True Lies: A Leg To Stand On

Some may find the following in poor taste

Back when I worked at a Big Four Professional Services firm, one thing was very important and continually insisted on: partners and staff were not same. Partners were actual human beings (or possibly superbeings who had ascended to a higher plane). Staff were mere helots at the service of the partners. Staff may eventually be accepted into the partnership but a vigorous apartheid needed to be enforced. Emails to the organization has to begin “Dear Partners and Staff…”. Partners got the big offices and made all the decisions.

Becoming a partner was akin to becoming a made guy in the mafia. I’m not sure if the partnership ceremony involved spilling a few drops of blood on the picture of a saint that is then burnt while the novice takes an oath of loyalty (to be honest that sounds way too interesting). But it is certainly predicated on being a good earner, a hard worker who made sacrifices for the family, and of course getting on with the other made guys. And just as in the mafia, a made guy was protected. A made guy could only be messed with by another made guy.

The guy I worked for was senior but he was not a made guy (at least not initially). Lets call him Posh. He had been a senior executive at the firm’s largest client who had missed out on the CEO job in a particularly high stakes games of corporate musical chairs. As an outsider, he was considered valuable but he was not one of the family. Some of the made guys had been with the family for 35 years. But he had respect in his industry and he was useful.

Meanwhile a younger made guy - lets call him Sporty - was on the rise. He had been in the firm since he was a graduate. And he was a bit of an a-hole. He was obviously intelligent but he needed everyone to know how intelligent he was. And if you weren’t a partner then you obviously couldn’t be intelligent. Sporty “wrote” a monthly column in an industry publication (that we had paid for). And by that I mean that a bunch of us actually assembled it and he rearranged it.

Sporty also loved rally driving - perhaps addicted to the buzz of the speed and the competition. One day, I got a text message and a link to a news article: “Sporty has crashed!!!". And when I clicked on the link, it was clear he had - and then some. Sporty had crashed his rally car so badly that he had lost half a leg and would be hospitalized for the next wee while. This obviously presented an immediate problem for Sporty. But also a problem for our team as well. So under the instructions of Posh, I wrote the column with an ex-journo who was slumming it as a PR flak. That mostly consisted of us going to various senior people and getting them to tell us about an industry problem that they had a solution for. And then getting them to tell it to us again in English this time. And repeating that process until we got something comprehensible by actual human beings. The original sin of professional services is being clever.

After a few months, Sporty made an appearance in an elaborate wheelchair. Ginger, a senior partner with a preternatural gift of saying the right thing in any given circumstance*, spoke movingly of Sporty’s plight and the agony for his family. Sporty then stated that despite the pleas of his wife and children, he would never give up rally driving. For some people, a brush with death is an opportunity to reflect on the course of their life and perhaps fashion themselves into something better. Sporty may have lost a leg below the knee but he had absolutely kept his dickishness. In fact, he seemed to have doubled down. Years later, Sporty was relocated to a country famous for its state-mandated punishment amputations - perhaps as a cruel joke by someone in the New York Head Office.

At that point, a reorg whisked me away from Sporty, Posh, and Ginger and I faced a new set of challenges in the World of the Clever. It was clear to me that at that point I was never going to be a made guy. And I wasn’t unhappy about that. Not everyone is cut out for a life in the mafia.

*He’s not a lawyer but if ever I am arrested for murder, I want Ginger on my defense team.