On Hiring Consultants: Advice from a retiring Consultant

 The Economist

I was delighted when you commissioned me to prepare this report for you after our discussion at the club. As a newly appointed chief executive at a Fortune 500 company, a thrilling yet perilous adventure awaits you. I commend your wisdom in choosing to hire a management consultant to guide you on your way. 

I, naturally, would have been ideally positioned, given my many years of experience serving your company’s principal rival. Alas, the time comes in every man’s life when he must hang up his hat and retire to his home in the Bahamas. As my swan song, I have thrown together, as requested, a few thoughts on how to handle my kind. I hope you find the attached 120-page PowerPoint presentation useful. Below you will find a brief summary.

Be ready for the “bait and switch”: Do not be fooled by the eloquent veterans who will turn up to your office to plead for your business. The work will mostly be done by clever but pimply 20-somethings, armed with two-by-two matrix frameworks recycled from client to client. What they lack in wisdom will be made up for in long hours. You need not feel sorry for them. They are cocooned in a shell of fancy meals, lavish hotels and private drivers—at your expense.

At first you will find them to be of no use at all—detrimental, even—as they harry your management team with endless questions and urgent requests for data. Eventually, they will win you over with their brains and gumption—or be quietly replaced. Meanwhile, those grey-haired senior partners will pop by from time to time. Beware.

Watch out for “land and expand”: We consultants are masters of the clandestine sale. If you hire us for a two-month project, it will assuredly take 12. By the time it ends, our tentacles will have spread. Ask for a new company strategy, blink, and we will be cutting your costs, fixing your it systems and tinkering with your supply chain.

Like many other bosses, you may one day tire of our eye-watering rates and decide to poach the cleverest consultants for yourself. We will happily oblige. The most reliable missionary for the merits of consulting is one of our own. The more senior, the better. Hire them, but do not give them the cheque book.

Question everything: Every self-respecting consultant knows that big recommendations demand big numbers. As a rule, divide everything you see by two. Never trust a benchmark; I made up most of mine. And carefully read those endless notes at the bottom of charts. That is often where the dirtiest secrets are buried. Be doubly dubious of any consulting reports your underlings happen to commission, especially when they recommend a bigger budget for said underling.

Take none of the blame: As a freshly minted chief executive, you are undoubtedly brimming with ideas. Many of them are terrible. Some may prove catastrophic. Among the valuable services offered by management consultants is the human shield. Make sure your board knows it was they who recommended the disastrous new product line or the overpriced acquisition. You always had your doubts, but trusted their illustrious reputations. Equally, your consultants may, from time to time, stumble upon a good idea. You thought of it first.

Experiment with polygamy: Your consultants will do their utmost to woo you into exclusivity. There will be much talk of “long-term partnership”. Yet it is a one-sided monogamy they seek. Fidelity is not in a consultant’s nature. Chances are they are already advising your competitors, with only the thinnest of Chinese walls between teams.

Follow their example and hire their rivals, too. Ideally, sit them in adjacent rooms at your offices. Consultants are fiercely competitive, and nothing will better spur them on to even longer reports than seeing their nemeses wandering the halls of your company. If bored, invite representatives of two warring firms to a meeting and watch them tussle for your favour.

As I look back on my career, I am not too proud to admit that I have occasionally fleeced the odd firm. But I maintain that my profession is a noble one. “Impact”, after all, is our industry’s watchword. (Admittedly, I never was quite clear what it meant, but you cannot deny it sounds lofty.)

One final thought to conclude: there is never a problem too big or small for a consultant. That I can confirm from experience. Your bill, including expenses, is attached. Good luck. 

Pakistan ahead of India in Muslim Personal Law

 

Love Jihad in Canada

 

Fatah Ka Fatwa - Episode 6

Women's special

No Second Wife Please - We're Indian Muslim women

Jyoti Punwani in the Hindu

Will the Muslim personal law make polygamy illegal?

When the Bhartiya Mahila Muslim Andolan started working on codifying Muslim personal law, they weren’t sure whether to ban polygamy, or make it conditional. Senior lawyers pointed out that despite bigamy being an offence, Hindu men continued to take a second wife. These women didn’t enjoy the status of a wife, whereas even the fourth wife of a Muslim man had that status.

But the final draft of the new ‘Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act’, released in Mumbai on June 18, makes polygamy illegal. How come? “That’s what Muslim women wanted,” says Noorjehan Safia Niaz, co-founder of the BMMA. “We played the Devil’s Advocate with them, asking them wasn’t a second wife necessary if the first couldn’t conceive, for example. Their reply always was: ‘No. No second wife. No woman should have to share her husband with another woman.’”

Of the seven years taken to arrive at this draft, two were spent talking to Muslim women, most of them poor, uneducated and living in ghettos. It was these women who were desperate for a change, urging the BMMA to “quickly change the law, get us justice.”

But the middle class, supposed to be the pioneer for reform, left Noorjehan disillusioned. A US-returned Muslim in Hyderabad baulked at the BMMA’s proposal to make 18 and 21 the minimum age of marriage for women and men respectively. “It should be 18 for both,” she suggested. Muslim male lawyers in Karnataka saw nothing wrong in a 13-year-old getting married as long as she had attained puberty. But in the bylanes of Bhopal, uneducated Muslim women suggested 21 and 25 instead. “Our daughters graduate at 21,” they pointed out.

“Middle class Muslims kept saying: ‘Don’t tamper too much with the shariat.’ They have well-off families and education to fall back on; the unjust decisions of qazis don’t affect them much,’’ explains Noorjehan. What kept the BMMA going was the response of poor women.

Consultations with these women were held across 10 states where the BMMA has been working, training paralegal workers as arbitrators and providing legal aid. Men would attend their public meetings, and a few would invariably object to their attire (“you are wearing a sari, you haven’t covered your head, you aren’t wearing a burqa — so you aren’t Muslim”), or to their lack of qualifications (“you are not aalims”). One man in Ranchi who objected vociferously to everything, later told Noorjehan, “I agree with everything you say, but if I don’t object, I can’t face my jamaat.” The BMMA took a decision not to consult the All India Personal Law Board and the religious organisations. “They have shown they don’t want change.”

The starting point of this long process was the condition of poor Muslim women, victims of the unIslamic and unjust decisions of maulanas and qazis. The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937 has no specific provisions to be followed, leaving every qazi free to rule as per their understanding of the Sharia. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 lays down grounds on which a woman can approach the court, but few can afford to do so.

Because of this, reformists such as the late Asghar Ali Engineer campaigned for years for the need to codify Muslim personal Law as per Quranic injunctions, which grant women more rights than any other religion does. All Islamic countries have put in place modern personal laws. But in India, the move has always been resisted on three grounds: 1. The Sharia can’t be touched; it is divine. 2. It will be impossible to decide which of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence should be followed in codification. 3. This will be the first step towards enacting a Uniform Civil Code (UCC).

As Engineer never tired of explaining, the Sharia is based on the Quran, it is not the Quran. In India, the Shariat Act was drafted and enacted by the British. The BMMA worked with Engineer on its draft, choosing to base it on the Quran itself. The draft contains verses from the Quran to back its provisions.  

Thus, to decide the minimum age of marriage, the Quranic injunction of ‘maturity’ of the spouses was interpreted as emotional maturity in addition to physical. “Besides, in Islam, marriage is a contract, and a contract can only be between two adults,” says Noorjehan.

The draft makes many common practices illegal, including underage marriage; unilateral, oral and instant talaq; making the woman give up her mehr (dower) and halala, the practice by which you remarry your divorced wife only after she consummates her marriage with another man and is then divorced by him. “This has no mention in the Quran, it’s become a prostitution racket in places like Lucknow,” says Noorjehan.  

Is this the right time to release this draft, given the new government’s emphasis on the UCC? “We oppose the UCC. But we also want to know, when will the right time come to get justice for women? Twenty years back, we were asked to wait as the Babri Masjid was demolished, the community was under attack. Aren’t women part of the community? Ten years back we were told the Gujarat pogrom had taken place. Can these leaders give us a guarantee that 10 years later, there will be a really secular government, and the community won’t be under attack? Secondly, who decides this hierarchy of issues? Let’s tackle all issues: discrimination, security and also women’s rights. Besides, how many of these leaders have worked on these other issues at the grassroots level? It is groups like us who have done so, tried to get the Sachar Committee recommendations implemented and also campaigned against Modi.”

Noorjehan knows it will take the efforts of many groups to get the government to accept the draft. “Let the community debate our draft first. At any rate, for us, the process was as important as the result.”

Is compulsory coupledom really the best way to live?

We are in thrall to the amped-up rhetoric of romance, but the primacy of the couple has political and social consequences

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 February 2013 14.45 GMT

'What we rarely do is question whether pairing off into hypothetically permanent monogamous units … are really where we must all want to end up.' Photograph: Mode Images Limited/Alamy

 

Now that parliamentary sanction finally extends to gay couples who wish to marry, could the floor be opened for a different sort of discussion? As the 10 Best Knickers recommendations, the dinner-for-two vouchers, and well-meaning How-to-Survive-Valentine's-Day-If-You-Don't-Have-a-Date advice tumble out of newspaper pullouts and special "love-and-marriage" issues this week, riffing on poet Adrienne Rich's resonant phrase "compulsory heterosexuality", I think we should talk about "compulsory coupledom".

In this country, we tend to flinch at the mention of "arranged marriages", that process whereby family and friends hunt out a compatible mate for you based on social, religious, lifestyle and economic indicators, or at least, offer you one to choose from a bouquet of options they come up with. Yet we are riveted by reality shows or blind date wedding triumphs, which offer us versions of this controlled mate-choosing but accompanied by the amped-up rhetoric of romance, sexual attraction and individual choice. An economist has just written a book about how market principles might be applied to romance, which people find a bit disturbing because we like to tell ourselves that rationality doesn't enter into the process.

Stories of other people's marriages, whether royal, rich and impossibly perfect or dismally toxic and dysfunctional, keep us in thrall. What we rarely do, though, is question whether pairing off into hypothetically permanent monogamous or even serially polygamous units are really where we must all want to end up. Given its less than inspiring statistical showing: a 50% failure rate and that's not counting unhappy marriages that carry on – the ugly end of the Huhne-Pryce marriage provided the depressing counter-notes to the chorus of joy over gay matrimony – should permanent coupledom really continue to be touted as the best possible way of organising our emotional, sexual and social lives? With tax breaks likely for all who obtain state-regulated matrimony, gay or straight, and with pressure to extend civil partnerships to straight couples – are there any dissident relationship possibilities left?

In her bracing polemic, Against Love – required reading for anyone desperately seeking an antidote to this week's excesses of retail heavy breathing – Laura Kipnis observes that refusing to participate in the required regimen of modern love and its elevation of the couple form is seen as both tragic and abnormal. To not conform willingly to the curiously uniform arrangements of modern coupledom is to be not so much dissident – you are certainly not accorded the dignity of choice – as either psychologically deficient or, in benevolent Channel 4 lingo, "undateable" (though that can be remedied, they say). Labour-intensive mantras now permeate the language of relationships. To refuse to "work" on achieving or preserving couple status is to be an irresponsible skiver, an emotional benefits cheat who undermines the social good.

To question the unchallenged primacy of the couple form isn't about advocating 60s-style "free love" or hip polyamory (itself not necessarily a radical option). Human beings, after all, have infinite ways of expressing love and being committed to ideals. But the way we are made to think about the right ways to love and establish relationships has decisive social and political consequences. It is unlikely to be an accident that a government that wishes to be seen as progressive in its extension of traditional matrimonial domesticity to all, seeks at the same time to viciously target those who are simultaneously economically vulnerable and living outside of the cosy middle-class ideal of two parents with a small posse of putatively well-behaved children. The disgrace that is the bedroom tax will overwhelmingly penalise those whose domestic arrangements fall outside of the idealised format – single parents, the widowed, the elderly, the disabled and carers.

The narrowly defined "love" and "commitment" touted by David Cameron and his ministers is so severely contingent on economic privilege and security that it is nothing more than rampant individualism in pairs with the recommended option of reproducing. You can certainly choose to be single if you can pull it off economically – no mean feat. The most gutting Valentine you will read this year is to Cameron from a fibromyalgia patient called Julia Jones who will now lose the 1.5-bedroom bungalow she shared with her husband who died of cancer and whose ashes are buried in the garden. Childless and living on £70 a week, she cannot afford the punitive tax to stay on and retain her loving local support network.

It is a given that people should be able to love whom and how they want and if pairing off for any length of time is what appeals, then that's fine. But it's time that coupledom stopped being touted as the best option, an idea reinforced not just by state approval and resource allocation, but also by religion, the market, popular culture, assorted therapists and our own anxieties.

Resisting the consolidation of invidious forms of social exclusion, it's time to get beyond the notion that yoking together love, coupling, marriage and reproduction is the only way to achieve happiness. The scare stories about single people dying earlier or loneliness becoming a pandemic must be seen in the larger context of a social order that is hostile to non-couples and an economic order to which the collective good seems to be anathema. Our own imaginations – and hearts – can come up with better.

Why shouldn't three people get married?

As three Brazilians are legally joined as a 'thruple' it starts to look illiberal to insist that marriage must be between two people

• 
• • Jean Hannah Edelstein
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 August 2012 12.47 BST

'If three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family?' Photograph: Stone/Getty Images

Three Brazilians in love have their nation up in arms over whether their relationship, now enshrined in a three-way marriage, is legal. The public notary who conducted their marriage says there's no reason the threesome – or "thruple", as the internet has charmingly labelled it – shouldn't enjoy the same kinds of rights imparted upon two people who get hitched. But traditionalists are not impressed: lawyer Regina Beatriz Tavares da Silva, of the Commission for the Rights of the Family, has it "absurd and totally illegal".

Speaking of absurd, shall we take a moment to consider traditional marriage? We do adore it: in the UK, just under half the population has chosen to pledge to love another person as long as they both shall live, or as long as they don't get divorced. And yet as we shoehorn ourselves into two-by-two formation, we're not that good at keeping our promises: as Helen Croydon has pointed out, breaking the boundaries of monogamy is far from unusual. Plenty of marriages have three people in them. They're just not legal ones.

A good old-fashioned monogamous marriage works beautifully for some. But even the most successful marriages are special and unique and incredibly weird. For much as we have a sweet collective imagining of what a happy union entails, the reality is that they all deviate from the fantasy norm, pretty much from the time that the certificate is signed, the chicken is noshed and the bouquet is chucked. The government can dictate that two people should be in a marriage, but it can't legislate what will make them feel happy or stable or emotionally complete together. And if we accept that, as we do every time we allow anyone the freedom to make a decision about who they'll marry, and furthermore allow them the freedom to call each other by execrable pet names in public, then does it not begin to seem strange, just a bit, that we do allow the government to dictate how many people are allowed to pledge to be together forever? Perhaps even as strange as it is for government to dictate who can do it based on their gender?

This is not about the advocacy of patriarchal polygamy that regards wives as unequal to, or property of, their husbands. But if three, or four, or 17 people want to marry each other simultaneously and equally, why should they not be granted the same status as two people who want to become a legal family? Without reverting to religious arguments, or logistical ones (does Ikea manufacture a big enough bed to accommodate this union?), it begins to feel a bit illiberal.

Is it possible that if we allowed more people to marry simultaneously that more marriages might be successful? Fewer breakups over infidelity might occur, for example, if those who found themselves in love with more than one person didn't have to choose or conceal their feelings. And relaxing the expectation that one partner should fulfil all of one's needs – good sex, complementary taste in television and shared preference for dogs over cats may just be too much to ask for – might mean that people who opt for a portfolio of other halves (or thirds) could outdo the rest of us in happiness.

Legalisation wouldn't send stampedes of people to the registry office in five-aside squads; for many of us, monogamy does feel the most comfortable option, whether it's because our brains aren't wired to love more than one person or because the prospect of making multiple people happy is too complex. But three's not a crowd for everyone. And as long as everyone is entering a marriage equally, as long as everyone is really going to make an effort to be open and honest to everyone else, it's probably not the government's job to tell them how many of them there should be.