波士顿咨询集团想用钞票来阻止我告诉你们的故事来源：
波士顿咨询集团BCG是咨询业界最有名的咨询公司之一。

本文的作者是MIT校报Tech的专栏作者。

作者是MIT原子物理专业毕业的高材生，毕业后就被BCG聘用去迪拜分公司工作，直到不久前迪拜泡沫破裂离职。

作者在校报T ech上写了四篇连载，讲述他的这段经历，向读者介绍了他在迪拜的真实体验和公司的内幕。

选择了他四篇连载中的第三篇，原文标题是
同系列四篇文章的链接：
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The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
By
The city was strange and the society was unnerving, but what disturbed me most about my Dubai experience was m y job as a business consultant for the Boston Consultin g Group.
I really had no idea what to expect, going in. In my mi nd, consulting was about answering business questions t hrough analysis. It was supposed to be Excel sheets and models, sifting through data to discover profit and lo ss, and helping clients make decisions that would add t
he most value for themselves, and by extension, society.
It was worrisome to enter a new job without any guarant ee 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 wh at I would do if for some reason it turned out that I c ouldn’t get my head around the analysis? In hindsight, analytical skills should have been the least of my worr ies.
Stretching reality
The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” in Munich. I expected instr
uction in Excel programming, data analysis, and busines s theory. Instead, Munich turned out to be little more than a week long social outing with other recently matr iculated consultants and analysts within the BCG’s Eur opean branches. We donned name tags, shook hands, and d rank often. Classes were fluffy, and mostly consisted o f discussion of high-level, almost philosophical topics.
I got along well — as both an American and a member o f 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 t he consulting business, it is standard practice for cli ents to write requests for proposals, describing the qu estion they would like answered. The consulting firm in turn writes a case proposal: We will answer A by havin g Consultant B do X, Y, and Z. A well written case prop osal promises much, but is deliberately vague about wha t concrete things the consultants will produce.
Case proposals were despised by the rank and file — on e 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 o f MIT, I was regularly advertised to clients as an expe rt with seemingly years of topical experience relevant to the case. We were so good at rephrasing our credenti als that even I was surprised to find in each of my cas es, 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 overr ated, for the simple reason that clients usually didn’t know why they had hired us. They sent us vague request s for proposal, we returned vague case proposals, and b
y the time we were hired, no one was the wiser as to wh y exactly we were there.
I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying t o mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being includ ed in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual. In any case it fe ll to us to decide for ourselves what question we had b een hired to answer, and as a matter of convenience, we elected to answer questions that we had already answer ed 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 environm ent. Most of my day was spent thinking up and writing P owerPoint slides. Sometimes, I didn’t even need to wri te them — we had a service in India that could put tog ether pretty good copy if you provided them with a sket ch and some instructions.。