Search Results for: Tin House

Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500

Longreads Pick

The author, on buying an abandoned house in Detroit and fixing it up, in a city that has seen more busts than booms:

I wanted something nobody wanted, something that was impossible. The city is filled with these structures, houses whose yellowy eyes seem to follow you. It would be only one house out of thousands, but I wanted to prove it could be done, prove that this American vision of torment could be built back into a home. I also decided I would do it the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money pouring into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to those resources. I also wanted to prove to myself and my family I was a man. While they were building things, I had been writing poems.

Author: Drew Philp
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 9, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,333 words)

Why Soda Expires in the Houses of the Super-Rich

Getting the details right was especially important when there were several houses, so that consistency could be maintained from property to property in the remotes for television sets, the controls for lighting and security systems, the organization of kitchen and bathroom cupboards. Principals did not want to fumble around, lost in their own houses. Ms. Fowler used Excel spreadsheets to stock refrigerators with soft drinks, then lined up and photographed the contents so that a glance would tell what needed replenishment. She religiously checked the expiration dates on cans of soda: if you own seven houses and each has as many as six refrigerators—two in the kitchen, one in the garage or storeroom, one in the pool house, one in the master suite, one in the screening room—for a total of forty-two refrigerators, it’s possible that years could pass before a can of soda is opened.

— In Harper’s, John P. Davidson discusses his time at The Starkey Institute, a “butler boot camp” which certifies estate managers to work for the super-rich.

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Photo of Spelling Manor: Atwater Village Newbie

Longreads Best of 2013: Award for Outstanding Reporting

Ryan Leaf’s Jailhouse Confessions, Written By His Cell Mate

John Cagney Nash | Playboy | September 2013 | 19 minutes (4,710 words)

 

Flinder Boyd (@FlinderBoyd) is a journalist for SB Nation, Sports on Earth, and the BBC among others.

Athletes and sports writers usually come from two completely different professional worlds and as a result there is often an emotional wall between the two of them. At times, on the page, it can almost read as if two are speaking vastly different languages.

The British journalist John Cagney Nash solved this problem by somehow landing himself in the same jail in Montana as Ryan Leaf, the one-time future of the NFL and now its biggest draft bust. Over the course of a few months the two became friends and Leaf was able to open up with his fellow inmate in a way we rarely get to read about.

For years since Leaf’s retirement he’s been seen as little more than a pathetic example for all that can go wrong with the draft. Thanks to Nash’s deft touch we’re able see him as human, and at times Leaf’s honesty is downright heartbreaking.

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Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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Illustration by Jason Mecier

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Don't Be Cruel: A Brief History of Elvis-Hating in America, Our Member Pick

Ned Stuckey-French | The Normal School | Fall 2012 | 20 minutes (4,999 words)

 

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “Don’t Be Cruel: A Brief History of Elvis-Hating in America,” from Ned Stuckey-French and The Normal School

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also now buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues. 

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My wife Elizabeth and I went to Graceland for the first time twenty-five years ago, right after we married, and as the van took us back down the hill to the parking lot, the driver asked his load of tourists if we had enjoyed our tour. One lady, a true pilgrim who had been sitting silently by herself, responded softly and immediately, “It was vury movin’.” I looked at my wife and rolled my eyes.

I’m ashamed now of that response, because during the last few years I have rediscovered Elvis. Come home to the King, really. I always liked the early stuff, watched the first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was a kid and the ’68 Comeback Special as an adolescent, but now…well…now things are different.

It began when research for Elizabeth’s most recent novel took her to Tennessee and some awful Cold War–era experiments on pregnant women at Vanderbilt. She needed the experiments, but not Nashville, and she’d been through Memphis a lot as a kid. She grew up in Indiana and when her family went to Little Rock, where her grandmother lived, they always went through Memphis. So, being a fiction writer, she just moved the experiments from Nashville to Memphis.

Fifties. Memphis. Elvis was unavoidable. Soon we found ourselves doing fieldwork in places like the annual Big E Festival in Cornelia, Georgia, with its T-shirts and tribute-artist contest (don’t call them impersonators). Then, almost before we realized what was happening, we’d visited the home place in Tupelo, begun buying CDs, watched bad movie after bad movie, put nothing but Elvis on our iPod, read and re-read the biographies. But mostly we went to Memphis—a dozen times or so we went to Memphis. Sometimes we took our daughters; sometimes Elizabeth went alone; more often we went together—to Graceland, to the house on Audubon Drive, to Sun Studio, to Dixie Locke’s house, to the band shell at Overton Park. One weekend we stayed in the Presley family’s old apartment in the Lauderdale Courts. But following Elvis around town means going everywhere—to the city’s blues clubs and barbecue joints (not the ones on the now gussied Beale Street, the real ones), record stores, the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, and Lansky’s for shirts. Everywhere there is the residue of the past—a past still hoping for a future that hasn’t arrived. Neon lights that seem to speak from the Fifties—Prince Mongo’s Planet, Walker Radiator Works, and a glowing shirt (with bowtie) waving you into Happy Day Cleaners. Flaking painted signs on brick walls, palimpsests from another age hawking beers and tobacco products no longer available. A beauty shop that’s become a restaurant called Beauty Shop, its décor all Naugahyde and glass bricks. Sometimes, it seems, the whole city is done up in retro, right down to the Lorraine Motel—its balcony so familiar, its hopes undone.

Tad Pierson showed us a lot of this. He gives custom tours in his 1955 pink Cadillac, what he calls “anthro-tourism.” He introduced us to Jimmy Denson, who grew up with Elvis in Lauderdale and whose brother, Jesse Lee, taught Elvis how to play guitar. Most of our friends think we’ve gone round the bend and are absolutely mondo, though one of them, the fiction writer Robert Olen Butler, gave us a beautiful portrait of Elvis made of candy wrappers and a certified piece of Elvis’s hair.

I assure you there is very little irony in all this, and Bob’s gifts are true sacraments, given and received as such. Yet I must admit I remain uncertain about this brave new world in which I find myself, and there are lines I still won’t cross. I don’t have an Elvis tattoo on my shoulder, for instance (though Elizabeth does). I believe Elvis is dead and isn’t Jesus. He left the building and won’t come back. And, as much as I love his music, even the rhinestone ballads of the seventies, I see the skid of his last five years—the long, druggy depression after Priscilla left—as impossible to defend. Finally, however, I’m surprised at how I willingly I’ve given myself over to the King.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Beating Rituals and Sex Ceremonies in Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church

“The central pillar of Moon’s theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin. Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures. He himself was the ‘perfect Adam,’ and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by forging a new world order led by Korea, the ‘Adam nation.’ America, the ‘archangel’ nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which it would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.

“Moon told his followers that they could join his sin-free bloodline by marrying a spouse of his choosing and engaging in a series of rituals. First, the newlyweds would beat each other with a bat, and then they would perform a three-day sex ceremony involving prescribed positions in front of Moon’s portrait. After the final sexual interlude—in missionary position—the bride would bow down to the groom, a confirmation that they had restored the ‘lost ideal of goodness.’”

-From Mariah Blake’s latest story in The New Republic, on the rise and fall of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Read more from The New Republic.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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How to Steal a House

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“They described what amounts to a methodical moneymaking scheme in which Setad obtains court orders under false pretenses to seize properties, and later pressures owners to buy them back or pay huge fees to recover them.

“‘The people who request the confiscation … introduce themselves as on the side of the Islamic Republic, and try to portray the person whose property they want confiscated as a bad person, someone who is against the revolution, someone who was tied to the old regime,’ said Hossein Raeesi, a human-rights attorney who practiced in Iran for 20 years and handled some property confiscation cases. ‘The atmosphere there is not fair.’

“Ross K. Reghabi, an Iranian lawyer in Beverly Hills, California, said the only hope to recover anything is to pay off well-connected agents in Iran. ‘By the time you pay off everybody, it comes to 50 percent’ of the property’s value, said Reghabi, who says he has handled 11 property confiscation cases involving Setad.”

A Reuters investigation into the Iranian supreme leader’s $95 billion economic empire, run through an organization called Setad, which makes some of its money by confiscating citizens’ property. Read more on Iran in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Marriage, Equality and Household Chores

“RG: Sometimes when people talk about women and the workforce, they say a woman cannot truly be equal to a man unless she has her own income. What do you think?

“Mom: Well. Equality. What a word. When we choose go outside in the world, when we come home, we’re still mommy. The second shift starts. Equality doesn’t exist, period, even when you share the chores. Some days it can be 70/30 and other days it is 30/70. I don’t think that’s what we should be fighting for.

“RG: What should we be fighting for?

“Mom: Men participating more in the home, but it’s petty to say 50/50, because life doesn’t allow that.”

Roxane Gay’s interview with her mother about equality in marriage in The Hairpin.

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Photo: nostri-imago, Flickr

College Longreads Pick: 'The End of the Waffle House' by Jessica Contrera, Indiana University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

You may have already read this week’s #college #longreads pick because someone posted it on Facebook or Twitter. Indiana University senior Jessica Contrera paid homage to the end of the local Waffle House with hours of reporting and 15 drafts. You hear the reporting in the details: An empty gumball machine. A stopped clock. Broken locks. You see the writing in the verbs: “On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.”

But you didn’t read the story because it’s a quaint look at a fading icon. Your friend didn’t send it to you because it’s better than what we expect from a student. You read it, and passed it on, because it’s just about perfect.

The End of the Waffle House

Jessica Contrera | Indiana Daily Student | 8 minutes (1,897 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America

Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words)

 

The American Century

In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life magazine editorial. He was describing the country’s global economic and political dominance leading up to World War II. But Luce was also correct in the literal sense: The American Century had actually started several decades before.

The building of the railroads and coincident spread of the telegraph in the United States in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century helped create the world’s first truly “mass” markets. If an executive had ambition, his company didn’t have to serve just local customers. It could serve an entire continent and beyond, if it had the wherewithal to get the organization and logistics right.

The economic historian Alfred Chandler documented the momentous changes in what came to be known as the Second Industrial Revolution in his seminal book Scale and Scope—the title of which referred to the simultaneous revolutions in both scale (in manufacture) and scope (in distribution) in American enterprise. Those twin revolutions transformed the United States from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse in the span of a single generation. In 1870 the nation accounted for 23 percent of the world’s industrial production. By 1913 that proportion had jumped to 36 percent, exceeding that of Great Britain.

By 1920, when only a third of homes in the country had electricity and only one in five had a flush toilet, the country’s business establishment was embarking on a course of radical, unprecedented expansion. This brought with it a dilemma that has preoccupied business leaders ever since: how to grow big while maintaining control over the enterprise. Moving from a single-product, owner-run enterprise into a complex and large-scale national one is a difficult task. First, you have to build production facilities massive enough to achieve the desired economies of scale. Second, you have to invest in a national marketing and distribution effort to ensure that sales have a chance of matching that scaled-up production. And third, you have to hire, train, and trust people to administer your business. Those people are called managers, and in the first half of the American Century, they were in very short supply.

The benefits to successful first-movers were gigantic. In industries where only one or two companies took the plunge early, they dominated their field for a very long time to come; this group includes well-known names like Heinz, Campbell Soup, and Westinghouse. A ten-year merger mania, from 1895 through 1904, also brought the creation of a number of corporate entities the likes of which the world had never seen—1,800 companies were crunched into 157 megacorporations, including stalwarts like U.S. Steel, American Cotton, National Biscuit, American Tobacco, General Electric, and AT&T.

The key business problem identified during this transition—and one that underwrote McKinsey’s success for several decades—was that a single, central office could no longer adequately administer such far-flung empires. Power had to be ceded to the extremities. The question was how. It was a quandary that beguiled some of the great thinkers of the time, including political scientist Max Weber, who argued that a systematic approach to marshaling resources through bureaucracy was a necessary and profound improvement over pure charismatic leadership.

In his book American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked, Harvard professor Thomas McCraw pinpointed the issue: “In the running of a company of whatever size, the hardest thing to manage is usually this: the delicate balance between the necessity for centralized control and the equally strong need for employees to have enough autonomy to make maximum contributions to the company and derive satisfaction from their work. To put it another way, the problem is exactly where within the company to lodge the power to make different kinds of decisions.”

Companies such as DuPont, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck were the first to address this problem systematically. According to Chandler, DuPont sent an emissary to four other companies experiencing similar issues—the meatpackers Armour and Wilson and Company, International Harvester, and Westinghouse Electric—to ask what they were doing. And the answers were remarkably similar: The innovators moved from the centralized system to a multidivisional structure with product and geographic breakdowns. The concept left operating division chiefs with total control over everything except funding resources. Top managers took a more universal view of the business, monitoring the divisions and allocating capital accordingly.

The most successful companies of the era, such as General Electric, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel, all employed some variant of this model. But by and large, they had developed these ideas on their own, a process of trial and error that was costly and time consuming. They would have much preferred hiring outside experts to help them with it, if only such experts existed. This was a huge commercial opportunity that called for an entirely new kind of service.

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Stepping into the Breach

Unwittingly, the federal government did its part to create the modern consulting business. Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

Regulatory efforts paid another rich benefit to the likes of McKinsey: Restricted from cutting backroom deals with each other, firms were thus obliged to actually compete, which meant they needed to make their operations more efficient. Here again, consultants were the answer.

But perhaps the circumstance that most aided the creation of the consulting industry was the entry of a new, key player into business itself. Empire builders with names like Carnegie, Duke, Ford, and Rockefeller had built huge, vertically integrated companies, but they had neither the time, the talent, nor the inclination to create and carry out management systems for those entities. These were the conquerors of capitalism, not its administrators. And yet, as Chandler pointed out, “their strategies of expansion, consolidation, and integration demanded structural changes and innovations at all levels of administration.”

Into the breach stepped a new economic actor who was neither capital nor labor: the professional manager. Gradually, he replaced the robber baron as the steward of American business. Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary president of General Motors, was the first nonowner to become truly famous for his managing skills. His decentralized, multidivisional management structure gave GM the agility to outmaneuver the more plodding Ford Motor Company and snatch the industry lead. Ford may have revolutionized manufacturing, but Sloan realized that the car-buying market had become big enough to be segmented into people who bought Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs. By the late 1920s, the car market was maturing, and people wanted choice. Sloan also gave them the ability to buy a car on credit—a groundbreaking idea at the time. Before the decade was over, GM had surpassed Ford as the market share leader, a position it didn’t relinquish until the 1980s.

Sloan and his ilk were perfect customers for McKinsey: Lacking the legitimization of actual ownership, professional managers felt great pressure to show they were using cutting-edge practices. And who better to bring those practices to their attention than consultants who were talking to everyone else? This was the beginning of a decades-long separation of ownership from control in corporate America, and the consultant was an able ally to the professional manager in this tug-of-war—an ally who wasn’t gunning for the manager’s job. Thus began the era of managerial capitalism.

For more than two centuries, economists had argued that companies operated in some sense at the mercy of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. But the revolution in management thinking in the United States offered up an alternative idea: the “visible hand” of management, which made things happen, as opposed to merely responding to external market forces.

The academy helped move this ideology along. Before 1900, there was only one undergraduate business school in the country, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Economy, founded in 1881 with a $100,000 donation from financier Joseph Wharton. The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth followed in 1900. Over the next decade, pretty much every major institution started explicitly preparing its students for careers in management.

Although the rise of today’s industrial-farm-style MBA programs is really a postwar phenomenon, Harvard founded its Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908, with a second-year business policy course designed to give the student an integrative approach to addressing business problems, including accounting, operations, and finance. The purpose of the course, according to the school, was to give the student an ability to see those problems from the top management point of view. Much of James McKinsey’s academic writing centered on this very issue and later informed the practice of his firm.

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McKinsey’s Oeuvre

As a young academic, McKinsey was a prolific writer, if not an especially engaging one. His first four books were dry tomes on the nitty-gritty of accounting and taxes: Federal Incomes and Excess Profits Tax Laws (1918), Principles of Accounting (cowritten with A. C. Hodges, 1920), Bookkeeping and Accounting (1921), and Financial Management (1922). But with his fifth effort, he broadened his horizons significantly. Budgetary Control (1922)—the first definitive work on budgeting—turned accounting on its head, promoting it as an essential tool of managerial decision making. “Budgetary control involves the following,” McKinsey wrote. “1. The statement of the plans of all the departments of the business for a certain period of time in the form of estimates. 2. The coordination of these estimates into a well-balanced program for the business as a whole. 3. The preparation of reports showing a comparison between the actual and the estimated performance, and the revision of the original plans when these reports show that such a revision is necessary.”

It seems commonsensical, but McKinsey’s new way of looking at the use of the budgeting process sparked nothing short of a revolution. “No other mechanism of management of similar scope and complexity has ever been introduced so rapidly,” wrote one commentator just ten years later. “It is estimated that 80 percent of budgets installed in industry have been put in since 1922.”

Up to that point, budgeting was a one-way exercise: Accountants added up all of a firm’s expenses and then tossed in a sales projection almost as an afterthought. In McKinsey’s view, companies should start by developing their business plan, figure out how to achieve it, and then estimate the costs of doing so. In this new context, budgeting wasn’t just a ledger activity; it could also be used to identify excellence in performance (i.e., those who outperform their budget), to spot weaknesses (those who underperform), and to take corrective action. “[While] there are many who do not yet plan scientifically … ,” he wrote, “there are few who will deny the merits of the system.”

Two subsequent books fleshed out McKinsey’s ideas: 1924’s Managerial Accounting and Business Administration. The former taught students how accounting data could be used to solve business problems. Using the data of traditional recordkeeping, he suggested the possibility for much greater control over a company’s destiny, including the establishment of standard procedures (how things should be done and to whom information should be reported), financial standards (ways to judge operating efficiency), and operating standards (including nonfinancial measures, such as quality). To today’s business student, this kind of comprehensiveness seems obvious. But at the time, the idea of planning, directing, controlling, and improving decision making by means of regular and rigorous reporting of company results was novel. The latter book contained the seeds of McKinsey’s General Survey Outline—a thirty-page system for understanding a company in its entirety, from finances to organization to competitive positioning. It became part of his consultants’ toolkit sometime in the early 1930s.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the General Survey Outline (GSO). It served as the foundation of his approach to understanding a company and provided novice consultants with a clear road map to do so themselves. The survey also shaped consultants’ thinking: The emphasis in the GSO was more on whymanagers did things, as opposed to how they did them. Using the GSO, consultants started every engagement by thinking of the outlook for the industry of their client, the place of the client in the industry, the effectiveness of management, the state of its finances, and favorable or unfavorable factors that might affect the future of the firm. No detail was too small to take note of, whether it was a study of all firm policies—including sales,production, purchasing, financial, and personnel—or an analysis of whether the layout of equipment in a company’s plant provided for the most efficient flow of the production operations. By the time the young consultant had completed the survey for his client, he knew the company and its business cold.

“You can see McKinsey’s intellectual development,” says John Neukom, who worked at McKinsey from 1934 to the early 1970s and wrote a brief memoir of his time at the firm. “He had lost interest in the details of accounting. By the time I arrived, he had lost interest in the budgetary procedure and was now excited and interested in analyzing companies and seeing how companies worked. He was clearly diagnosing the total problems of the company.” In a 1925 speech at a conference for financial executives in New York, McKinsey offered the kind of pointed insight for which he is remembered: “Usually, I find that the executive who says he does not believe in an organization chart does not want to prepare one because he does not wish other people to know that he had not yet thought through his organization properly. For the same reason many men are opposed to budgets. They are unwilling for anyone to see how little they have thought about what they are going to do in future periods.”

Armed with that insight—and the general philosophy that management can shape a company’s destiny—he decided to set up shop and sell it.

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Bastards Require No Diplomacy

In the mid-1920s, McKinsey began doing business under the banner of James O. McKinsey and Company, Accountants and Management Engineers, the progenitor of the modern-day McKinsey & Company. Strangely for a company that prides itself on getting the details right, the actual date of its founding is unknown—a firm training manual from 1937 suggests 1924, while John Neukom’s memoir says 1925. Whichever it was, McKinsey’s timing was excellent. The economy was booming, and the need for consulting services was seemingly endless.

It is worth noting that the word “consultant” was not in the name of his firm. Rather, the term “management engineers” reflected the prevailing ethos of the time: that science held the answers to most serious questions, and even human commerce could profit from the rigors of this kind of data-driven analysis. McKinsey’s standard working pads have always been crosshatched graph paper, another nod to engineering. The fact that McKinsey himself employed no actual engineers was beside the point.

Intellectual underpinnings aside, the firm’s real-world roots were in red meat. McKinsey’s first client was Armour & Company, one of the country’s largest meatpackers. The treasurer of Armour had read Budgetary Control and wanted McKinsey to help rethink the meatpacker’s approach to budgeting and planning.

The first partner McKinsey brought on board was A. Tom Kearney, who had been director of research at Swift & Company, another Chicago meatpacker. Kearney was a warmer, more congenial complement to McKinsey’s formal and pointed demeanor. Another early partner was William Hemphill, the same treasurer of Armour who had hired McKinsey in the first place.

McKinsey continued to teach at the University of Chicago for a time, but he eventually switched full-time to the firm. One reason he seems to have juggled so many responsibilities is that he didn’t waste time with niceties at the office. In Hal Higdon’s 1970 history of consulting, The Business Healers, one associate recalled him saying: “I have to be diplomatic with our clients. But I don’t have to be diplomatic with you bastards.”(Marvin Bower later modeled his own approach to constructive criticism after McKinsey’s tough love approach.)

McKinsey was blunt, but he was also a quick and agile thinker. He once diagnosed a client’s problems just by looking at the company’s letterhead. A Midwestern maker of air conditioners had stationery that announced “Industrial Air Conditioning Installations—Coast to Coast from Canada to Mexico.” In an era before salespeople traveled by airline, McKinsey observed that travel expenses were probably eating up the majority of the company’s profits and that employees should confine themselves to a radius of five hundred miles around Chicago. He was right.

Even the Depression couldn’t stop the growth of the firm. By 1930, McKinsey’s professional staff totaled fifteen. In 1931 he drafted the General Survey Outline, and the next year he opened a New York outpost in the offices of a defunct investment house at 52 Wall Street—six offices with a reception area. The New York–based consultants busied themselves working not only for local industrial companies but also for investment banks like Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1934, the Chicago office moved to the forty-first floor of the new Field Building on 135 South LaSalle. By the mid-1930s, McKinsey’s partners were charging $100 a day for their services—a giant figure, though nothing compared with the founder himself, who was billing five times that, the highest rate for a consultant in the country.

From The Firm by Duff McDonald. Copyright © 2013 by Duff McDonald. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

‘The pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin.’

Longreads Pick

On Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and an oral history of the “outlaw country” movement that coalesced in Austin as a reaction to the polished “countrypolitan gloss” in Nashville, led by RCA executive Chet Atkins:

“Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.”

Author: John Spong
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 13, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,438 words)