Month: July 2019

Many of you have been asking about possible interactive community/discussion elements for this newsletter. Rather than do a generic open-ended discussion component (there’s @artofgig mentions on Twitter for that), I’d like to experiment with some structured wisdom-of-crowd discussions, of potential use to all of us, using Substack’s new thread feature.

For our first experiment, here is the prompt/challenge: using the axes on this 2×2, identify and NAME one or more current trends you’ve encountered in your work that we in the gig economy should be staying aware of. Post any interesting details or examples you are able to share, and which quadrant you think it fits into. Feel free to comment on others’ candidate threads with your own supporting or conflicting anecdata/thoughts. Hit “like” on trend hypotheses you agree with, so we can get an aggregate sense of how strong a candidate trend is.

For every candidate trend posted within the next 48 hours that fits this map, I’ll post a reaction/comment, and compile a finished visualization out of the responses in a future post.

I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.

Here are tips 28-44.

Consulting Tip #28: Do not get religious about the indie consulting life. You were probably a paycheck type once, and might be again. Or you might be part-time paycheck, part-time indie. The goal is to steadily increase individual agency over time, not cargo-cult religiosity.

Consulting Tip #29: Accept that you will often be misunderstood and viewed with suspicion by missionary types with a strong sense of belonging to organizations. Mercenaries have value precisely because missionaries suffer from loyalty blindness.

Consulting Tip #30: Google, learn about, and internalize Hirschman’s Exit, Loyalty, and Voice” model. To be an indie consultant is to deeply internalize exit-oriented decision-making defaults.

Consulting Tip #31: Develop empathy and compassion for those with voice-oriented decision-making defaults, and learn to respect how and why they behave as they do, and how they serve as the yang to your yin. It takes both exit and voice types to make a world.

Consulting Tip #32: Turn public celebrations of freedom into private celebrations of your own. Take a moment to reflect on, and update, what freedom means to you. If your understanding of freedom isn’t evolving, neither are you. Happy 4th of July.

Consulting Tip #33: Employees need to get their head in the game, but consultants need to get the game in their heads. A good way to hone this ability is to read sectoral histories, biographies, and historical documents.

Consulting Tip #34: Take business cartoons like Dilbert, and workplace shows like The Office seriously. Your ability to get the jokes without being terminally depressed by them is a measure of your understanding of a work culture.

Consulting Tip #35: Learn to recognize common workplace watercooler versions of transactional games like “Ain’t it awful?” and gently resist being drawn into them. They’re a perk for employees, not you. Read Eric Berne’s classic, Games People Play to learn the basic ones.

Consulting Tip #36: Examples, examples, examples. Your advice is only as good as your examples. Collect examples everywhere, from all sources. Half your value lies in being an encyclopedia of examples, with ready access to greater volume, velocity, and variety than employees.

Consulting Tip #37: Read up on classic/cliched examples commonly cited in your consulting niche, and have something fresh to say about them. Examples: Southwest Airlines (strategy consultants), iPhone (design consultants), AlphaGo (AI), BP futures (futurists).

Consulting Tip #38: Beware obscure, marginal examples unless they seem like portents of future megatrends. Obscure examples are the consulting equivalent of citing practices of isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in anthropology. Go for unfamiliar aspects of familiar examples.

Consulting Tip #39: Do not half-ass statistics as an element in anything you do, whether it’s macroeconomic trends or A/B testing of UIs. Either go deep and do it right, or stick to narrative-mode justifications. Half-assed statistical thinking is often worse than none.

Consulting Tip #40: Try to be higher availability to longer-term clients. The better you know a person, the more valuable spontaneous or quick-scheduled conversations are to both of you (1 hour to 2 days out).

Consulting Tip #41: Stay aware of the tempo of the engagement relative to the tempo of the normal workflows of the client. A weekly standing meeting with a client team that meets daily means up to 5 internal course changes might happen between your own updates.

Consulting Tip #42: Primum non nocere. First, be mostly harmless.

Consulting Tip #43: You are likely just one source of counsel for your client. Learn about the other sources, and do your best to harmonize with them, but if you must pick a battle, do so as openly and directly as possible. Influence undercutting games are rarely worth it.

Consulting Tip #44: Beware the boom-bust psyche, swinging between tactical hustling during cash-flow crunches, and coasting after a few good-sized invoices get paid.

Here is Compilation #2 (14-27) if you want to backtrack and catch up.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list.

Into the Yakverse Index

The history of consulting is sadly a very under-studied subject. We modern indie consultants tend to talk and write as though ours is a field of timeless, ahistorical ideas drawn from an eternal platonic realm of aphorisms, perfect 2x2s, pick-2-of-3 triangles, 7-principle lists, and 12-laws lists (these are known as the 5 Archimedean consulting gases by the way). The operating assumption seems to be that history is something that happens to clients, and that we bring perspectives from nowhere and nowhen.

It doesn’t help that much of our own history is shrouded in shadows, secrecy, mystery, esotericism, and the occult. So, since I talk a lot about historical context and ancient consulting traditions in this newsletter, I figured I should do a brief history.

I divide the history of consulting into 9 distinct ages of varying lengths, grouped into three eras of three ages each, forming a neat little 3-act Big History. I will cover the first era, the Pre-Modern Era (which by law is required to be a Fall from Golden Age Act), in this post, and cover the other two in the next two parts.

Here is a visual of the history with some Act 1 milestones marked.

1. Age of Wizards (prehistory – 800 BC)

The earliest consultants were also the most adept in terms of their inner game of tennis, as well as other dimensions of adeptness, and their reign is sometimes known as the Golden Age of Consulting.

Consultants from this era were Real Consultants, their clients were Real Clients, and gigs, also known in those times as mythic adventures, were Real Gigs. Various magical divination techniques, astrology that actually worked, and the earliest known versions of various subtle technologies like shtickboxes and strategometers, appear to have been first developed during this era. Sadly, almost all of this early knowledge is now lost.

In popular culture, consultants from this era are generally known as wizards (though there were a few witches as well). They were not indie, but tended to form clan-like memetic lineages, with knowledge, skills, and client contacts passed down from master to student. Their clients were kings and queens claiming divine status. The earliest consulting gigs revolved around creating the CYA scrollwork and tabletwork to legitimate such claims. An early wizard, known as the Great Gartner, who served in the court of an early Pharaoh, appears to have created the first known 2×2, known as the Magic Quadrant. This has now been lost but was apparently used to classify Nile floods into 4 types, and justify the Pharaoh feeding people he didn’t like to crocodiles.

Gartner, the modern consulting firm, was named after the Great Gartner, and they produce a 2×2 also known as the Magic Quadrant in honor of that lost first 2×2. They’ll deny this of course, which is why this is a secret history.

Though wizards and witches had largely disappeared by around 800 BC, a few true wizards and witches can be found in later periods of history. One well-known one was Merlin, consultant to King Arthur and inventor of the Round Table Methodology.

But people claiming the label wizard since around 800 BC have largely been frauds. The end of the Golden Age was brought about by the invention of money.

2. Age of Sages and Seers (800 BC to 400 AD)

During the Age of Wizards, consultants were generally paid in kind, in the form of magical objects, secret formulas, keys that opened mysterious doors, email addresses of important court officials, gems with strange powers, the ability to talk to birds, and so forth. Also room and board. That’s the stuff that was valuable back then, since there wasn’t much you could buy with money anyway. Amazon didn’t even sell Moleskine notebooks back then.

The once-magical objects that survive from that era are mostly duds now, since the thaumic field on Earth has decayed to the point that you can’t do much with it. Many blame this on the invention of money. Money killed the magic in consulting, but it also led to a deeper engagement with the real world, and based on a meta-analysis of several cost-benefit studies of that shift, it has come to be regarded as generally a Good Thing even though it would be nice to have magical powers.

The invention of modern impersonal money and coinage in the first millennium BC led to the rise of consulting in a form we would recognize today, based on the premise of paying a stranger to do unpleasant things it would be inconvenient to do yourself, and awkward to ask of people you have other sorts of ongoing relationships with.

It’s sometimes hard to see this, because money is like water to us consultants, but the existence of impersonal money (as opposed to mutual credit based on interpersonal trust) is actually a prerequisite for the existence of consulting. David Graeber talks about some aspects of this in his book Debt, but misses the connection to consulting.

The popular saying, you don’t pay a consultant for advice but to go away after giving it, dates to this era. You can’t go away if you can’t spend what you’ve earned in the neighboring kingdom.

Money gave mobility to consultants.

Consultants during this period were generally known as sages or seers, and though they generally lacked magical powers, most were in denial about it, and therefore very conflicted and insecure about debasing their high arts and esoteric knowledge by accepting money. As a result, many of them failed to effectively navigate the Consultant’s Conundrum:

Embrace asceticism and poverty as the lifestyle most conducive to generating deep insights and perhaps rediscovering Golden Age wizarding powers?

OR

Embrace shameless commerce as the path to acquiring the worldly knowledge to complement esoteric insights, and thereby make up for the loss of magical powers and astrology that works?

Several events are notable from this era:

• Around 500 BC, Laozi emerged in China as the first known consultant for whose existence there is some historical evidence. He reputedly charged 1 gold coin per day (though sometimes he charged per aphorism). Clocks accurate enough for hourly billing had not yet been invented.

• Around the same time, his contemporary Confucius emerged as the first bureaucrat to sign off on a consulting purchase order (PO), for an employee engagement study of the emerging Chinese bureaucracy (in a related development, the first overdue invoice for consulting work entered the historical record 90 days later). He was the first person to use the phrase, “let me see if I can find money in the budget for this” in a conversation with a consultant.

• Another notable event was the founding of the Order of the Yak somewhere along the Silk Road, in the wake of Alexander’s Invasion, around 310 BC. The Order of the Yak would go on to become the most important steward of consulting traditions for the next two millennia.

• Kautilya, the first known Indian consultant also emerged in this era, as an advisor to Chandragupta, that founder of the Mauryan empire. Kautilya earned an MBA at Nalanda University and wrote the Arthashastra, which is Sanskrit for “How to Make Good 2x2s”.

India was a major center for the consulting arts during this era. Familiar consultant titles like Pundit and Guru can be dated to the Ashram tradition of ascetic teachers of this period, who lived in conveniently located suburban forests where kings could go seek advice. Sadly, the growing scholastic conservatism of Brahmin traditions led to the decline of this tradition. Consulting activity shifted first to Buddhist court philosophers in the growing urban cores, and then declined in the subcontinent altogether.

In the West, Greece had a conflicted relationship with consulting, with notable figures like Aristotle being more like public intellectuals and teachers than consultants (though some of them took on the occasional side hustle during the summer months). Some say the relatively democratic and public-spirited tone of classical European antiquity made it a somewhat hostile place for the consulting arts, which, let’s be honest, aren’t exactly very democratic in spirit.

Ancient Greece was where the Fundamental Tradeoff of consulting, between a high public profile, based on public speaking and 6-figure advances for tablet deals, and high private influence, based on court intrigues and discreet backroom whisperings in the ears of movers and shakers, was born.

3. Age of Missionaries vs. Mercenaries (400 AD – 1500 AD)

The fall of the Roman Empire led to the shift in the center of gravity of the consulting arts from Asia to Europe and the Middle East. Though the Romans employed mercenaries in their military, and borrowed ideas freely from the lands they conquered, they were not particularly interested in the consulting arts, preferring more concrete ideas. During the decline and fall of the empire, many consultants tried to pitch turnaround strategies (at least one based on Southwest Airlines, according to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) to later Roman emperors, but they were unable to close on the gigs, and as a result, the Roman empire, starved of good ideas, fell.

But with the fall of the empire, Barbarian Europe arose, and proved to be a much more fertile home for the consulting arts than Asia. Despite the general decline and Dark-Agery going on in the rest of European society, consulting began to come into its own at places ranging from early Christian monasteries to the estates of great feudal lords.

This age is marked by the emergence of the great, enduring conflict at the heart of our calling: mercenaries versus missionaries. The mercenary/missionary conflict was actually the outgrowth and institutionalization of the Consultant’s Conundrum from the Age of Sages and Seers. Mercenaries were those who embraced commerce, while missionaries were those who embraced commerce while being very conflicted about what that would do to their Pure Ideas.

Missionary-style consultants continued to pursue a form of the consulting arts that superficially valued poverty and asceticism, but they managed to accumulate power and institutional capital all the same. A key instrument of this evolution was Christianity. Due to the practice of primogeniture, pissed-off younger sons who were sent off to monasteries to join the priesthood figured out all sorts of clever ways to restrict the power of their elder brothers, and claim it for the Church. As a result, the power of the Catholic church grew. Some of this story is told in Matthew Fraser’s book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

(A subplot in the history of consulting is that celibacy of various kinds, both voluntary and involuntary, from Chinese court eunuchs to Christian monks, was a major driver of the evolution of the field throughout the pre-modern era).

On the other side of the conflict, ecosystems of mercenary consultants of all sorts emerged to fill the vacuum left behind by the collapse of imperial Roman institutions. There were mercenary knights, mercenary traders, shady people hawking unreliable maps at farmers’ markets (which back then were just known as “markets”), flavor-of-the-month divination systems, and so on.

The great intellectual advances of the era, such as the 2x2x2 and 3×3 matrices, came from the missionary consultants operating out of monasteries. The great practical innovations, such as detecting the synergy possibilities between the sacking of Constantinople and the liberation of the Holy Land, came from the mercenaries.

The great historical events of that era, such as the Crusades, were as much about mercenaries versus missionaries as they were about the nominal combatants fighting over religions.

Notable events occurred in the Near East as well. Hassan al-Sabah founded the Ismaili Order of Assassins, and the associated Total School of Consulting, combining missionary and mercenary approaches and introducing the smoking of Interesting Substances into consulting practices. Mullah Nasreddin emerged as a prominent Turkish consultant and early pioneer of the business parable. Over in what is now Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun, the Arab philosopher, widely regarded as the founding father of sociology, wrote the first airport bestseller, 12 Habits of Highly Effective Caliphs.

On a global scale, for a century or so around the turn of the millennium, there was intense competition between the Order of the Yak, which was expanding westwards at the time, and the Assassins, for control of intellectual culture along the Silk Road. The competition was inconclusive, but neither managed to expand much into Europe proper. With the advent of the Age of Exploration, the Silk Road ceased to be the main conduit of intellectual exchange between East and West.

The pre-modern era of consulting came to a relatively sudden end with the development of the Gutenberg Press.

Suddenly, your average consultant no longer had to rely on lineages, monasteries or imperial courts to be part of an intellectual tradition. With movable type, the seeds of independence in consulting were about to be planted. The Consultant’s Conundrum and the Fundamental Tradeoff of Consulting were about to be transformed in fascinating new ways by the printed word.

In the next part (which I’ll post in a couple of weeks), we’ll see how the Gutenberg revolution triggered a consulting renaissance and inaugurated the Second Act, which would last all the way through World War 2, to the beginning of the Modern Era.

Into the Yakverse Index

All that talk of kool-aid last week reminded me of a 2×2 from one of my earliest explorations of that topic, a talk I did back in 2012 titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid? (slides, video). Here is an updated version, transposed from the startup key to the indie consulting key. It is meant to help you think about a very important question: How do you know the core things you think you know?

This is a central question for us students of the art of gig because indie consultants need to be aware of their operating epistemology in order to avoid buying their own bullshit and turning into unconscious grifters.

Startups and Gigups

It is no coincidence that a 2×2 from a talk about startups is easy and useful to transpose to a discussion of indie consulting. The two domains are so similar it can be hard to keep them apart in your head. In particular, startup knowledge also revolves around the same question. In both cases, the answer is the same:

How do you know the core things you know?

Definitely not in a scientific way!

Beyond the obvious surface-level similarities — small scale, financial precarity, cash-flow volatility — both startups and what we might call gigups share a deep feature: their associated modes of knowing are not science. Whatever the shared epistemology of gigology and startupology, it isn’t a scientific one.

If you’re an entrepreneur or an indie consultant, whatever else you might be, you are not a scientist. You may use or do some science along the way, but it will be peripheral to your core way of knowing. And crucially, if you want to succeed, you’ll find you can’t stop at the science. There is no such thing as an evidence-based startup or gigup. In the world of gigups and startups, only failures can be evidence-based.

The core of your real work begins where the science ends.

A strictly scientific self-image is self-limiting for an indie-consultant or entrepreneur, and can only hurt you. Looking for the secret sauce of a startup idea or an indie consulting offering only where the light of science can shine is to act like the drunk in the parable, looking for his keys where the street light is shining rather than wherever in the dark he dropped them.

This does not mean the native modes of knowing in startups and gigups are illegitimate or useless. In fact, thinking that, developing science envy, and trying to put a scientific gloss on non-scientific modes of knowing, is the surest way of destroying the kinds of legitimate value they do produce.

The 2×2 captures 3 possible good answers to the question How do you know the important things you think you know? — through fiction, through simulation, and through thick description (a fancy word for anthropology). None of these is science, but all of them are valuable modes of knowing.

Science, loosely speaking, is a conservative, data-driven mode of knowing. Indie consulting is speculative and/or story driven. The science quadrant of the 2×2 is ??? because there is, in a sense, nothing there that can be a core part of what you know as an indie consultant. This took me a few years to realize. In the original version of the 2×2 (which you can find in the slides linked above), I had some stuff in that quadrant that I was giving the benefit of doubt and labeling “science”. Now I’m convinced there is no there there. Just people performing various forms of science envy.

If there is science to it, it is not part of your core. If it is part of your core, it isn’t science.

If it’s a real science, there will be “pure” scientists working adjacent to whatever you’re doing (setting aside the parlor game of “who is the real scientist”) to whom your use of their output will seem like a profane “application”.

When it comes to gigups and startups, nothing important that you think you know is known in a scientific sense. In the process of going from:

The ball bounces this way because physics

to

Calculating how the ball bounces is valuable for Great Yak Enterprises because….???

you inevitably, and inexorably, go from science to something else. Whatever that is, to call it “science” is a distortion of it, and a disservice to it.

But in that ??? lies the core of how you do know things and add value.

The Price of Integration

Why is science lost in going from pure bouncing balls to applied bouncing balls? What is gained in giving up a purely scientific posture in what you’re doing?

In the simplest terms, science is “lost” because startups and gigups both require integrative modes of knowing, and the price of achieving effective integration is that you must necessarily go beyond the limits of scientific modes of knowing.

This may be a cliche, but science is reductionist by design, and this is both a good thing and the strength of the scientific mode of knowing. You take an ambiguous phenomenon, and carve out a piece about which you can make relatively unambiguous assertions. The reduction is not a bug or flaw: it is what makes ambiguity reduction possible at all. Ambiguity reduction is the point of carving out a piece to work with.

When you try to “science” a system, you don’t carve out pieces that are important, interesting, or useful. Those are merely nice-to-have features you can hope for in a carved-out piece, but essentially unrelated to whether or not you can “science” it well. The chances that you can “carve reality at the joints” in ways that conform to the contours of practical concerns are low.

You carve out a part that offers potential for systematic ambiguity reduction, and hope that when you go back (if you can go back) and integrate it into understandings of the whole, some of that lowered ambiguity will pay dividends in some unpredictable way. To bring science to a party is to take a leap of faith that you’ll be able to go from holistic to reductionist and then back to holistic. But “going back” is not guaranteed. It’s a bit like killing yourself, hoping to be resurrected in a stronger form.

Simulation, storytelling, and thick descriptions are integrative modes of knowing. When you’ve taken something apart and scienced what you can science (and that subset might be “nothing”), the real work of a startup or gigup begins (also, leadership in general).

Are all gigups startups? Are all startups gigups? Is one a subset of the other? We’ll look at that question in a future episode of Art of Gig.

Teaser: they are not the same, except in the ways they can fail. What makes them distinct is differences in how they succeed.

<< The 12 Eigenconversations | Into the Yakverse index | The Medium is the Client >>

A shtick, in the traditional Yiddish sense, is

“a comic theme or gimmick derived from the Yiddish word shtik (שטיק), from Polish sztuka and German Stück (Proto-Slavic *ščuka), meaning “piece” or “thing”.

Shticks are ubiquitous in the indie consulting economy, so in order to truly cultivate the Art of Gig, you must gain a true understanding of shticks, and in particular, learn to tell them apart from genuine systems. Let me tell you about a very instructive case that drove this distinction home for me a few years ago.

I got involved in the case thanks to my friend Agent Jane Jopp of the FBI G-Crimes division, whom you met a couple of episodes ago, in The Two Shadows of the Hero. The case I want to tell you about unfolded almost immediately after that one, and really gets at the essence of shticks.

It all began with a text and photograph from Jopp popping up on my phone one balmy afternoon, as I was relaxing at my local Starbucks, trawling through Twitter for gig leads, and trying to @ known millionaires into giving me money. 

She called a few minutes later, launching right into it without a preamble, as she usually does. Her manner’s only gotten more peremptory since I’ve known her, though becoming a grandmother recently has mellowed her out a bit.

“Did you see the picture? Look familiar?”

It’s tempting, as a consultant, to pretend you’ve heard of everything, but long-term, it saves time, and makes it easier to build credibility, if you make it a habit to be blunt about what you know and don’t know.

“Not a clue.”

“Ever heard of Scorpion Arts Software?”

“No, should I have?”

“No reason you should have. Boutique security systems contractor, couple of miles north of downtown. Get your ass up here, Rao. You’re gonna want in on this I think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

***

I was there in 15 minutes. Scorpion Arts was an unremarkable single-storied building within a premium-mediocre business park. It had been cordoned off. Several cop cars and unmarked black SUVs were parked outside. 

In the parking lot, I noticed familiar dark blue BMW as well. My old frenemy Guanxi Gao was on the scene as well! 

As you may recall, I had introduced Gao to the G-Crimes division following the events of the Bermuda Triangle case only a few weeks earlier, and it had taken Gao no time at all to get cozier with Jane Jopp than I myself am.

I’m used to that sort of thing. One thing you’ll learn in the gig economy is that people vary in their ability to get close to, and comfortable with, important professional contacts, and you have to learn to accept your own natural operating distance with different sorts of people. Gao quietly gets very close to all people, and before they know it, he’s turned into their closest confidant. I talk a lot more but tend to maintain an arms-length distance with all professional contacts and clients. To each their own, so long as it works for you.

Jopp was outside talking to Gao. She motioned to the beat cop guarding the perimeter, who nodded at me and raised the crime-scene tape. I ducked under and joined them. Gao gave me his usual sleepy nod.

“Agent Jopp. Gao. How’s gigs?” I said.

“Hey Rao, I just got here,” said Gao.

 “Come with me, both of you,” said Jopp, in her usual peremptory way.

We followed her into the building. It was just a few rooms. A dozen or so people were visible in the main conference room, behind the reception area, through the glass. Several agents and uniformed cops seemed to be doing various things all over the premises.

Jopp said, “The ones in the conference room, that’s all the people who work here. The guy presenting is the VP of Product. Notice anything unusual?”

Gao and I peered into the room through the glass. It seemed like a normal business meeting in progress. Almost normal.

Gao was frowning.

“Something’s off, but I can’t put my finger on it,” I said.

Gao nodded, “Yeah. They look a little tired maybe?”

Agent Jopp seemed pleased with herself at having stumped us both. 

“It was the night janitor who called in the cops. We got called in this morning. Apparently, they’ve been having exactly the same 55-minute meeting, over and over in a loop, for almost twenty four hours straight, including through the night.”

“What do you mean?”

“The same presenters talk through the same slide deck, and the others in the room make exactly the same remarks. They go on for precisely 55 minutes, then they take a 5-minute coffee break, come back in, and start over. Watch, they’re due to break now.”

As if on cue, the people in the conference room got up, and filed out, and headed across to the break room on the left, ignoring us.

“It’s Thursday now, they’ve been at it since yesterday afternoon as far as we can tell.”

Gao frowned, “when you say the same, do you mean…”

“Exactly the same, yes. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. Like a clockwork menagerie. Watch. That one over there is going to mention her kid’s soccer game.”

We watched them for a few minutes. The scene looked almost normal. They were getting coffee, a few headed to the bathrooms at the far end. There was the normal sort of office banter.

Normal that is, except that Jane Jopp was whispering to us in an undertone exactly what they would be saying, before they said it. It was eerie.

“Has anybody tried, you know, asking them what they’re up to?” I asked.

Jopp shook her head. “They just ignore everybody outside their own group and carry on. It’s like we’re not even here.”

“Have you tried breaking up the meeting?” asked Gao.

“We tried holding one of them — that man in the black turtleneck, we think he’s the CEO — back after their coffee break one time, and he began this unearthly screaming. You don’t want to hear it, trust me.”

“What about the rest?”

“They went on as before. When they got to the part of the meeting, about 15 minutes in, where black-turtleneck guy makes one comment, they all just froze. So we let him go. He stopped screaming, went back to his chair, made his comment, and the meeting continued.”

Gao and I looked at each other and shrugged. Neither of us had seen anything like this before.

“Why is G-Crimes here? Is there a gig-economy angle? Are any of the people in the room consultants?” I asked.

“All employees as far as we can tell. Most of the executive team, plus a few middle managers. About a dozen in all. No consultants around as far as I can tell, but G-Crimes gets all the weird cases dropped in its lap these days. The whole corporate world is getting weird these days, and G-Crimes is in the middle of it.”

“What about other employees?” asked Gao.

“This is everybody who works out of this office. We are tracking down the head of the New York office. Lestrode’s in New York right now, working another case, so I have him running that end down on the side.”

“What about the slides they’re reviewing, the content of the meeting?” I asked.

“The techs got those off the presentation laptop the last time they were in a coffee break, we’re looking at it now. Nothing unusual as far as we can tell, some sort of product-roadmap discussion. Probably make more sense to you two than me.”

“Can we see?” asked Gao.

Jopp shrugged and motioned to a junior agent, an IT-nerd type, who brought over a laptop with some slides showing.

I flipped through them. A Gantt chart, some spider charts, a Pugh matrix. Some bullet-lists. All-in-all, a fairly routine-looking product roadmap deck for a software company.

Still, there was something off about the deck.

Gao was the one who spotted it.

“The names are all weird. They’ve labeled that Gantt chart Core Activity Tracker™”

“Ah, you’re right. And those spider charts are labeled, Product Shape Charts™ and the Pugh matrices, they’re labeled Feature Attribute Model,™” I said.

“Very designed look too. These came from a template.” added Gao.

Jopp interrupted, “Fine, so people make up different names for the same ideas all the time, what’s significant about that?”

“Coupled with a consistent, hyper-coherent presentation aesthetic, it’s a telltale sign of an active shtick, and this one is particularly brazen,” I said. “There may be no consultants in the room, but they’re in the room. A ghost, or ghosts, in the machine.”

“‘Shticking in the first-degree, by ghosts or ghosts in the machine, unknown,’ huh?” said Jopp.

“There will be a bad acronym in here somewhere,” said Gao, reaching over to flip through the slides again, “Here it is. In all the footers. CAPSFA-4 Review.”

“That mean anything to either of you?” asked Jopp.

Gao shook his head.

I said, “I’ll take a guess. Core Activity, Product Shape, Feature Attribute. CA-PS-FA. The 4 probably indicates it’s some sort of 4x formula.”

Jopp looked annoyed. “So? Where does that get us?”

“A shtick in the gig economy, especially on the management side, is a bunch of familiar, warmed-over, formulaic elements of cookie-cutter analysis and procedural synthesis, rebranded and packaged into a ‘comprehensive step-by-step system’ of some sort,” I explained.

Jopp frowned. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what all you guys do? Sell color-by-number management systems to companies? Some of it is bullshit, some of it is not, right?”

I sighed. “Nothing wrong with it per se. It’s all about context and situation. Deployed one way, a system is just another tool. Adapt and apply as needed. Deployed another way, though, as a sacralized, mystical panacea, it becomes a shtick. Generally the mark of a second-rate operator who has found a lucrative vein of third-rate clients to mine.”

“Sounds like a precious-snowflake distinction to me. Or am I hearing some sour grapes here? You two don’t have shticks, do you?”

I ignored the jibe. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like the difference between artistic nudes and porn. You’ve heard the term productivity porn, right? A shtick is a system with porn-like characteristics.”

“Culture porn, meeting porn, strategy porn, chart porn, efficiency porn, negotiation porn, sales porn, you’ve got all sorts. Name it, there’s consulting porn of it.” Gao sniggered.

I elaborated. “Systems that work are evolved from — systematized from — wild local patches of behavioral effectiveness. What we call Gall’s Law. Shticks on the other hand, are made up from whole cloth to fuel a theatrical performance of some sort. To look good…”

“…in a pornographic sense.” Gao finished delicately.

“Rule of thumb. If you can buy it, it’s a shtick. If you must grow it, it’s a system.” I finished my little mansplaining lecture.

Jopp waved us away impatiently. “Well, I don’t know where that gets us, but I haven’t shown you two the other thing yet.”

“Ah the picture you sent,” I said, and turned to Gao, “did you recognize it?

Gao shook his head. Well, at least we were even on that score.

“It’s over there in the break room,” Jopp motioned us to follow.

We followed her. The device was in a corner, plugged into an outlet.

“We originally found it inside an air vent behind the snack machine, oozing that green fluid. The techs ran toxicity tests, and it seems safe. We’ve plugged it back in because it seems to be transmitting an encrypted telemetry signal somewhere. We’re trying to trace it. It seems to periodically ping a server somewhere in Asia and then send a burst transmission.”

Gao frowned and sniffed, “what’s that smell? It’s like lemon-and-mint-flavored ass.”

“It’s the green oozing stuff. The lab says it is some sort of custom-formulation kool-aid concentrate. They’re analyzing it. Not toxic…So neither of you has seen anything like it before?”

“No. Apart from the fact that it looks like a broken box with green stuff oozing out, I’ve got nothing,” I said.

“That logo… Microsoft?” asked Gao.

“No, the colors are in the wrong order. Obviously designed to look almost like Microsoft though,” said Jopp.

“Looks Chinese-made,” said Gao. “Want me to send a photo out to my contacts in Asia to see if they can identify it?”

Jopp, shrugged. “Why not, go ahead.”

Gao took a picture and sent it off to whatever mysterious contacts he thought might help.

“Let’s look at this logically,” Jopp said, “We have two unusual things in the Scorpion Arts building at the moment: a roomful of zombies stuck in an infinite-loop meeting, and a mysterious broken device leaking some kool-aid. They must be connected.”

“Three,” I corrected, “you’re forgetting the ultra-shticky slide deck they’re reviewing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite that shticky in my life.”

“Fine, if you think that’s relevant. Three weird things. What’s the connection?”

Gao, who had been stooped over, examining the broken device, straightened up.

“I think this thing is an aerosolizer. Like some sort of beefed-up air freshener.”

“Yes, the techs figured that out. As far as we can tell, it’s supposed to dilute and inject microdoses of that kool-aid into the air at set times. There’s a water lead too, which we disconnected. It looks like the canister ruptured and spilled the stuff.”

“What times?” I asked.

“The timer is set to release a dose every week, Wednesdays around 3 PM.”

“Do we know what’s on the corporate calendar at that time?”

Jane leaned out of the break room doorway and yelled for the IT guy, who scurried in with the laptop.

She barked at him, “Are we into the Intranet yet? Can we access their calendar? Look up what they have going on at 3 PM on Wednesdays.”

“There’s a second canister in there, with some red fluid,” said Gao, still examining the device. “This one seems intact.” He sniffed it. “Smells like tomatoes…Bloody Mary mix maybe?”

“Yes, we’re analyzing that too. That one’s not kool-aid, it’s set to go off at 9 AM on Thursdays, but we had the machine unplugged this morning, so it didn’t go off. That’s not toxic either, but we don’t know what it is yet.” said Jopp.

Inspiration struck, “I think I know what’s going on here,” I said.

Jopp and Gao looked at me inquiringly.

“I think it’s a shtick box. I’ve never seen a high-tech one like this, and I didn’t think anyone used them anymore, but I’ve seen traditional versions that work on incense in museums. Court consultants in the Middle East used them till the 15th century. They called it dabba al-khwarazimi, literally, algorithm box. The traditional kind is a wooden box with two compartments, each with an incense holder. You burn one kind of incense stick when you want to increase suggestibility and reinforce an idea, and another kind when you want to increase skepticism and encourage challenging of ideas. Fell out of use in the sixteenth century I believe.”

“Reminds me of something,” Jopp said, frowning, “Something about making decisions while drunk.”

“You’re probably thinking of that bit in Herodotus about the Persians making important decisions when drunk and then revisiting them in the morning when sober.”

“Yes of course. So the timer is set to release the first kind of chemical during a specific meeting, and the other kind on the morning after?”

“Yes, and since the canister broke…”

“…they got an overdose.”

“…and they’ve gotten themselves trapped in a procedurally generated kool-aid escaped reality based on a particularly powerful shtick, yes. That’s my theory.”

The tech looked up from his laptop.

“I can access the intranet now. They seem to have a standing meeting Wednesdays at 3. Subject line says CAPSFA-4 Review.”

Gao’s phone dinged. He looked at it, typed briefly, and looked up. “Looks like Rao was right. My friend Ohno in Tokyo recognized it. He says these are popular in Japan. They call them shtikuboxu over there. They’ve apparently gotten popular recently for instilling new management ideas.”

Gao looked thoughtfully at the shtick box. “The other fluid is supposedly the antidote; a sort of hangover cure. So in theory, if you hit them with an extra stiff dose of that, they should wake up… or break out of the infinite-meeting loop.”

Ten minutes later, we were ready to test the theory. We were gathered outside the conference room where the zombie meeting was still in progress. We had masks on.

“The techs don’t think the stuff is toxic, but they want to make sure.” Jopp had explained.

A technician entered the conference room in a hazmat suit, shut the door behind him, took out a plastic spray bottle with the diluted red fluid in it, and carefully sprayed a generous amount around the room.

For a minute nothing happened. The meeting seemed to continue along on its zombie track.

Then the people in the room began pausing and looking around uncertainly, like they were slowly waking up from a trance.

The man in the black turtleneck was the first to speak.

“What’s going on?”

I suppose that’s why he was CEO. First one to get back to reality is the biggest sociopath in the room.

***

It took a couple more weeks to wrap things up. Gao and I learned later from Jopp that the shtick box had been installed without permission from the Scorpion Arts.

The CAPSFA-4 system was traced to a web-based virtual consultant operating out of Bali under a false name. The trail ran cold there. Nobody at Scorpion Arts seemed to recall who had first hired the consultant.

Juicy recurring subscription payments had been set up to be routed to a bank account in the Caymans (which Scorpion Arts suspended immediately, so there was that at least). The only other clue was a glossy website with what appeared to be stock photography, and a signup process for downloading training materials and templates. The instructors in the various training videos turned out to be actors who had been paid to record the material, working off canned scripts. There was, we discovered, an entire membership forum of affiliates who had paid good money into a train-the-trainer program, to learn how to sell the CAPSFA-4 system to their own clients. Few, it turned out, had made any of their money back.

It was the purest case of a passive income front-end for a purely shtick-based consulting business I had ever encountered. A true work of art. Despite myself, I was impressed with the details, as they were uncovered.

The thing was a true machine; a machine parasite. Inhabited by ghosts or ghosts unknown, raking in passive dollars.

G-Crimes shut the whole operation down, filed it away as a cold case, and lost interest. But not before I’d gotten a copy of all the material — website, templates, and so on. I was convinced there was something deeper going on, and I was determined to dig.

***

Gao and I got drinks shortly after that.

“G-Crimes,” I remarked, nursing my Manhattan, “is very good at shutting things down after most of the damage is done, and losing interest before things are actually figured out.”

Gao seemed to be in an unusually reflective mood. He’d done some of his own post-case digging, and turned up nothing further, which annoyed him. Gao prides himself on knowing what was going on better than everybody else.

Apparently, several small bespoke engineering shops in Japan and China make shtikuboxus to order, and much of the market is for relatively benign magical thinking. Harmless euphoria boosters for strategy retreats.

The kool-aid and antidote in the Scorpio Arts case though, turned out to be potent custom formulations. Not illegal exactly, but definitely not the standard stuff you could get off the street in Tokyo. This was inception-grade stuff. G-Crimes was unable to trace the source.

“Lots more shtick activity in the last few years,” Gao said, after a long silence.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve noticed it too.”

“I don’t think your friend Jopp gets it.”

I noted the your friend with amusement. Gao might be a network inveigler par excllence, but he has his own weird code of ethics about credit apportionment, when it comes to network capital.

“No she doesn’t,” I agreed. “It’s not that she’s unimaginative. It’s just that she doesn’t appreciate intangibles. Especially when there is competition from tangible stuff like aerosolized kool-aid and encrypted telemetry to track down. She still thinks the case was about the shtick box.”

Gao said, “Did you know she’s calling this the Shtickbox Affair in the G-Crimes database? She’s decided the CAPSFA-4 stuff is just peripheral bullshit. She’s calling this a case of Unauthorized Chemical Environment Modulation. UCEM. They think they can work with local law enforcement to file criminal charges next time something like this happens.”

I said, “But you and I know the template material is the main act. I looked at those templates and training videos.”

“I did too. Whoever made those knew what they were doing. The shtick box was just a finishing touch.”

“And they’ll strike again. The abstractions are mediocre, but as leakproof for weak minds as the shtick box was not. Sufficiently bureaucratic companies could spend years trapped in them…”

“…while imagining themselves to be cynically above the influence of flavor-of-the-month systems. Yes we’ve both seen that syndrome too many times. Sell the cynicism, not the system,” said Gao.

“Good line, very Žižek, I’m going to steal that. Sell the cynicism, not the system. But to return to this case, I think the accident actually saved Scorpion Arts. That CAPSFA-4 shtick is a death-march autopilot. If it gets into, say, a major Fortune 100 company, it could have disastrous effects if not defused in time.”

We lapsed into silence, sipping our drinks.

The most pernicious shticks I know of are peddled with a knowing wink, and a suggestion of complicity in an associated kind of above-the-shtick cynical enlightenment. Of course this is a shtick, the peddlers like to indirectly suggest, But you and I, oh wisest of clients, we have the taste to apply it in a situation-dependent way without getting caught up in it. We’re not like those OTHER fools in their foolish, gullible companies, running on flavors of the month.

Aloud, I said, “You’re right about shtick activity being up in the last few years. And the fake Microsoft logo worries me. Plus there’s that fake Yak Coin racket Agent Q told us about a few weeks ago. It all seems related somehow. Did you hear from him again by the way? Anything new?”

Gao shook his head. “I did talk to him again, but he didn’t have anything more to share. Just repeated what he told us the first time — fake Yak coins showing up all over the place, especially around shady transnational gigs. Why would anyone do that. That stuff is ancient history.”

“It almost feels like there’s dark forces out to destroy the gig economy, doesn’t it?”

Gao looked at me solemnly, and for once he didn’t have a snigger or aphorism.

“We should dig more,” he said, “I’ll put the word out.”

“And so it begins,” I thought to myself.

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