Anny P. (wolfnme) reviewed on 6/5/2006 + 3389 more book reviews

As the ungentle conversion of every man, woman and child into management consultants continues apace, we are fortunate to have Martin Kihn's highly readable, mordantly funny "HOUSE OF LIES: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time" to remind us how deeply this enterprise has come to penetrate our souls. So deeply have these "core values" (to use an egregious elocution of the consultant class) been inscribed into our hearts that to believe in anything else is now made to seem utter madness, suspiciously perverse, to partake of a dangerous agnosticism.

If you've ever been in a meeting where data was "socialized," attended an "off-site" for "team-building," you will no doubt gasp with laughter at Kihn's well-turned tales of consulting engagements gone awry, of destructive and unexpected outcomes engendered by the very consulting culture itself. Beginning with Kihn's discovery that a star partner at his firm is a self-promoting fraud, and ending with his unexpected ascension to Senior Associate status in the wake of a botched assignment where he was neatly snaked by one of the factions within the client firm, Kihn takes us deep into the necrotic, nervous bowels of the American business elite.

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