Friday 30 March 2018

The Firm – Duff McDonald 2013

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A really interesting book. It is especially entertaining as from the 50s to the 80s McKinsey seemed to have suffered all the problems that agencies struggle with today.

On industry experience:
 “The great open secret of the McKinsey business model is that a large part of its success has come by reselling the insights of others.” (McDonald quoting Bower, 2013, p.88).

Responsibility of advice:
 “He (the consultant) is not a banker, accountant, or lawyer. He is a thinker. He has had the chance to whisper into the ears of power, to exercise influence while being insulated from responsibility.” (McDonald, 2013, p.7).

Professionalism
“”And we look to hire people who are: first, very smart; second, insecure and thus driven by their insecurity; and third, competitive. Put together 3,000 of these egocentric, task-oriented people, and it produces an atmosphere of something less than humility.” (McDonald, 2013, p.166).
 “The McKinsey consultant would be selfless, be prepared to sacrifice money and personal glory for the sake of building a stronger firm, never look for public credit, and always be confident and discreet.” (McDonald, 2013, p.42).

All done with a truly interesting purpose:
“We’re selling the benefit called change. Change is where the value is.” (McDonald, 2013, p.185). The firm works “by pushing companies fearlessly into the future.” (McDonald, 2013, p.8).“In a word, McKinsey sells its own enlightenment, the firm’s ability to see things more clearly than its clients.” (McDonald, 2013, p.9). “One of the firm’s recently stated goals is helping to “(solve) the world’s great problems.” (McDonald, 2013, p.336).



The key is analytic knowledge - Tools are for tools.
“We need a conceptual supernova, a direct response to BCG’s matrix. And I rejected that notion. That was exactly what we didn’t need. We want to help our clients solve the problems they have, not the problems we know how to solve. We don’t want to be a solution in search of a problem, and that’s what the four-box matrix was.” (McDonald, 2013, p.140).

“To that end, Gluck introduced practice bulletins, one-page summaries of what had been learned on a particular engagement or series of engagement with clients, so as to keep all consultants abreast of current work being done by the firm. Gluck intended to build an internal McKinsey knowledge network one piece of paper at a time.” (McDonald, 2013, p.141).
 “”McKinsey evolved from general advisers to ‘knowledge bearing advisers.” (McDonald, 2013, p.197).  “”Today McKinsey positions itself as the repository of all business information and theory worth knowing,” (…) The firm claimed to do more research in business issues than the business schools at Harvard, Stanford and Wharton combined.” (McDonald, 2013, p.215).

Creativity
 “”It was a given, of course, that (Skilling) was brilliant and that he could get to the essence of an issue faster than anybody,” wrote McLean and Elking in Smartest Guys. “But once he felt the audience understood the strategy, he lost interest. Execution bored him. ‘Just do it!’ he’d tell his subordinates with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Just get it done!’ The details were irrelevant.” (McDonald, 2013, p.245).

Culture
“Bower came up with a new language. McKinsey had clients, not customers. Its consultants played a role, rather than worked at a job. It had practices and firm members, not a business and employees. It didn’t sell, nor did it have products or markets. The firm did not negotiate with clients, that being far too adversarial a term. It merely made arrangement. It didn’t have rules. It had values. And, perhaps most important, McKinsey was not a company; it was The Firm.” (McDonald quoting Bower, 2013, p.45).
“”up-or-out” rules.: Whenever business turns down, instead of laying off people, the firm simply lowers the percentage that gets promoted at each level and problem takes care of itself in a year or two. Voila!” (McDonald, 2013, p.127). “Even so, McKinsey has the temerity to refer to its “tradition” of people leaving the firm to seek greener pastures. In most companies that’s called quitting or getting fired. At McKinsey, it’s raised to the level of ritual.” (McDonald quoting Bower, 2013, p.84).

Money
“turning problems into profits.” (McDonald quoting Bower, 2013, p.453). “”value billing”: simply charging clients what McKinsey deemed its services to be worth.” (McDonald quoting Bower, 2013, p.57).
“Because consulting firms pay out all their profits at the end of each year, they are usually funded for about the next three months and nothing more.” (McDonald, 2013, p.268).


Democracy
“Bower appointed an election committee that produced an elaborate set of rules. There would be a secret ballot, for starters, with the results tallied by McKinsey’s auditors, Arthur Andersen.” (McDonald, 2013, p.100). “Talented people don’t like to be managed, Clee argued, and so if the firm wanted to attract and retain talented people, it had to trust them to do the right thing without due oversight.” (McDonald, 2013, p.103).







Tuesday 13 March 2018

WB Yeats – Collected Poems 2010


More wisdom than I understand.  But it reaches me without the latter.


“Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.
(…)
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is not truth
Saving in thine own heart.” (Yeats ‘The Song of the happy shepherd’, 2010, p.33).

                                 And then she:
‘Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Ephemera, p.44).

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
(…)
And I shall have a some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the crickets sings;
(…)
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The lake isle of Innisfree’, p.74).

“I sigh that kiss you,
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you have grown.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘A cradle song, p.75).

“Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Into the twilight, p.98).

“Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The song of wandering Aengus’, p.99).

“When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘He remembers forgotten Beauty, p.103).

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’, p.116).

“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, p.117).

“I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Withering of the Boughs’, p.125).

“Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The coming of wisdom with time’, p.145).

“Do men who least desire get most,
Or get the most who most desire?’
A beggar said, ‘They get the most
Whom man or devil cannot tire.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The three beggars’, p.163).

“When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon!
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Lines written in dejection’, p.207).

“Robartes: Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,
The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents,
Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty
The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:
For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast;
But while the moon is rounding towards the full
He follows whatever whim’s most difficult
Among whims not impossible, and though scarred,
As with the cat-o’-nine tails of the mind,
His body moulded from within his body
Grows comlier, Eleven pass, and then
Athena takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born
Because the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,
Before the full moon but sets the soul at war
In its own being, and when that war’s begun
In its own being, and when that war’s begun
There’s no muscle in the arm, and after,
Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon,
The soul begins to tremble into stillness,
To die into the labyrinth of itself.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The phases of the moon’, p.230).

“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
(…)
The long-legged moorhens dive,
And hens the moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when it may suffice?” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Easter 1916’, p.251).

“Turning and turning the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack of all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The second coming’, p.260).

“That is not country for old men The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
- Those dying generations – at their song
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monument of unageing intellect.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, p.267).

“What shall I do with this absurdity –
O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Tower’, p.268).

“Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun, and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of the words of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Tower’, p.273).

“O what if levelled lawns and graveled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight or every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Meditations in Times of Civil war, p.276).

 “… if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, p.285).

“Come let us mock the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind
Nor thought of the levelling wind.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, p.286).


“A prayer for my Son

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning’s back,
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.

Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.

Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stars to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman’s knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone;

And when through all the town there ran
The servants of your enemy,
A woman and a man,
Unless the Holy Writings lie,
Hurried through the smooth and rough
And through the fertile and waste,
Protecting, till the danger past
With human love.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘A prayer for my Son, p.290).

“Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain” (Yeats, 2010, ‘From Oedipus at Colonus’, p.308).

“For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘All Soul’s night’, p.311).

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time:
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb” (Yeats, 2010, ‘In memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, p.315).

“Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Death’, p.316).

“Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages –
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Blood and the Moon’, p.320).

 “The Seventh:                       They walked the roads
Mimicking what they heard, as children mimic;
They understood that wisdom comes of beggary.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The seven sages’, p.326).

“Under my window ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moorhens on the top,
Run for a mile undimming in Heaven’s face
Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,
Run underground rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What’s water but the generated soul?” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Coole and Ballylee, p.329).

“Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Coole and Ballylee’, p.329).

 “Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Vacillation’, p.337).

“No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought,
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Vacillation’, p.337).

“Things said or done long years ago
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Vacillation’, p.338).

“The soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?
The heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The heart. What theme had Homer but original sin.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Vacillation’, p.339).

“What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Gratitude to the unknown Instructors’, p.343).

“I broke my heart in two
So hard I struck.
What matter? For I know
That out of rock,
Out of a desolate source,
Love leaps upon its course.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘His confidence, p.352).

“I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘A woman young and old’, p.361).

 “Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that’s a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Ribh considers Christian love insufficient’, p.382).

“’I am I, am I,
The greater grows my light
The further that I fly.’” (Yeats, 2010, ‘He and She’, p.383).



“An Acre of Grass

Picture and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength and body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing but a mouse stirs.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end” ” (Yeats, 2010, ‘An acre of Grass’, p.399).

 “Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Parnell’, p.413).

“Grandfather sang it under the gallows:
‘Hear, gentleman, ladies and all mankind:
Money is good and a girl might be better,
But good strong blows are delights to the mind.’
There, standing on the cart,
He sang it from his hear.

Robbers had taken his old tambourine,
But he took down the moon
And rattled out a tune;
Robbers had taken his old tambourine.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Three marching songs’, p.435).

“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six week or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show
Those stilted boys that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, p.449).

“Man: In a cleft that’s christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till,
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answer right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘The Man and the Echo’, p.452).

“Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.” (Yeats, 2010, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, p.457).