Business Doctors - Management Consulting Gone Wild (18 page)

“You have a sharp brain, Angie. Makes me wonder why Woody hasn’t involved you in his business.”

“The events over the next few days are a bit more collaborative and team-oriented. But I’m guessing that’s not what you called me here for.”

“Right.” Angie got up. “We’ve been sitting here for too long.”

No alcohol. Not the bedroom. Schneider was almost praying.

“Do you want to go out for a walk? We can get some fresh air.”

“Sure!” the relief in Schneider’s voice was almost palpable, as he sprung out of the couch. He made a mental note to enumerate and evaluate all the reasons when he had the time, why he perceived her to be a super-intelligent manipulative man-eater.

* * *

Schneider was home early. He had initially felt the urge to go back to the camp to see how the combat rounds were shaping up. But he now had a larger issue at hand to fix. He needed time to think about it alone. The fights were being recorded, so he could always catch up with them when he was less stressed. Tough jobs and impending deadlines at work didn’t usually intimidate Schneider. He had seen too many of those, and learnt to deal with it in a structured manner with a cool head. For his regular assignments he knew, the worst that could happen was some monetary loss for the client and for his own firm. But all that had not trained him to handle the situation that was staring him in the face right now. It had to do with what Angie revealed during their walk. She had mentioned about another crisis that was facing WFB. Project Lean & Mean had involved expenses that Woody couldn’t have managed on his own. The jail breaks had burnt the biggest hole in his finances. He had borrowed the money from a business partner who now wanted the whole amount back earlier than expected.

Schneider wondered if he had made a mistake yet again by visiting Angie. He also wondered why Woody hadn’t shared such an important update with him directly. Probably he felt Angie would be in a better position to explain the problem and convince Schneider, yet again.

Chapter 1
6

Schneider had spent the night tossing and turning in his bed. The eventful meeting with Angie the previous evening had unsettled him to the core. Though she didn’t mention it specifically, Schneider knew that he was indirectly responsible for the crisis. As a consultant, where the client was sourcing his money from wasn’t his concern – it fell outside the realm of his responsibilities. Had he already known about Woody’s financial constraints, he might’ve cautioned him against borrowing more. Anyway, it was too late to think about it.
Outside of my jurisdiction,
he thought, and went to sleep.

Martin was away from the city for a few days and Schneider did not want to discuss the topic with him over phone. There wasn’t anyone else he could confide in. He had never been overly dependent on anyone to vet his own decisions. But he also believed that an external, objective view was important especially when his own mind was clouded by emotion. After a night full of contemplation and hardly any sleep, he knew he had a task cut out for him the following day.

Schneider’s eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. On a regular assignment, this would be a common occurrence when approaching a deadline or critical milestone. Schneider’s body had grown accustomed to working long hours with little sleep, and running on junk food and coke. Despite droopy eyelids and bloodshot eyes, true to his breed, his brain would continue working at almost peak capacity.

Next day, the group was back in a meeting room – spacious, airy, well-lit and modern looking. It was in direct contrast to the ambience in the Dungeon.

“You guys feeling ok? I heard that there was quite a bit of action after I left yesterday,” Schneider looked at the faces around him. “Good. It goes to show that we’ve got a few real good fighters within the team and a whole lot of fighting spirit as well.”

“Yeah,” Jamal responded. “We were hoping to have you in the ring as well…you know, so that you can have a taste
of your own medicine.” His words sounded playful, but Schneider suspected that it also carried an implied challenge. There had been only two events so far, and Schneider realized why the program so far could have been interpreted as a barbaric cock-fight by the guests. It was natural for them to feel like they were the fighting roosters inside the ring, unsure about the intentions of those like Schneider watching the carnage from a safe distance. Would their so-called-boss sell the video recordings to private pay-per-view channels and internet sites? Either ways, the interns would have loved to pull a few spectators inside the ring to give them a run for their money.

But Schneider felt this wasn’t the time to prove a point.

“I would have loved to, Jamal. Maybe some other time,” Schneider replied smilingly and attempted to cut the conversation short. “We’ll take a rain check on that one. Right now, we’ve got a few important things to move on to…like our next event.”

“Yippee!” Emiliano let out a little sarcastic yelp and pumped his fist in the air.

“Well, to be honest, we had drawn up several more like the two that you experienced. But hey, like we all know, it’s a dynamic business… Some of the recent developments have made us re-align a few things in the program. So we’ll have one final event before the rewards are handed out.”

Schneider wasn’t too happy to bend his original structure of the program and fast forward it to the
Performing
stage. Without giving enough time to the
Norming
phase, there was a risk that the group would fall back to the
Storming
phase. There’d be no sense of purpose for the team. There would probably be no team, only individuals waiting for an opportunity to get out, just like they did while they were in prison.

“Initiation time, finally! So we’re gonna get punched in? Or are we gonna get guns to bring a few bastards from the other gangs down?”

“No, it’ll be a little more complicated than that. It could either be a painless ride or a shitload times worse than being punched in. That would totally depend on how you approach the challenge,”

“So are you going to open the lid and tell us about it right now or are you going to keep spilling more useless shit from your smartass hatch? This suspense thingy ain’t workin with me,” Ryan was getting sick of waiting.

With a loud and clear voice, once again assuming control, Schneider announced, “Alright guys, here’s the deal. We need to raise six million dollars in the next five days.” He waited for the statement to sink in. He glanced at Ryan, who looked as if he was hit by a truck – he was ready for anything but not this. There was that eerie silence in the room – everyone was sporting some form of the
hit-by-a-truck
expression. It was the kind of eeriness that Schneider hated so much from his guts, but then he knew that he had gotten back control – he was once again the alpha-male, in command of his pack of dogs. But he waited for someone else to speak up.

“Cool! So you gonna make us play Monopoly now? Or lemme guess, some corporatized version of it?” There was an obvious scorn in Ryan’s voice, more so in the way he said
corporatized
.

“No. This is as real as it gets. We’ve been shielding you guys from the big bad world out there all this while. Now it’s time to go out there and do what we’ve got to do. There’ll be no second chances.”

“You are nuts! Had it been six grand, we could’ve taken you seriously. Your grand planning needs to demonstrate a little more structure than that, dude. You gotta keep your whims and fancies under check. This is ridiculous.”

“I am not kidding,” Schneider waited for more questions and comments.

“Why, may we ask, is this number not five or ten million? And why do we have five days? Where did these magic numbers pop up from? Tackling an amount like that would require a little more thought, a little more planning…don’t you think?”

“The amount and the time frame for this task are
things that are not under our control. So we cannot influence them. All I can share with you is that it’s an emergency that we are tackling. It’s a real problem that the business is staring at. It’s not important for us to get into those details at this stage. This is your opportunity to actually show WFB that you have what it takes to make a real difference to their business.”

“WFB? You mean
the
WFB?” Chang wasn’t sure he heard it right. Schneider hadn’t communicated to the team yet about their new employer. This was the first time they were hearing the name.

“Yes, I wanted to talk about it a little later. But the situation has changed. So it’s better that you know now.” Schneider continued,
“I know what you might be thinking. Individually you’ve never accomplished anything of this magnitude. And one of the main reasons for that was…”

“…we never got a chance,” Jason completed the sentence.

“Possibly that, and also because you worked alone. Now you have a team. You have access to skills within the team that you personally never possessed. Everyone complements the others, and that makes the group immensely strong and powerful. Six million dollars is too big for any single person to bring home. So we’ll be doing what we had planned earlier anyway. Split you into teams. This time you have a choice in selecting your team. But before that, we…sorry…
you
have to come up with ideas. Whoever comes up with the best idea leads his or her team and gets to choose team members. If there is a clash of preference, we’ll see how to deal with it when we get there.” 

“I hope you
aren’t shitting us about the WFB bit. So, how do we do this?” Bullet wanted more clarity.

“First we’ll have to decide what we intend to do and then work out the details of how we do it. Let me give you an example,” Schneider was itching to use the analogy that he had worked out for this session, “Let’s say you’ve got digging skills. Depending on where you start digging, you could get water…or oil…or nothing.”

“...or maybe a rotting dead body in the backyard that wasn’t disposed off properly.” Gabriel offered a more probable scenario for consideration.

“Sure,” Schneider tried to show he was not flustered by the comment. “The point I’m trying to make is that the outcome would greatly be influenced by one factor…”

“Our good ol’ friend, Destiny?” it was Alex this time.

There were too many people willing to complete his sentences for him, in an imaginative but useless manner. This time Schneider didn’t pause for too long. “Yes. And there’s one more - planning! So, the mantra for this event is – if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

“Cool, mantra, dude,” said Jamal. “You just made that up?” 

“No,” Schneider left it at that. In his mind, he continued.
It’s a standard line that I picked up from the internet. Now we use it in almost every assignment. Never fails to impress the clients.

Schneider walked towards the corner of the room where a whiteboard had been propped up on a tripod stand.

“In the corporate world…” Schneider ignored the mass eye-rolling that his clichéd phrase triggered around him, “…when we have a major business problem that we are trying to tackle jointly, we make use of a few tools. One of them is called
brain-storming
.” Another heavy word from Schneider’s repertoire had just been dumped onto the unsuspecting audience.

“Dude, I like the way you slow down your speech when you are introducing a new word,” Kruger wasn’t in there to study Schneider’s speech patterns, but it had happened so many times, that it was difficult for anyone with a keen sense of observation to ignore. “Almost makes us feel like we are back in kindergarten…well, at least for the privileged ones in this room who went to kindergarten.”

“The way it works is quite simple. We get the entire group together and everyone is encouraged to come up with ideas. Lots of ideas. At this stage, we do not worry about them. We don’t care whether they are actually worth executing. That’s step one. Once we have enough ideas on the board, we then start evaluating them one at a time. We weed out the impractical ones.”

“Weed…aah…I like the sound of that. Been a while.” It was reminiscence time for Gabriel.

Schneider moved on. “We take the ideas that are still left and we fine tune them further. Simple enough?”

A few in the group nodded.

“Things will become clear as we get on with it. I’ll act as the facilitator. To structure this better, we will use our friend, sticky notes. Each of you will be given a bunch of sticky notes. Write down one idea per note. Everyone has to come up with at least five ideas. There is no upper limit to the number of ideas. We will then group them in similar themes and then see which ones got the maximum counts. Simple enough? I’ll need a volunteer. Someone who can write down the good ones from the lot.”

“Schneider, Bullet’s writing is pretty…er…legible…ain’t that the word? May be she should be in charge of the board.” Chang, sitting next to Bullet raised her hand.

“Would you please, ma’am?” Schneider picked up the whiteboard marker and offered it to Bullet.

Reluctantly Bullet got up and smacked Chang on the head. “Can you please stop doing that?” Chang said rubbing the back of his head and thinking of his first interaction with her. She moved towards the whiteboard strutting her stuff and heard whistles and catcalls behind her. Without looking back, she raised her middle finger at the group sitting behind her.

Kenny was the only one with a serious expression on his face. “The way she moves her tush as she walks. It’s sooo hypnotic.”

“Get over her, Ken,” Jamal tried to reason. “If Jason finds out, he’ll hammer you to death.”

“What do you mean? They aren’t a couple, are they?”

“You been sleepwalking through your stay here, dude? Of course, they are. The knight in shining armor rescues the princess from a bunch of assholes in the WFB guest house, and they live happily ever after.”

“Ok, then.” Schneider clapped his hands hard to get everyone’s attention. “I think we are all set now. We understand how this works. Ok? Good,” Schneider’s past experience with the group had him convinced that it was a bad idea to have long pauses where he’d usually wait for a response. But he also knew that the session that was about to follow had to be interactive if anything useful had to come out of it. It was also a question about ownership. The schedule so far had been thought out and executed by him, with the supporting staff. The final outcome of this next task was going to be influenced heavily by how much the group sitting in front of him bought into the concept of raising a huge sum of money in an almost impossible timeframe. If the ideas came from Schneider and company, the group would still go ahead with it and possibly emerge out from the other end with reasonable success or maybe absolute failure. But if the group pursued their own ideas, there was a greater probability of success. They would fight tooth and nail to prove to everyone watching them that their capability could not be doubted.

“Before we start, I wanted to remind you a few basic things that will decide the fate of this task. Life has given you a second chance. This is a chance for each one of you to redeem yourself. This is your chance to prove to the world and yourself that you ended up in prison because luck failed you, not your skills or your capability. This is your last chance to prove that you aren’t the scumbags that the world out there presumes you to be. Do you want to earn your respect back?”