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7. Acting on this highly scientific analysis, the regional managers were instructed to redistribute their window-
dressing teams across their shops and fire thirty-five staff.
8. Four weeks after I started my mini-project, the next season s windows were successfully completed by ninety
rather than one hundred and twenty five people after all, this was in the middle of a recession and so none
of the ninety survivors was motivated to kick up a fuss overwork was better than no work.
9. To make sure that the remaining staff managed to complete their tasks in the times I had calculated as
necessary, each day a report was completed showing how many work hours each employee had been paid for
and how many Standard Hours they had earned per worked hour. Any employee who fell below a certain
efficiency level would get what was euphemistically called coaching . If their performance failed to improve,
they would then get fired. Following my intervention, the window-dressers would have their personal work
efficiency monitored in this way for the rest of their working lives. This was perhaps acceptable for a machine
but not a particularly pleasant prospect for a human being. Fortunately for the employees, the later
bankruptcy of this company also meant the well-deserved disappearance of the awful Management Control
Systems that myself and my colleagues at Butchers had introduced.
10. I did not personally feel particularly good about the process I had just conducted but at least I still had a job.
The Butchers procedure appeared to me to be the same whether you were working in a ba nk, shops, factories,
mines, steelworks or whatever. And the result was also usually the same people off the payroll, increased
productivity from the petrified survivors and a so-called Management Control System that was reasonably suitable
for machines, but way out of order for thinking human beings. At the time, there were many consultancies offering
the same types of services as The Butchers and there were many management teams willing to pay generously
for these services.
LACK OF PROFESSI ONALI SM
The Butchers should have been a very efficient selling machine. But the combination of rapacious top
management and largely unskilled lower level consultants often gave quite unexpected yet entertaining results.
My next client was a nationwide chain of television, video and electrical goods rental shops. Having just done
the project at the chain of menswear shops, I was now considered a Retail expert and made Team Manager on
my second assignment for The Butchers. I think The Butchers had earlier done a project to reduce the number of
repair and service staff at this client the man in a van and wanted to carry out a similar operation in the
company s four hundred and fifty or so high street shops. This would, probably, have used the standard Butchers
approach of achieving the staff savings by replacing often experienced and knowledgeable full-time staff with yet
another army of unskilled and unmotivated part-timers. However, after all the disruption and bad feeling caused in
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the repair and service operation by the first Butchers project, this client was none too keen to repeat the
experience in their shops. Nevertheless, some pushy salesmanship from a Butchers account manager managed to
persuade one of the directors to allow us to conduct a preliminary study free of charge in four or five shops to
estimate the potential for staff savings. I was sent in with a couple of other consultants to conduct this work. As
you can imagine, the account manager left me in no doubt as to the result he expected in his briefing the magical
words thirty percent lost time were often mentioned along with a series of very clear threats to my likely future
employment at The Butchers were the thirty percent not to materialise.
Dutifully, I arrived at the client s site, sent my small team off to do the necessary studies and settled in to an
office, where I tried to imagine what I would do if my two inexperienced consultants failed to find the required
thirty percent which would justify the client embarking on a full scale project with us. While my team were doing
the studies, my job was to hang around HQ and try to get meetings with all the directors to sound them out on their
feelings about buying another big project from us. On about my third day there, I was called in to see one of the
directors not the one who had allowed us to start work. The man was furious, absolutely furious. Before I could
introduce myself and exchange a few pleasantries, he launched into an emotional tirade attacking The Butchers
and the whole way they went about doing business. This went on for, what seemed to me on only my second
consultancy project, an awfully long time. When he had finished, without allowing me to say anything in The
Butchers defence, he evicted me from his office promising that he would do everything within his power to
prevent The Butchers ever working for that company again.
Not a very promising start to my first opportunity to try my hand as Team Manager. As I awaited the arrival of
my boss and the lashing I knew I would get for screwing up his chances of selling a project, I did a little
investigation to try and discover why the executive was quite so angry with us. I soon found out that at the end of
the previous project, some lowly consultant had forgotten to return confidential project files to our European head
office in Brussels. The client s people, finding a couple of boxes of project material had started to look through
them and had found our detailed, highly personal assessments of the key client executives. If I remember
correctly, one was described as a coward who would do whatever the CEO wanted, another was a politician
with only his own interests at heart . There was a has-been, who had no real influence and yet who was always
voicing his opinions & .. and so on. All in all, not very complimentary stuff. Incidentally, the gentleman who had
just given me a right old lambasting was the one the previous team had labelled a coward . Hence his high state
of emotional energy on hearing that The Butchers were trying once again to enter his life.
Within a week I found out that the angry man was true to his word. He had talked to his colleagues, shown
them the incriminating evidence and we were forced to close the study and withdraw our team it was fairly clear
that the client would not buy another project from us, however huge the potential savings we actually found or
claimed to find.
My next assignment at The Butchers was an even greater botch-up. I was sent in again as Team Manager on
the Analysis. The place was a factory owned by a massive American engineering company and made sub-
assemblies for trains. Appropriately enough, just across the road from the office I was given, there was a
slaughterhouse. All day long the screams of the unfortunate pigs meeting their fate and the stench of their offal
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