Next month, the board will receive a leather-bound report containing 108 pages of strategic recommendations that will cost the company exactly $48,888. I am sitting in the observation room now, watching Marcus-a consultant who looks like he was grown in a lab specifically to sell confidence-flip through a deck of 98 slides. The air in here is a stale 68 degrees, and the humming of the projector is the only thing keeping me from falling into a trance. Marcus is currently explaining ‘The Paradigm of Internal Synergy,’ which is a phrase that roughly translates to ‘talking to the people you already pay.’ I look around at my colleagues, 18 of us in total, and I see the flicker of recognition in their eyes. We wrote these points. We emailed these points to our managers 288 days ago. We argued for these points in the breakroom while the coffee machine leaked onto our shoes. But when we said it, it was just ‘complaining from the trenches.’ When Marcus says it at $508 an hour, it is a revelation from the mountain top.

I spent the better part of Saturday morning alphabetizing my spice rack. It started with the Allspice and ended with the Za’atar, and for 58 minutes, I felt a profound sense of control that my professional life completely lacks. I moved the Cardamom 8 times because the jar was slightly taller than the Cumin. This is what we do when the structures around us stop making sense; we create tiny, manageable bureaucracies in our kitchens. I needed to know that if I reached for the Paprika, it would be exactly where I put it. In this meeting, however, the facts are being moved around like magnetic poetry. Marcus is taking our 8 core grievances and rebranding them as ‘Opportunities for Growth.’ It’s a linguistic shell game where the only loser is the truth.

Nina Y., a friend of mine who works as a grief counselor, often tells me that her job is 88 percent listening to people say what they already know but are too afraid to act on. She says that people don’t pay her for new information; they pay her for the permission to believe themselves. Perhaps that is what Marcus is. He isn’t an expert in our business; he is a professional permission-slip writer. He provides the political cover necessary for the CEO to make the hard choices she already decided on last November. If the ‘Strategic Pivot’ fails, she can blame the $508-an-hour firm. If it succeeds, she was the visionary who hired them. It’s a win-win for everyone except the 188 employees who will have to execute a plan that was built on their own stolen ideas.

“

The invoice is the only thing that makes the truth heavy enough to be felt.

“

I remember talking to a biologist once who spent 38 years studying the migratory patterns of a specific type of toad. He didn’t have a PowerPoint deck. He had dirt under his fingernails and a notebook that smelled like stagnant water. When he spoke, there was no ‘leverage’ or ‘scalability.’ There was only the data and the deep, earned intuition of someone who had lived in the mud with his subjects. That is genuine expertise. It is the kind of knowledge that doesn’t need to be dressed up in a $2008 suit to be valid. We have people like that in this company. We have engineers who know the exact vibration that precedes a system failure and sales reps who can tell if a client is going to churn just by the tone of an email. But we treat them like furniture. We walk past them every day, ignoring the wealth of knowledge they offer for free, while we wait for the consultant to arrive in his Uber Black.

I see it in the eyes of the junior analysts. They are learning that their primary job is to feed the consultant the data he needs to justify his existence. They are the ghosts in the machine, invisible until the machine needs a scapegoat.

We are paying for a mirror, not a map.

There is a profound difference between being a guide and being a ghostwriter. A real guide leads you into territory you haven’t explored, whereas a corporate ghostwriter just puts their name on your diary. Think about the way a

Zoo Guide provides actual depth to a visitor’s experience. They aren’t there to tell you that the lion is big; they are there to explain the complex social hierarchy of the pride and the specific biological adaptations that allow the animal to survive. They respect the creature and the observer enough to provide genuine insight. In our boardroom, however, Marcus is just telling us the lion is big and charging us for the privilege of hearing it in a British accent.

The Authority Gap

I find myself wondering what would happen if we took that $48,888 and gave it to the 8 most frustrated people in the company. What if we told them they had 28 days to solve the problem without any oversight from the executive suite? I suspect they would fix it in 18. They wouldn’t need a deck. They wouldn’t need a fancy lunch. They would just need the authority to act on what they already know. But authority is the one thing leadership is unwilling to outsource. They will outsource the thinking, the planning, and the blaming, but never the power. So we sit here, watching the laser pointer dance across the screen, a tiny red dot illuminating the obvious.

Nina Y. once told me about a client who spent 8 sessions trying to decide whether to leave a toxic job. On the 8th session, the client finally said, ‘I think I’m just waiting for you to tell me it’s okay to quit.’ Nina smiled and said, ‘It’s been okay since the first day we met.’ That is the essence of the consultant’s value proposition. They provide the ‘okay.’ They are the high-priced valets of our own indecision. They take the keys to our brain, park the car exactly where we told them to, and then charge us for the walk back to the entrance.

The Echo Chamber Consequence

I look at my watch. It is 3:58 PM. Marcus is wrapping up. He uses the word ‘alignment’ for the 18th time this hour. He suggests a follow-up meeting in 8 days to ‘deep dive’ into the implementation phase. The CEO nods, her face a mask of solemn appreciation. She looks like she’s just received the Ten Commandments, rather than a summary of the Slack channel from last Tuesday. I feel a strange urge to tell her about my spice rack-about how the Cinnamon is now perfectly adjacent to the Cloves-and ask her if that makes me a strategist too. If I put the Cayenne in a shiny folder, would she pay me $508 to tell her it’s spicy?

As we file out of the room, Marcus shakes hands with everyone. His grip is firm, practiced, and entirely devoid of warmth. It’s the handshake of a man who knows he’s getting away with something but also knows that we are all in on the joke. He isn’t the one who deceived the leadership; the leadership deceived themselves, and he was just there to facilitate the transaction. We are the ones who suffer the consequences of this expensive echo chamber, yet we are the ones who will stay late tonight to fix the errors that Marcus didn’t have time to notice in his 48-slide appendix.

If I put the Cayenne in a shiny folder, would she pay me $508 to tell her it’s spicy?