All That Is Seen And Unseen

IV

Strategic

Fritz Applefield’s strategic mantra regarding technology assessment gigs consisted of three bullet points:

• Make friends
• Make a quick showing
• Make opportunities

Unlike the “best-practice methodologies” and “work products” advertised on Hartbridge Consulting’s Web site, this list of objectives was not copyrighted, or even stored anywhere in the firm’s private knowledge base, but it was no less etched in Jim’s memory.

Making friends

To fully appreciate the difficulties attendant to this particular objective, it is necessary to keep in mind another list: the set of means that were not available to achieve it. Also unwritten, but familiar to all management consultants, were a number of prohibitions, failure to comply with any of which constituted a firing offence:

• No conversations on popular culture
• No expression of political or religious opinions
• No flaunting of wealth or status
• No sharing of Hartbridge’s trade secrets
And the one that summed up the others:
• No fraternizing with the client’s staff

Making friends under such constraints was something of a challenge, but one Jim was well equipped for. Although at the time he never stopped to wonder why Fritz had come looking for him when he started his new company, it was probably not for his technical and managerial skills alone. The fact was that Jim was fairly loaded with that elusive asset that goes by the name of charisma. And Fritz knew his own deficiency in that area.

Within the first couple of weeks, Jim managed to score golf dates with Bob Johnson, Vice-Chancellor of Business Services, and with the Director of Admissions and Records, an energetic, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy by the name of Roger Wilkins. Each time, by the ninth tee, Jim had fairly sized up his man. Bob was steady, modest, methodical, devoted to the welfare of the district. Once he was convinced that a particular course of action would reduce costs and/or enhance services, he would probably offer his unflinching support. On the other hand, Roger, intent as he seemed on projecting the image of a maverick, Jim suspected of being a herd animal. For instance, he had no sooner registered Jim’s southern accent that he started peppering his speech with “y’all”s and “yes, Sir”s. He would be easy to win over, until a more powerful individual disagreed. But won over he must be: directors of admissions typically had veto powers on new administrative systems.

Most of the time during those first two weeks Jim spent out on campus and at the district office, informally interviewing students, instructors, counselors, deans, executives and the occasional administrative employee. The goal of the exercise was to elicit negative comments that could be used to make a case against the IT department’s current technology infrastructure or management. The process rarely failed. But beyond the instrumental aspect of these interviews, Jim simply enjoyed talking to people. He, who had spent his childhood literally hiding in the woods, had come to relish the prospect of addressing perfect strangers, of enticing them to open up to him, of making them like him. He knew he was very good at it, without deeming it necessary to probe the nature of his talent—never look a gift horse in the mouth was how he saw it. He only felt grateful for the mixture of circumstances and experience that had brought it to its present near infallibility. The only thing that remained from his original shyness was a terror of public speaking.

From his encounters with a client’s staff, Jim wasn’t content to accumulate friends and information; what he was after, if only for his own intellectual pleasure, were the patterns of thought and behavior, the currents of influence and power that underlay punctual interactions. To him, an organization was as exciting an object of scrutiny as a painting by an old master, which, subjected to x-rays, reveals another painting behind, or two, or three. All that is seen and unseen…It was all part of the big picture.