The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Opinion: The city of tomorrow If it sounds too good to be true, maybe it is By Keith Yost STAFF COLUMNIST April 2, 2010 I hadn’t expected much coming out of college. I knew that recessions were not kind to the young and inexperienced, so I was surprised when I received an offer from the Boston Consulting Group to work as a business consultant in Dubai. It seemed too good to be true — what did a business strategy firm need with a 22-year old nuclear engineer? — but the compensation was too much for me to harbor any serious second thoughts. Adding up the salary offer, signing bonus, housing allowance, performance bonus, and profit sharing, I could easily make $200,000 in my first year, topped off with a gold-plated benefits package. I’d long given up my rebellious streak, but it was still a source of pride to outdo my parents. In a single stroke, I would surpass their highest combined income — what better proof of one’s independence could there be than that? Getting the job was not just a relief from the uncertainty of life after graduation. This was it. This was adulthood. This was everything I’d worked so hard for at MIT. I couldn’t be happier. A short year later however, the dream job was gone. The Dubai economy, advertised to me in interviews as recession-proof, was racked by a credit crisis that revealed deeper, arguably insurmountable, structural problems. My foreign adventure ended abruptly with a paroxysm of self-doubt and despair. In returning to the United States, I returned to all the feelings of uncertainty that came with graduation; I was right back to where I was before I had begun my job search, complete with the inescapable anxiety that comes from not knowing what you want to do in life. Seven months in the Middle East had taught me only one lesson: Even in the best of circumstances, business consulting can be a morally ambiguous and soul-crushing profession. Now back in Boston, I find it hard to complain about how things turned out. I still may not know what I want to do in life, but I learned a little more about the world. I paid off $61,000 of student loans. I continue to get to waste my weekends on idle adventures with friends. When I am honest with myself, I must admit this was more than I had expected. Yet at the same time, what I am left with is little consolation when I think of how close I was to being set for life. Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder... what happened? The city of yesterday and tomorrow, today! I arrived in Dubai in June, 2009. If there is an urban analogue to shock and awe military campaigns, Dubai is it. Giant malls, grand hotels, towering skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes, islands shaped like palm trees; to be poetic about it, what the mind imagines, the Emiratis built. The skyline is amazing. The food is wonderful. The elevator close door buttons actually close the doors when you press them. Nothing is old, everything is new. After a life of living exclusively in buildings several decades older than myself, I was finally in the city of the future. Within a couple weeks, the favorable first impressions faded into a less attractive picture. While the winter is cooler, summer temperatures commonly reach to 110 degrees and, factoring in the high humidity, feel closer to 140 degrees. The ocean is like bath water and provides no respite from the heat. There are no names for the streets, no up-to-date maps online, and the cabbies, themselves fresh expats from less developed countries, do not know their way around. The commercial banking system is terrible. The laws are strange and the bureaucracy inept. There is silt and dust everywhere. English is common, but not as common as Bad English (Bad English is a language very similar to English, but with the added grammatical rule that speakers must repeat every sentence three times). If one is determined to do so, it is not hard to have a terrible time in Dubai. As a city, the novelty of Dubai fades quickly. Outside of one or two unique attractions, like wadi bashing or the gold souk, Dubai does not have much to offer in the way of touristy things. One quickly bores of roaming the countless malls, each filled with the same stores and sights as the last. Despite its headline-stealing architectural accomplishments, after a few hours of exploration one gets the feeling that Dubai is not so much a city as a giant sprawling suburb, an insipid tessellation of apartment buildings, shopping centers, restaurants, and office parks, plopped unceremoniously into a barren desert. As a culture, Dubai’s novelty is more durable. The city is a melting pot, borrowing heavily from British, Arab, and South Asian influences, but also adding in pieces from elsewhere around the world. The cultural plenty affords an opportunity to cherry pick the best bits (like chicken tikka masala) and avoid the mediocre elements (like watching cricket). But along with this diversity comes a curious sort of contradiction, as if one were viewing the frayed edges where two cultures failed to mesh. The posted signs plaintively urging western women to wear more modest clothing and the advertisements on the sides of mass-produced soda cups at franchised fast food joints (one such cup suggesting, in the ultimate of anatopisms, that hen-pecked Emirati men should relax from their female-dominated households by indulging in a snack on their bike ride to work), imply that on some level, the mixing cultures failed to find common ground. At one restaurant I found, the managers had put up a flat screen TV that played, on loop, the concert of some teen idol boy band I’d never heard of. Emirati women, bundled up head to toe in their black burkas, would walk by, giggle, and goggle at the hip gyrations of these half-naked, off-key westerners. If you had a taste for irony and were lucky, you might eat lunch during one of the five daily calls to prayer, and could listen bemusedly as the tinny adhan fought to be heard over the sex-filled pop music. Were these merely growing pains, or a battle for the city’s soul? Ultimately, my most enduring impression of Dubai is not what it has accomplished, but what it failed to accomplish. Caught offguard by the global recession, Dubai’s haphazard expansion has been frozen in mid-stride for all the world to gawk at, like rubberneckers at a traffic accident. Its unfinished metro system, a patch-work solution to an awkward, poorly planned network of roads, connects partially built apartments to idle construction sites. What had been a miraculous boom story now looks like a particularly ugly form of “hurry up and wait.” To the optimistic, the inchoate nature of Dubai’s sprawl might suggest the possibility of some later, more mature period of development during which the mistakes made during the early days of reckless development can be put to right. But for me it was eerie to look upon a city that is incomplete. The windowless, unfinished skyscrapers, with their threads of rebar jutting out, evoke the thought of destruction, rather than construction. The still, abandoned cranes and the anemic flows of traffic highlight the troubles the city faces rather than its potential. Were it not for the youth of the city, who seem to take great pains to draw obscenities and genitalia on every dust covered surface of every abandoned car and storefront, one might easily mistake Dubai a casualty of some sort of apocalyptic alien invasion or neutron bombing, not the victim of a sharp recession and sudden depopulation. There are several words that can be used to describe Dubai. It is magnificent, mundane, interesting, diverse, conflicted, and hot. But if I were limited to only one, it was disturbing. This is the first in a four-part series on the author’s experience as a consultant in Dubai. Opinion: Welcome to your caste If you’re not an Emirati, you’re just a carpetbagger By Keith Yost STAFF COLUMNIST April 6, 2010 I settled in a studio apartment on the thirteenth floor of an apartment complex in a western, unfinished area of the city. It was simple but spacious, and despite my zeal to be as frugal as I could, was still far more than I needed to satisfy my college student tastes. Still, my coworkers laughed at the apartment as the type of place an Indian engineer would live in — not a flophouse by any means, but clearly not the level of luxury a white person should treat himself to. I smiled whenever I was told this, laughing internally at my own inside joke — in better times, my colleagues might have been right, and the 26-story building would be packed with software engineers and other white collar workers from the subcontinent. But these were not good times, and aside from my landlord, whose winter residence was a floor below mine, the building was almost completely empty of tenants. I was not alone in my alone-ness. Nearly every building I came across had huge banners draped across its upper floors, advertising leases. Living in a modern-day ghost town brought more than just physical isolation. In some way, I was detached from the lifestyle that my coworkers enjoyed. It is hard to bridge the conversational divide when one side wants to lament the difficulty of finding good domestic help and the other wants to brag about the new futon he bought from IKEA. The difference in mindset between me and the bulk of my coworkers was minor compared to the major divisions that split Dubai society. The most accurate way to describe UAE society is to say that it is stratified into a caste-like structure, with Emiratis at the top, western expats beneath them, and eastern expats at the bottom. There is little interaction between the rungs — each member is expected to socialize with his or her own group, and even western expats, who presumably participated in a more egalitarian society in their country of origin, accept the division as natural and desirable. I enjoyed meeting and talking to other westerners. But it was difficult to shrug off the insidious effects of the caste system. Some of the nicest people I met displayed an almost sociopathic disregard for the eastern expat workers who served them. It was commonplace to verbally abuse cab drivers, make outrageous demands of waitstaff, and generally treat those on the lower rung as mere peons to be ordered about. In the middle of my time overseas, a co-worker friend and I went to eat at an upscale restaurant near work. We were having a good conversation, trading stories and jokes, and I was enjoying myself until, seemingly out of nowhere, my friend pulled aside a waitress and dressed her down for some imperceptible infraction. After he was done and the waitress had left, I asked him, as politely and neutrally as I could, why he treated the waitress that way. He gave two reasons. The first was the common response, as universal as it was unconvincing: being mean was the only way to get anything done. Unless one occasionally put boot to bottom, no eastern expat would ever take you seriously. The second reason was more enlightening. Besides being necessary, he explained, keeping eastern expats in line was merely being honest with the situation. If he wanted to, my friend could call over the manager of the waitress and demand that she be fired. The woman would lose her job and be deported back to a country where she would be undoubtedly worse off. What good did it do to pretend that the power balance was otherwise? If my friend wanted speedy service, who was this waitress to deny him? In obedience to the social norms imposed by the caste structure, I didn’t spend much time hanging out with eastern expats, but what little time I did spend did not confirm the expectations set by my colleagues. I liked talking to my cabbies. The most common topic of discussion was U.S. meddling in Pakistan — many of my drivers said they were not fond of America, although since we got along fine it seemed more likely to me that they took fault with some concept of America rather than any Americans in particular. Maybe it’s just hard to root for the big guy. My longest conversation was with some Pakistani youths I’d hired to help me pick up furniture I’d bought off of Dubizzle, the Dubai equivalent of Craigslist. We crammed together in a tiny pick-up truck and wandered lost in the city for two hours grabbing futons and chairs and the like, mostly talking about our favorite movies and music, and what life was like in our respective countries. My impression is that the average eastern expat in Dubai is not embittered or anti-western — to the contrary, if anything they are envious of western lifestyles and eager to work for one themselves. You’d much sooner find them slinging bootleg DVD’s than fomenting revolution with AK-47’s. The downside of being in a caste system is that as a westerner, I didn’t occupy the topmost rung. A month after I arrived, the government tapped my cell phone. When I tried to leave, immigration services barred me from leaving the country. For such injustices, there is no explanation, no apology. If the monarch wishes to tap your phone, he needs no justification. If you miss your expensive international flight because a bureaucrat decides at the last minute you cannot leave, tough cookie. You’re not a citizen. You’re a hired hand, a temporary servant brought in to fill a gap until a superior Emirati learns how to do your job. I was never treated with malice by an Emirati — they wouldn’t consider me worth the effort. But it was clear that the system — the laws, the government, the society — was not set up for my benefit. I had no rights that they were bound to respect. I came to Dubai expecting some degree of culture shock. But there is a distinction between struggling to adapt because something is different and struggling to adapt because something is abhorrent. Dubai is a dictatorship, perhaps benevolent, but still a dictatorship. The press is free only so long as it does not criticize. The economy is hewn more closely to familial ties than capitalist pressures. Beneath the glamour of Dubai lies a society built upon precepts borrowed from the antebellum south. If I, a carpetbagging northerner, came away from the land of plantation owners and slaves without any feelings of attachment to the country I had lived for seven months in, I do not think I have myself to blame. This is the second in a four-part series on the author’s experiences as a consultant in Dubai. Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell The city was strange and the society unnerving, but what disturbed me the most about my experience in Dubai was my job as a business consultant. By Keith Yost STAFF COLUMNIST April 9, 2010 The city was strange and the society was unnerving, but what disturbed me most about my Dubai experience was my job as a business consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. I really had no idea what to expect, going in. In my mind, consulting was about answering business questions through analysis. It was supposed to be Excel sheets and models, sifting through data to discover profit and loss, and helping clients make decisions that would add the most value for themselves, and by extension, society. It was worrisome to enter a new job without any guarantee that I would be qualified. I assumed BCG would train me, and that as it had been with MIT, intelligence and hard work would prove sufficient. Still, I wondered what I would do if for some reason it turned out that I couldn’t get my head around the analysis? In hindsight, analytical skills should have been the least of my worries. Stretching reality The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” in Munich. I expected instruction in Excel programming, data analysis, and business theory. Instead, Munich turned out to be little more than a week long social outing with other recently matriculated consultants and analysts within the BCG’s European branches. We donned name tags, shook hands, and drank often. Classes were fluffy, and mostly consisted of discussion of high-level, almost philosophical topics. I got along well — as both an American and a member of the Dubai office, I was doubly foreign and therefore double the curiosity. After a pleasant week of pseudo-partying, I returned to Dubai and was assigned to writing case proposals. In the consulting business, it is standard practice for clients to write requests for proposals, describing the question they would like answered. The consulting firm in turn writes a case proposal: We will answer A by having Consultant B do X, Y, and Z. A well written case proposal promises much, but is deliberately vague about what concrete things the consultants will produce. Case proposals were despised by the rank and file — one had a dozen bosses, unclear objectives, and virtually no coordination with co-workers. But in one sense, the proposals were good practice for real case work. Both involved stretching reality to fit whatever was assumed the client desired. Despite having no work or research experience outside of MIT, I was regularly advertised to clients as an expert with seemingly years of topical experience relevant to the case. We were so good at rephrasing our credentials that even I was surprised to find in each of my cases, even my very first case, that I was the most senior consultant on the team. I quickly found out why so little had been invested in developing my Excel-craft. Analytical skills were overrated, for the simple reason that clients usually didn’t know why they had hired us. They sent us vague requests for proposal, we returned vague case proposals, and by the time we were hired, no one was the wiser as to why exactly we were there. I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual. In any case it fell to us to decide for ourselves what question we had been hired to answer, and as a matter of convenience, we elected to answer questions that we had already answered in the course of previous cases — no sense in doing new work when old work will do. The toolkit I brought with me from MIT was absolute overkill in this environment. Most of my day was spent thinking up and writing PowerPoint slides. Sometimes, I didn’t even need to write them — we had a service in India that could put together pretty good copy if you provided them with a sketch and some instructions. Burning out I worked hard at MIT. I routinely took seven to ten classes per semester and filled whatever hours were left in the day with part-time jobs and tutoring. It was a fairly stupid way of going about my education, and I missed out on many of the learning opportunities that MIT offers outside of classes. I don’t recommend what I did to anyone. But as stupid as carrying double course loads was, it had one advantage: After all the long hours I put into MIT, I believed I was invincible. If MIT couldn’t burn me out, nothing else ever could. It took roughly three months before BCG disproved my “burn-out proof” theory. Putting together PowerPoint slides was easy, the hours were lenient, and the fifth day of every week usually consisting of a leisurely day away from the client site. By all accounts, I should have been coasting through my tasks. What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work. It was relatively easy to drag myself to classes when I thought I was working for my own betterment. It was hard to sit at a laptop and crank out slides when all I seemed to be accomplishing was the transfer of wealth from my client to my company. I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangib