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Consulting and Me
Like many of the industry's top achievers, I did not set out to become a
management consultant, or even consider a business career, until well after
college. Consulting recruiters value diversity and esoterica, founded on
strong educational pedigrees, knowing that this is the stuff of staying a
step ahead of one's clients, of engaging, entertaining, and when need be,
duping them into a paying belief in new and unique perspectives.
Diversity and esoterica I had in spades. I grew up in Rhode Island in the
boom years of the 1960's, when everything interesting seemed to be happening
all at once, but somewhere else. The youngest of six children, I benefited
from parents with a staunchly liberal, New Deal view of the world and social
justice, and brothers and sisters engaged in every part of the causes of the
time. Several of them would embark on academic careers, and all would at
least try to live out of state if not overseas. Though working-class poor,
my parents encouraged the gathering of new experiences and a high investment
in education.
While most were caught up in one way or another with Vietnam, however, I
developed an early and obsessive interest in the space program. More than
anything else, I wanted to be a scientist astronaut, or perhaps an
astrophysicist, and explore other worlds and solar systems. The moon
landings seemed but a small first achievement, and between Arthur C.
Clarke's 2001 and Star Trek, I had all the fuel I needed to imagine
humanity's future role in space. A little weirdly, but telling for my
interests in international space development then and today, my personal
hero of 2001 was space-bureaucrat Heywood Floyd, not the odyssey-making
astronauts, and the concept of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets
intrigued me as much as any alien slug-fest featuring Captain Kirk.
I was fortunate to have my choice of colleges, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology I hoped would in turn give me a choice of jobs in
the space program. But the late 1970's proved a dismal time for space
development. Much of NASA's energy and budget was then consumed by trying to
get the intractable space shuttle off the ground, and I was angered to find
American popular, governmental, and commercial interest in space at an
all-time low. Midway through MIT I chose two new directions which I hoped
would one day lead me to an engaging career in the use and exploration of
space. I started an ocean engineering major and internship program and
enrolled in a domestic year-away program at the University of Chicago, to
take up intensive Japanese studies.
In ocean engineering I hoped to find the excitement and experience of
exploration-driven technology development, something I planned to use when
prospects for space development turned around. I loved the oceans, and
inspired in part by Arthur C. Clarke's own celebration of both the oceans
and outer space, I took up scuba diving and fully embraced my new medium. In
Japan, I expected to learn something about large-scale project finance for
civil engineering projects and hoped to tap that country's competitive
strengths for application to space development, once the treaty law barring
Japan's own space launches expired.
These were towering ambitions for a poor, struggling student, but I had
blundered into the right time and place for combining engineering and
Japanese skills. Harvard's Ezra Vogel, with Japan As No. 1, had just hit the
best-seller lists, and study of Japanese management techniques would soon
become an institutionalized fad. After Chicago I returned for two more years
at MIT and cross-registered at Harvard in Japanese language, business, and
government, finally finishing inpolitical Science at MIT so that I could
combine credits in both disciplines and still manage to graduate, in 1982.
I had managed to squeeze in some fledging German into my poly sci degree,
and while waiting on job applications, I took up a United Nations
scholarship to do a summer internship in technology transfer at the UN
complex in Vienna, Austria. Days before I left for Europe, I was offered and
immediately accepted an open-ended job with the Japanese steelmaker and
shipbuilder Nippon Kokan, where I would become one of the conglomerate's
first foreign professional hires. I arranged to fly directly from Vienna to
begin work at NKK's shipyards in Kawasaki at the end of the summer.
My three years with Nippon Kokan were a key formative experience for me both
personally and professionally, molding much of what would drive and sustain
my later, largely unexpected commitment to consulting. Combining some of
Japan's most challenging living conditions with exposure to one of the
world's most stimulating urban cultures, all the while propelling me through
extraordinary new responsibilities, in these years I became at once
professionally confident and alive to Tokyo's many attractions, and
desperately eager to find a means to enjoy them.
Like many of the traditional Japanese industrial giants, Nippon Kokan firmly
believed in isolating its new male employees in bachelor dormitories, where
conditions were spartan at best. The idea was to build a certain sense of
equality and camaraderie, reduce any last pretensions to a private life, and
encourage early marriage to company-approved spouses.
By and large this approach worked quite well. The pre-World War II
Itanaka-ryo where I was assigned was infamous for dilapidated facilities,
complete lack of heat or air conditioning through freezing winters and
stultifying summers, and truly horrible food. We had one six-man o-furo bath
for two hundred grimy shipyard workers, filled with hot water only every
other day. I quickly learned to tolerate the blistering heat of a fresh fill
of the bath, to avoid dealing with the floating scum that would quickly
collect with the first few uses.
