Search Results for: mars

Looking Back on 'The X-Files': A Reading List

I watched “The X-Files” in a Baltimore house I shared with eight people, at the end of days spent navigating the city’s shaky public transit system, alternating between feeling perfectly in place and wildly lost. That’s how I felt when I watch “The X-Files,” too: One moment I was perfectly attuned to Agents Mulder & Scully’s plan of attack; the next, I was baffled as the agents discovering a farm of clones or a UFO witness who also happens to be a serial killer. Confused? Intrigued? You are not alone. And the truth is out there.

(Some spoilers ahead.)

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year

Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor?

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969

 

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.

***

Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

Photo by born1945

J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

Read more…

“But was Playboy Marfa creative expression or crass commercialism? The debate over art versus advertising has consumed artists and critics for decades. Andy Warhol brought it to a head in 1962 with his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans; a few years later, critic Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “art is anything you can get away with.” In the eighties artist Richard Prince got away with photographing and enlarging Marlboro’s cowboy ads; in the nineties Chinese artist Ai Weiwei got away with making ceramic vases with the Coca-Cola logo. Could Playboy get away with this?”

– Francesca Mari travels to the small town of Marfa, Texas to report about an art installation by Playboy that has residents riled up and arguing: Is it art? Or is it advertising? See more stories from Texas Monthly in the Longreads archive.

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

The Year of Living Carlos Dangerously

Longreads Pick

“I’m just an empty, soulless vessel.” Marshall Sella follows Anthony Weiner during his doomed campaign for New York City mayor, and finds out what happened after election night:

"At the end of every regret, there was always Huma. Oh, he showed contrition to the voters, but that was weak beer. He apologized to Huma and expressed his pain for her so frequently that there were times when I wondered whether he’d partly been trying to talk to her through the press. His honesty was challenged by all quarters, but his love for her seemed absolute. It was the core of him, the one thing he said—despite the lies—about which I never felt a trace of doubt.

“I asked, had to ask, if they’d be staying together. ‘One thing I’m grateful for is that now I’m under no obligation to answer anything like this,’ he said. ’But we’ve had a very rough time. It causes me a great deal of pain in the way she gets reported and the way she gets discussed. Her treatment in the press has been rough. It pains me because I deserve it. She doesn’t.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 17, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,589 words)

Playlist: 5 Podcast Episodes on the History of Hip-Hop

image

Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life, a frequent longreader, and a fan of podcasts. 

1. How Hip-Hop Works (Stuff You Should Know, 52:13)

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck and Josh discuss the history of hip-hop, from The Sugar Hill Gang to the present. They add their own personal history, which includes stories of attempted breakdancing and well-intentioned clothing choices.

2. Los Angeles Review of Books: 2pac and Biggie (1 hr.)

Co-authors Jeff Weiss and Evan McGarvey speak with host Colin Marshall about their book 2pac vs. Biggie: An Illustrated History of Rap’s Greatest Battle. They talk about the artists’ rivalry, their beginnings, how their styles differed, and why you’re missing out if you only listen to one and not the other.

3. NPR Fresh Air: Questlove (45:14)

The drummer for The Roots talks about his influences growing up, how he listens to music, and his favorite part of Soul Train. (Bonus: Also check out Terry Gross’s classic 2010 interview with Jay-Z.)

4. Bullseye (formerly Sound of Young America): Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback (44:00)

Dan Charnas, a veteran hip-hop journalist and one of the first writers for The Source, talks with Jesse Thorn about the history of the hip-hop music business and how executives and entrepreneurs turned an underground scene into the world’s predominant pop culture.

5. WBUR On Point: Fame and Fortune of Jay-Z (48:00)

Andrew Rice, contributing editor for New York magazine, spoke about his article on Jay-Z’s business acumen with James Braxton Peterson, director of Africana Studies, professor of English at Lehigh University, and founder of Hip Hop Scholars. Together they delve into the financial side of Jay-Z’s career.

6. KCRW The Treatment: Michael Rapaport, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” (28:29)

If you were around in the ’90s, you might recognize Michael Rapaport from movies like Zebrahead, Poetic Justice, and Higher Learning. In 2011, he came out with a documentary on A Tribe Called Quest. He talks to The Treatment’s Elvis Mitchell about his love of hip-hop, his childhood in New York City, and his experience filming his favorite artists.

Got a favorite podcast episode on hip-hop? Share it in the comments. 


Get the Top 5 Longreads free every week

Taken: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture

Longreads Pick

Now happening in America: Police are using civil forfeiture laws to take money and property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime—and police even allegedly threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. In the Texas town of Tenaha, police pulled over drivers and used the roadside seizures to fund an assortment of unrelated items:

“More revelatory was a nine-page spreadsheet listing items funded by Tenaha’s roadside seizures. Among them were Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations, ‘Have a Nice Day’ banners, credit-card late fees, poultry-festival supplies, a popcorn machine, and a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation that was said to be important to Lynda Russell’s reëlection. Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund. (His base salary was about thirty thousand dollars; Garrigan later confirmed reports that Washington had received a total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.)”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 5, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,405 words)

Post-Scarcity Economics

Longreads Pick

Our world is increasingly automated, so what exactly will drive our economy, our jobs, and consumer demand into the next century?

“We live like gods, and we don’t even know it.

“We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.

“And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon.”

Published: Jul 13, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,804 words)

Your Latest Fiction Picks: Lorrie Moore, Tor.com and Taddle Creek

image

In case you’ve missed them, here’s a quick list of some of the most recent #longreads #fiction picks from the community:

1. “The Side Sleeper” (Emily Schultz, Taddle Creek)

2. “We Have Always Lived On Mars”(Cecil Castellucci, Tor.com)

3. “Paper Losses”(Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker, 2006)

4. “Burning Bright” (Ron Rash, Ecotone Journal, 2008)

***

What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.