouraged me to be concerned about ethical issues, and made it easy for me to follow the right course. I have headed my own management consulting firm for the last 22 years, where I can made my own calls on ethics. So I am probably biased in my review. Forgive me for that, but this book called out to me to be read and reviewed. This book should be required reading for anyone about to enter a business career. The reason I say that is because it exposes the reader to the kinds of ethical choices that can arise in consulting, investment banking, law and many other high impact professional careers. If you have your moral compass in front of you, you will probably make different (and possibly better) choices than Mr. Pinault did. If you don't, you may stumble into some places where you will later wish you hadn't gone. The book is also promoted as a source that all clients should consider. If you think of some of the stories as being "what can go wrong during a consulting assignment," that can be valuable. But the book is hardly a thorough look at how to buy and get value from consultants. Here is where I graded the book down one star. I think the blurb and the subtitle are misleading on this point. I drew a different lesson from this book than the author did. I thought that he was a victim of stalled thinking. Whenever a potential ethical problem arose, it seemed to me that he viewed the question as being one of whether he could duck the pressure put on by a colleague or not. Instead, he could have stepped back and considered how an alternative solution could have been designed that would have ethically fulfilled the same purpose for the client and his consulting firm. For example, you need not interview all of your client's competitors flying a somewhat false flag (as he and his teams sometimes did) to find out how your client is doing. There are plenty of public sources that are available to you, and these may even be more reliable in some cases. Also, the client needs enough information to make the right decision -- not every bit of information that can be gleaned (by fair means or foul). So as you consider your future career, be aware that you need to take responsibility for your own actions. Ask yourself how you would feel writing a book about them and sharing what you did with your parents, children, and grandchildren. If you don't like the answer, come up with a better one. If you can't find that better answer, quit and take up with another firm or another line of work.
Rating:
Summary: B2B or B2C: Is that the only question?
Review: In this personal account of his journey through the world of management consulting, former management consultant Lewis Pinault explains why more than a decade of consulting experience drove him to finally revert to his original career dreams and training in space science. Although his tales of questionable business ethics, grueling work schedules, and a fast-paced jet-setting lifestyle, seem almost by design to deliver a grim picture of this industry, they may remain the least of factors which either deter or attract young aspirants to the entry and higher ranks of this trade, just as similarly scathing insider reviews of investment banking paradoxically became marketing tools for that industry. There are many revealing, if often unflattering anecdotes in this book, including one related to management guru C. K. Prahalad, co-author of Competing for the Future, which I have also reviewed on this website. And there is some wisdom to be gained from reading this book cover to cover.
Rating:
Summary: Management Consultant in an integrity crisis
Review: Management consultant in an integrity crisis This book can save users of management consultants millions of dollars. But they can also miss making millions. The stories in the book appear to be true. They show that some of the most important and prestigious consulting companies are far more interested in making money than solving a company's problems effectively and with integrity. The author however also states correctly that good consultants have three unique advantages 1 intensive concentration on a problem 2 no blinkers as the persons working in the company 3 experience of similar problems and their solution elsewhere. These unique advantages when combined integrity can deliver important benefits. The quality of the individual consultant is very important regardless of whatever the most reputable consulting company may claim. Many clients once they decide to start a project want to start quickly which makes it often impossible for the consulting company to make suitable persons available. Therefore a company that engages consultants at short notice takes a high risk as there is no time to properly organize and staff the project. The book documents a considerable lack of integrity in consulting companies and among consultants, with the author being a frightening example. The book is also useful reading for consulting companies that wish to operate at a high level of integrity. An interesting issues is strategy development and gathering information about competitors. The book gives dramatic examples of how is "stolen". Every company worth its salt is benchmarking the performance of its products against the competitors'. Reverse engineering, that is dissecting a product of a competitor and figuring out how one can do the same or better is an accepted practice. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was proud of the ideas he had "stolen" from others. Headhunters often search for candidates among competitors. Where does legitimate information gathering stop and stealing starts? This is not the kind of issue on which this book gives any guidance.
Rating:
Summary: Consultants, clients and potential consultants,
Review: My recommendation is that Lewis Pinault's book carries an appeal for consulting clients, anyone considering a career in management consulting and those already navigating the industry. I appreciated the writing style, consulting industry content, as well as the in-depth look into the glamorous and often not-so glamorous lifestyle of a management consultant.
This book was difficult to put down. Both entertaining and informative!
Rating:
Summary: Consultants, clients and potential consultants,
Review: My recommendation is that Lewis Pinault's book carries an appeal for consulting clients, anyone considering a career in management consulting and those already navigating the industry. I appreciated the writing style, consulting industry content, as well as the in-depth look into the glamorous and often not-so glamorous lifestyle of a management consultant. This book was difficult to put down. Both entertaining and informative!
Rating:
Summary: interesting points, but in need of editing
Review: Postives
-makes many valid points about greed and unscrupulousness in consulting and the toll it takes on both people who work for the industry and companies that hire these firms
-gives helpful interview advice for people interested in working for these firms ;-)
-section about living in Japan before starting a consulting life v. interesting
Negatives
-self-righteous attitude--he works as a lawyer and used to live in a fraternity--not to stereotype, but I'm sure anyone who has been in both places has seen, perhaps not necessarily participated in, A LOT more than Pinault details in his book
-long rants about issues which may have personal significance but fail to advance plot (ex: weight loss working in singapore office, ex-wife's English class). Ironically, these anecdotes showcased the author's social ineptitude more than revealing anything about consulting.
Rating:
Summary: What did you expect?
Review: This book gives an entertaining story of the author's career in consulting. 13 chapter summaries teach how to work with consultants without being taken advantage of. Readers may like the author or not but I don't see what else people expect from a book.
Rating:
Summary: Fear and Loathing on the Consulting Trail
Review: This book is part Michael Hammer (Reengineering the Corporation), and part Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing). Lewis Pinault's drug of choice: adrenalin, adrenalin generated by the fast-paced life of management consulting. Other reviewers have missed this obvious fact: the demons in the title are Pinault's own. But they are also his personal demons writ large onto the organization's psyche. What the psychologist and poet R.D. Laing did for the individual and schizophrenia, Pinault has done for management consulting and "organizational madness" - he has made the experience of corporate consulting madness comprehensible, if not understandable, without providing a specific treatment or cure, and without judgment, beyond his personal accountability. For myself, a low level consultant operative (an IT contractor of some thirty years experience), I can attest to witnessing from the trenches many of the behaviours Pinault delineates. Many times what I saw from the high powered consultants made no rational sense from my own or my client's points of view, but I dismissed my lack of sight as simply the shortcomings of my vantage point. With impeccable education, credentials, and experience, Pinault has provided the bird's eye view, the proverbial 20,000 feet high look at the consulting landscape below, and now it turns out I was right all along. The only "rationality" is to make more money for the high powered consultants; nothing else makes sense, including why so many clients put up with it. The prose describing Pinault's experience is sometimes difficult to navigate, as if he has too many ideas in his head all at once, and must sputter them out before he forgets even one. And the "consulting tracts" of strategy that close each of Pinault's chapters are not easy to parse, being somewhat abstract and overly-laden with "management speak". But they are the keys to understanding the real world strategies used by management consultants to pick the pockets of all but the most savvy clients. "Business Process Reengineering", as practiced by the big boys, is not Michael Hammer's variant, but a perversion. Pinault reveals it for what it really is: inane exercises in chearleading, brainwashing, camouflaged reductions in force (staff cuts), cost-shifting (rather than real elimination of wasteful processes), and the sleight of hand by which process detail is alternately revealed and concealed. Consultant work that adds real value to the enterprise and to its end product or service, is left undone, and that need for added value remains, until someone else, with more integrity and more sharpened knowledge, performs that substantive task. Treat this work not as a scholarly treatise on management consulting, nor as an ethical rant, but rather as one man's personal journey from career madness to sanity. As such, it is unrivaled. Thank you, Lewis Pinault! What you have done will help keep me sane for the rest of my career!
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