Munro Consultants

At ten-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, the woman who had started as the receptionist and one month later became the company’s office manager, walked out of the office door on to the sidewalk of University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. She stood holding the door open, looked left then right. The office door, a narrow entrance to a stairway that lead to an upstairs offices, was wedged between two street level stores: an upscale bike shop on one side and a Bose electronics store on the other. The office manager saw a well dressed woman standing in front of the bike shop window. “Excuse me, are you the consultant?”

Lindsey Munro had been waiting outside the office since nine fifty-five. The door had been locked, and no one in the office had answered her calls or the doorbell. She assumed someone would show up soon, and had walked over to look in the bike store window, keeping an eye on the office door.

Before Lindsey could answer, a group of tourists from Japan, twenty strong, came between them and stopped in front of the building. The guide, an older woman whose face was hidden under an oversized visor, carried a red and white Stanford University umbrella; she was leading a sort of pilgrimage for perspective students and their ambitious parents. Although Lindsey couldn’t understand anything, she did catch the words ‘Google’ and ‘PayPal.’ As the group listened to the guide, someone would occasionally nod vigorously or murmur some sound of assent, perhaps even praise. It reminded Lindsey of a Black Baptist prayer service, although she had no idea how to say amen or hallelujah in Japanese.

After another minute the tour group moved down University Avenue, and took a left on Ramona, in search of the next shrine.

Lindsey walked over to the young woman in the doorway. “Was that tour guide saying something about Google?”

“Probably, I couldn’t understand her. But, yes, didn’t you know? This building has good luck. Google rented this space for a while. So did Paypal. And I think a couple of other companies did too. It’s an awesome place. The address alone is enough to get people to come work here. Every time we tell college grads that we’re in an old Google space, they just can’t wait to come see the office.”

“The building has good luck. I see.”

“So. Are you the consultant?”

Just then Lindsey’s phone rang. It was her recruiter. “Lindsey? It’s Tracey. Hey, I totally messed up. I spaced out and sent you the old address for Areté Systems. I’ve already called them to tell them I messed up, not you. I’ll reschedule your interview. I’m very sorry.”

As she hung up, Lindsey asked the woman, “Did there used to be another company here?”

“Yes, they moved out, I can’t remember when. We’ve been here at least three months.”

Lindsey nodded, paused for a moment. “You’re expecting a consultant?”

“One of the board members arranged for an engineering process consultant to come in. I mean, I don’t know much about it. But I heard they’re having some problems. They want some sort of consultant or speaker.”

Lindsey paused, thinking. She smiled. “Okay. And what’s your company name?”

“B56 Analytics.”

“B56 Analytics?”

“Yeah, it’s a funny name. The original one was strange – Barium Analytics.”

“You’re right, any name with barium in it is much worse.”

“It was the idea of one of the angel investors, a doctor at Kaiser or Stanford. I’m not sure about the fifty-six.”

“Maybe it’s barium’s number on the periodic chart. What do you do?”

“Systems to help social media companies. Reporting, things like that. They had a byline about helping companies see what was on the inside, something like that.”

“Just like a barium enema.”

The office manager laughed, “Yeah, gross.”

Lindsey had blocked out the morning for the interview, but because of Tracey’s error, she now had time on her hands. And this unfortunately named company was in need of a bit of consulting and motivation. Why be dull?

“Well here I am, sorry to be late. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, you’re expecting a consultant who is sort of like a motivational speaker, right?”

“Sure, I mean, I didn’t set this up. It was done by one of the VC’s. All the execs and managers are at a two day offsite in Saint Helena, so it’s just a bunch of us worker bees.”

Lindsey followed the office manager upstairs. The office space was a large open area. There did not appear to be any private offices. Instead of desks there was large sheets of plywood on top of sawhorses, all set to different heights: some employees stood at their desks and others sat, using hoppity hops for chairs. There were thirteen men and eight woman, all looked to be in their mid-twenties. She studied them for a moment: they were casually dressed, a Ralph Lauren or Patagonia sort of casual. All were white or Asian. On the wall were some posters: two for the groups GangstaFU and LA/Jihad; in between these was a large black and white picture of Ayn Rand.

“Hey everyone, the consultant is here,” said the office manager, “I can’t believe so many of you got here so early. Why don’t we meet in ten minutes in the conference room next door?”

“Would you mind,” Lindsey said to the office manager, “getting me a cayenne hot chocolate and a scone from Arturo’s?” This was the newest, chic, expensive Venezuelan coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto. “Does anyone else want anything from Arturo’s?” Lindsey asked the rest of the employees.

The office manager frowned, but then said she had the company credit card and assumed since one of the VC’s had hired Lindsey, that whatever she asked for was okay. Thirty minutes and seventy-five dollars later they began in the conference room.

Lindsey began by asking the employees to stand and give their job title. After the sixth one, she broke in.

“Look this is all well and good, but these job title’s have got to go. Software engineer? Technical support? These titles are too limiting. Do you want that? Do you want to be constrained by your job title? Let’s reconsider our options and challenge our assumptions. There’s the standards: guru, ninja, rock star, all star, superstar. At least think about these. But why stop there? What about ‘coding hero’ instead of programmer or engineer? ‘Happiness concierge’ instead of support engineer?”

There were a few nods.

“Here, look, let’s do a quick free form association of possible titles. Everyone call out something, a title you think might work better. Let’s go, don’t be shy.”

Lindsey wrote on the white board, as they called out. Afterwards, she ran through them all. “Okay, some are good, some might not work, but that’s the nature of these sessions. All initial ideas are welcome. So, what have we got? Architect sounds a little dull, dishwasher, inspector, codeonaut, cowboy, craftsman, carpenter, code quarterback, okay…not bad. This last one, escort, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She looked at the group. “Okay, let’s move on, but remember: don’t let the title define you, instead you should define the title. Next topic: how are you all keeping track of projects right now?”

A young woman in the back answered, “We haven’t settled on any one system yet. We’re still evaluating two or three systems.”

Lindsey nodded. “Okay, just remember that islands of information are your friend. What does that mean? It should be standard operating procedure to keep departmental information quarantined, in case one system is compromised, then the remaining ones are safe and isolated. So for each group you might want to use your own project management and information tracking system.”

“Do you have any recommendations on which systems to use?”

“Well, the good news there are so many best in category products, it shouldn’t be a problem for each group to come up with its own tool. There’s Google docs, DropBox, Asana, Jira, to name a few. For those technically inclined you could spin up your own wiki. What else? Maybe BaseCamp, Trac, Confluence. The point is for each group to establish its own unique identity as reflected in a project management tool. It’s kind of like customizing your Facebook background page: it makes you unique. So make sure you pick the tool most suited to the style of your department, and go from there.”

The audience wrote down Lindsey’s list.

She continued. “Let’s talk about documentation, especially for you developers. There’s no sense in writing a specification until you’re done coding. Spec writing will take time away from coding and bug fixing. If you change your code, you also have to go change your spec. Does anyone here think that is efficient?” No one said anything.

“You’ve heard the spec is the code – generally that should be good enough. Maybe only once you’re code complete and all bugs have been fixed, then you can take the time to write a separate document. But really, if you’ve done a good job of commenting in your code, you shouldn’t need to write anything else.”

Lindsey turned to the office manager, “You all are hiring right,? Do you have many open positions?”

“Yes, about twenty openings across most departments: marketing, engineers, and sales.”

“That’s good. Oh, and by the way, did you make reservations for lunch?”

“Lunch? No, I didn’t receive any instructions.”

“No? Well for lunch why don’t we all go to MacArthur Park. But if you can’t get us in there, since it’s such short notice, try for Il Fornio.”

“Back to hiring. What is the best way to ensure success? Hire only your friends, or at worse, friends of your friends. Why? That’s the best way to ensure everyone will get along. In addition, consider hiring interns. They’re cheap, and they leave at the end of the summer. Also, for whatever hiring you do, don’t forget to mention what a great address this is, and who occupied this space before.”

There were a few nods and smiles at the mention of the auspicious address.

A question came from the back row. “But, if you spend time in training interns, don’t you lose whatever knowledge you’ve invested in that person? Whatever experience they have gained while working here?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true if you subscribe to the portfolio theory of employee performance, where you expect certain returns over time, especially if you’re tracking to a particular performance index, say the Werner Klemperer Personnel Performance Index, sort of the Russell 2000 of employee productivity measurement. And what should that be? Seven percent? nine percent? Or for you bulls, double digit returns? Do you?”

The questioner blinked a few times. “Do I what?”

“Never mind. The last thing to say about hiring is keep an eye on an applicant’s number of years worked Why? Because experience is overrated, and expensive. You don’t want to go through all the work of retraining experienced people—it’s like deprogramming someone who has been in a cult. Without fail experienced people, say those with more than five years in one job, feel so entitled that they will want more salary, more options, and more responsibility. Any questions? Let’s move on.”

Lindsey continued to review, revise, and recommend. As was de rigueur, their engineering meetings were held standing up, but she advised them to think about the deep knee squat or push-up position. Pushing untested code to the production site was only permitted if there was a beta label clearly displayed. She asked each employee if B56 Analytics were a car, what kind would it be. She inquired about their Myers-Briggs personality type. She was concerned that there was no foosball table, but noted with approval a mission statement that contained the words ‘empower’ and ‘make the world a better place.’

On the way back from lunch Lindsey told the office manager she had one quick errand to run. At Bell’s Books, she resisted the urge to browse, and instead made her one purchase, then walked quickly back to B56 Analytics. As she came up the stairs, the office manager was coming down. “I have to leave for the day, I’m meeting a repair man at my apartment. I left the receipt for lunch on the CFO’s desk. I hope that he doesn’t mind that it came to almost five hundred dollars.”

“Money well spent,” said Lindsey. “I’ve got a special role playing exercise for the team this afternoon. I’m sorry you’ll be missing it.”

The real consultant arrived an hour later, having misunderstood the start time for her meeting. By this time Lindsey had already left the building, although not before she had turned, and in a demented Randian benediction, made the sign of the dollar in the direction of the employees. The consultant found the employees in the conference room, paired off and facing each other. Each was trying to convince the other to give way and let the other pass by.

“What are you all doing?”

“We’re performing a conflict situation and resolution exercise,” said one of the women as she pointed to the book on the table. It was the book Lindsey had bought. “Who are you?”

The consultant didn’t answer, but instead looked at the book. It was Dr. Seuss’s story of the Zax, the two creatures who come face to face and neither will yield to the other. Lindsey had instructed the employees to read the story, then afterwards pair off facing each like a set of opposing Zax, and come up with some resolution.

At dinner that night, after getting the children served, her husband asked how the interview had gone.

“There was a problem with the address, Tracey had sent me their old one, so she’s rescheduled me for next week.”

“That’s too bad. Well, I hope it wasn’t a complete loss.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was. And there’s certainly one company I’m going to keep my eye on.”

________

Author’s note: a nod to H.H. Munro’s (Saki) “The Schartz-Metterklume Method”.