The McKinsey Way by Ethan Rasiel

I've been having some downtime at work recently. We have a pretty decent library of business books and I decided to put it to good use. The few true business books featured on this blog have been industry hallmarks. They've been enjoyable not only because of the subject matter but also due to the high quality of writing and corporate drama. The world is full of second rate business books that exhibit neither of the above qualities and for the most part I've resolved not to review them here. A few of those have had redeeming qualities - Good Strategy, Bad Strategy comes to mind - but mostly you'll find hackneyed advice that promises way too much. Business writing is very faddish.

The McKinsey Way, in its ultimate brevity, has endured relatively well. It does read like a company brochure at times, but there is enough humor and self-deprecation to ensure the reader doesn't feel like someone is trying to sell them a management consulting project. I am not entirely sure what the ultimate goal of the author was as he no longer works for the company. Is he simply using the company's good name to advertise his own work? I've heard that something similar is wont to happen with Navy Seals, the elite commando team of the U.S. army. Ex-soldiers use the brand for their own purposes, because it always attracts attention if a Navy Seal "reveals the ultimate workout snack" or something similar.

Although The McKinsey Way promises to reveal the techniques used by McKinsey in its consulting engagements, the level of detail is not high enough to actually be useful to copycats. It works better as an introductory course to the industry, for both newcomers and potential customers. It's enjoyable enough because Rasiel has the good sense to joke and question some of the aspects of life at "The Firm". Some of my initial goodwill was undone by the entirely unnecessary chapters towards the end containing tips on "Surviving at McKinsey". In a way they reveal the true audience of this type of literature: the 25-year old Ivy league MBA who travels the country advising CEOs, who still needs to be taught to keep a toothbrush with him when sleeping away from home.

Cityboy by Geraint Anderson

There was absolutely no reason to reread Cityboy. But I was a bit down on my luck after starting and failing to finish The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel. Life of Pi is one of my all time favorite books (also by Martel), and even the movie is pretty spectacular, so my expectations were way too high. I bought the book on a trip to Portugal and imagined that it would be a breeze. Yet I was wrong, I found The High Mountains of Portugal so tedious that I decided to skip it for good. After a few hundred pages of vague, uneventful landscaping and exposition, I had no will to go on reading.

What I really needed was something that I could pick up without the risk of boring myself to sleep. Cityboy is something I read when I started my studies and I figured it would be a good send off to the corporate life. It's supposed to be a fictional account of the excesses of the banking system, but the cover up is so transparent that it only takes a few tries on Google to figure out that "Scheissebank" is Commerzbank and "Banque Inutile" is Societe Generale. The fact that the main characters name is "Steve" is probably only there to deter lawsuits, such is the extent to which the storyline resembles the authors own life. For all I care, you can read it as an autobiography.

"Steve's" job is to show the reader the extent to which the banking system (as it was before 2008) is corrupt, in-bred and pointless. Bankers make millions of pounds in bonuses just to screw their clients, use drugs and engage in other immoral behaviors. Steve is a utilities-analyst tasked with producing research notes on utilities firms: water, electricity and so on. Some of the material will be genuinely interesting to outsiders, because it's mostly about things that you would never read about otherwise. The banking sector has always espoused opacity, so there are a few precious sequences showcasing the average day in a bankers life that I found enlightening. Pick it up for the fun turns of phrase and stay for the juicy gossip.

The biggest problem with Cityboy is that Anderson himself isn't very likeable, and ultimately seems shallow and moronic. He can pretend to be a left-wing hippie all he want, but actions speak louder than words. Especially at the end, when he ponders the ludicrous amounts of money that he made by hustling clients (but mostly staying on the right side of the law). He promises to give part of the proceeds to charity, but to me that sounds like bull. Talking about giving to charity isn't the same thing as actually doing it. Anderson even tries to create an antagonist in "Hugo", a stuck-up fool of a banker, who somehow manages to get the most votes in industry surveys. But you can't really have an antagonist when there is no one to root for anyway.