Review of “The Consultant [Achtung Spoiler!]”
Amazon brought me this series so much that I ended up watching a few episodes. All the while a little voice inside me was saying “but you KNOW what you're looking at”, “but you've already seen this thing”. And it's true. Because years ago my old company made me take a "Problem Solving, Decision Making" course, which included, as a final exam, the solution of an MBA exercise (Master in Business and Administration).
I describe it to you
In other words, it involved being a consultant, taking control of a financially distressed textile company, in storytelling it had been bought by an Austrian company, and designing a strategy to save it.
The incipit of the test, which I still have, was this:
From what I see on the internet, the course is still being offered, because the case seems interesting. For example:
https://www.case48.com/case-analysis/40882-Arthur-Keller
https://milliondollarspatula.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/my-own-private-boxholm/
My first answer, after seeing the accounts in a synthetic way, was: “this company has cash, including credits, for 19 minutes and broken. It must be closed". It was the pure truth." The answer of a guy who had been bashing Uallera with the "hard facts" for a good two weeks was "it doesn't matter, you imagine that there is some liquidity, you have to give us a strategy to save the company and do the complete analysis ”.
In one fell swoop my confidence in MBAs collapsed to zero, given that in my brief experience as an entrepreneur I had never been able to pay bills just because I imagined I had the money.
That said, the role-play featured several instructors and instructors, all with the name featured in the story itself. My company had informed the company (that did the training) of all of what they felt were the "problems" we had to overcome, one by one. They also asked us to cooperate in creating stressful situations for our colleagues (test candidates).
To reveal the bias: I had had problems, with a (a) client, with the classic MILF manager, one of those who use sexual attraction to destabilize those who would like to do the job well in spite of their "hidden agenda".
So one of the instructors was just like that, and what was supposed to be my "right hand" in the test, communicating with the company, had been instructed to SIMP this chick every time she got hot, sending to hell with all the strategies we had prepared. I wanted to take the situation in one direction, she in another, and the only person who had to support me in this shit company was the SIMP with the girl.
I didn't throw it out the window because it's forbidden in Germany, and at one point I had a private conversation with this one – outside the format – because I was visibly stressed. And I'd like to see you, since I was expecting Sharon Stone's move without underpants at any moment. (which was not there).
Instead this girl was acting, she had an IQ like 150, I don't know how many degrees, and in fact she explained to me how to manage these types without launching SIMP from the windows. Apparently it is banned in many countries. Sin. (DVRA LEX, SED LEX).
Useful? I would say yes, otherwise I would be in prison. For flipping dudes. And not only during exercise, the problem with the naughty office girl I really had from a real client. And also with the simp. And also a shit character.
Then in the end my strategy turned out to be good, the company was saved, with the small detail that its balance sheet was less than the investment that the parent company had had to hunt down to provide liquidity (after the first 19 minutes, I mean). But apparently (I asked at the table during the farewell lunch) ALL the solutions are like this.
I suspect that for these Harvard MBAs the rescue of Alitalia is seen as a masterpiece.
That said, when I started watching The Consultant I began to notice that ALL the details of that exercise were there. The creative tripe who rarely came to the company because she lived far from Boxholm, the antisocial type who didn't smell bad but was unbearably rude (maybe they had trouble finding stinky guys for the test), the absurd suppliers, everyone, everyone, all, simply repurposed into a software company that makes mobile video games.
In short, “The Consultant” is CLEARLY inspired by an MBA exercise. And (probably) precisely the case of Arthur Keller, mutatis mutandis.
I don't know how this MBA ended up in a Bentley Little novel, which then became a movie. But it's hard, really hard, to ignore the similarities.
It's clearly ideological, in the sense that this guy paid to save the company looks like a psychopath and all, and I have to say that indeed the previous days of indoctrination of "just looking at the hard facts" lead to that.
Now, it takes guts to go in front of a group of engineers, physicists, mathematicians who work in IT on critical infrastructures, and explain that decisions must be taken coldly and only after having analyzed the problem well: you talk about people that the first thing it asks for is a trace in hexadecimal, and it reads it directly on the monitor. And it recognizes the wrong bits.
But the order was to get us out of our comfort zone, hence an MBA exercise. Basically, the idea was to indoctrinate us to look at the facts while they explained those techniques, including financial ones, that were used for the exercise.
In my opinion, since we were all already on the Asperger's spectrum (it's an occupational disease), the attempt to make us ALSO become psychopaths failed, and at lunch the average comment was always "but these finance guys don't fuck with the facts own". I tried to explain to the nice instructor that we spent our lives reading network logs and traces to find "hard facts", before lifting a finger. But the guy needed help hooking up his laptop to the projector, so he wasn't exactly one to figure out what logs are and what a tcpdump, or snoop (for Solaris lovers) is.
My point is that these characters who do strategic finance are on a path designed to make them psychopaths. Completely. I think that moving a few degrees (slightly) in the Asperger's spectrum can help to counter this professional training, but objectively the training process is done (at least ideally, if we consider that imaginary money is a fact for them) to produce psychopaths.
So the “Consultant” made sense to me, and also reminds me of one of the instructors on that MBA test. He was a psychopath all the same.
The film consultant obviously exaggerates, like the opening scene of the blowjob, or the immediate dismissal of the girl in the wheelchair who arrives late, and everything from the old boss's mother to the moral scruples of a chick who would also be "willing to" . But also not.
Because all this impacts on the vision of the film.
The film comes from a horror book author, who had written a thriller. But it's not a thriller in itself, since it's too focused on screwing up some managerial and corporate dynamics. It takes on some mysterious features towards the end, when they then put the gimmick of the golden bones, but for me it fails both in discrediting the abuses that take place inside companies, and in creating a thriller, and honestly too many scenes are gratuitous.
I say free because maybe in the book the diabolism of this guy is more marked, or the book is more horror or thriller oriented, but take these things away most of the time, and then let them resurface for minchiam, in my opinion it only produces estrangement. We were talking about the company and now comes Satan?
So, unless you want to do an MBA exercise, it's not worth it.