Sunday, June 27, 2010. The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 11 U.S. residents today and plans to charge them with being deep-cover agents, spying for the Russians. Two of the alleged spies are Boston residents Donald Howard Heathfield and his wife Tracy Lee Ann Foley. Heathfield has been working for ten years in the Boston area as a management consultant.
It was right in front of us all the time. All the signs were there. We whispered our suspicions at the office water cooler or at a neighborhood bar after work but rarely in public and never around our company's management. The idea was too fantastic.
We knew what our enemy was capable of. We'd seen the results through the years in Siberia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. What we discounted was Russian subtlety. We never dreamed the iron-fisted, ham-handed Commissars of the Kremlin possessed this level of cunning and treachery. Now, thanks to the brave and dogged soldiers at the FBI we have uncovered the truth. Archival information is sketchy but, from what we know, we can piece together most of the story.
It was August, 1989. The Soviet Union was crumbling. The Berlin Wall was teetering. The Soviet Committee for State Security, aka, KGB, was holding what might be its last meeting. The mood in the conference room of Moscow's Lubyanka Prison headquarters was grim. KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov spoke, " Comrades, we are finished. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Baywatch we can no longer defeat the West. They have more missiles, more tanks and they have MTV. Before we capitulate entirely and become waiters in Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach, are there any ideas as to how we can defeat this hated enemy?"
From the back of the room came the confident voice of Captain Sergei McKinseikov. The young officer had recently returned to the USSR after earning his MBA at Harvard. "Comrade Chairman, having recently come from the United States I can tell you that there is a growing crisis of confidence in American business. Companies that have prospered for many years are being managed by young, over-educated, under-experienced neophytes. They have more experience unhooking women's brassieres in the back of a Lada than running a company. Soon bonuses will begin to suffer and, remembering what they were taught at Yale/Columbia, etc., they will seek guidance from equally clueless strangers known as 'management consultants."
The Chairman interrupted. "Captain, are you suggesting that American corporations, having prospered for decades using methods proven over generations, will suddenly abandon the business models that made them a success and follow the advice of people with no experience in their field? That's madness! No sane competent executive would knowingly choose such a course. In Russia we would send such an executive to our management re-training program in Siberia."
"I realize it sounds crazy, Comrade Chairman, but it is happening. What I am proposing is that we infiltrate these 'management consulting' companies. and people them with well-trained KGB operatives. This can be done while the agents are studying at America's Ivy League Universities. Most of the schools are run by socialists anyway. They won't mind. When the time comes, and believe me it's coming, our people will be in the perfect position to wreak havoc throughout American industry. The beauty of this plan is that the American companies will come to us. All we need are a few laptops and a dictionary of buzz words and catch phrases. One of my classmates at Harvard grossed $3mil last year with only a Dell Dimension and the words ' silos and bandwidth'. Even our Russian accents will seem exotic. We'll tell them that all the new, robust thinking 'from 10,000 feet' and 'six-sigma, best practices' are coming from Eastern Europe." Most of them think the "Far East" means Amagansett. They'll never know.
The Chairman remained skeptical. "I don't know, Captain. The plan sounds expensive. Besides, what if the American executives don't believe the useless advice we give them?"
"But that's just it, Sir" McKinseikov persisted, " the beauty of this plan is that it funds itself. American executives believe that if you charge them staggering fees and bury them in reams of paper, you must certainly be smarter than they are. Look at how much they pay Bill Clinton to read a 30 minute canned speech. We can use the exorbitant revenue from each assignment to pay for the next. And don't forget, American executives are sheep. If Company A hires us to 're-purpose' their once successful business, Company B down the street will feel that they also must redesign. Plus, once the Americans have paid millions for advice, they feel compelled to follow it regardless of how destructive it appears. At Harvard they call this a 'win-win'."
Chairman Kryuchkov was impressed but still cautious. "So, Captian McKinseikov, your plan is to train a group of Russian agents at America's Ivy League schools to become consultants to management. We then set them up in fancy offices with laptop computers. You claim that America's biggest and most successful companies will hire them to completely reorganize what were proven successful business models. Our people will then take this questionable unproven advice and market to those companies competitors? And those competitors will pay even more for the same bad advice? Won't we ultimately get caught? Sooner or later won't American executives get wise to the fact that they are buying air? I mean how long can such a ridiculous concept survive?"
Good Question!
Dosvidanya!
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