The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
tech.mit.edu
tech.mit.edu
I was contracting at a big three automaker and they had retained just such a firm, possibly even BCG, to "restructure" the IT department.
So they had a team of overpaid consultants come and perform an analysis. I won't even get into the pointlessness of all that. However, the leader of the pack, the alpha male of the consulting team, would physically walk his laptop over to a printer near the admin's desk to print because the information was too sensitive to print over the network.
In true hacker fashion a buddy and I had recently discovered that you could telnet into the printers and with a carefully crafted command actually set the text on the LCD readout on the printer itself. (The spot where is usually says "Load Paper") So we actually wrote a program that would allow us to send any text we wanted to any LCD of a printer.
So of course, this self important consultant became our first victim of the prank. He hooked up his laptop and we starting sending text like "Loading Virus" to the LCD. It actually became a little frustrating because he wasn't noticing the LCD.
Finally, he looked at the LCD and we starting sending text like "Downloading files from computer". This guy just went into an absolute panic and after the first few seconds of frantic inactivity he got his act together and closed the laptop. Of course, that didn't stop the printer from "Downloading files", so he finally ripped the cable from his laptop to sever the connection.
He was in a panic for what I'm sure were some of the longest seconds of his life, but by then we were doubled over laughing just a couple of desks away and he caught on.
I will give him credit for taking the joke well and he never tried to push it up the food chain or anything to involve any management.
Priceless!
This is the reason you see musicians take 5 year breaks, or even quitting music. They are lacking in motivation. Look at the band Queen, They are still making music and touring, but half the band has quit. Freddie Mercury died and John Deacon quit music altogether. What did John Deacon lose? His motivation. Brian May and Roger Taylor both had a lot of say in the bands creative process, and that process motivated them to continue, even after Freddie had passed away. Now, Deacon, he wasn't as involved in that process, and he was the one who quit.
That may not have been true at the time the gp indicates though.
John Deacon had a very small part in their total creative output, and so, his contributions to their creative development wasn't comparable to that of the other members.
Advantages of doing http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PairProgramming
I always wondered what caused people to 'burn out' on jobs that you couldn't possibly call taxing by any stretch of the imagination, I think this is the key to the answer.
I've heard this or statements like it in quite a few articles over the years, but I've never actually met a retired thirties business consultant. Do they exist and am I just missing them? The only ones I know are well into their thirties, working 70+ hours a week, and looking forward to making even larger boatloads in their forties.
I'm not saying he had any reason to suspect he wouldn't be able to find another job, and even quickly, but it probably wouldn't pay nearly as much and there was no guarantee of that. It's just the depressive state accompanying the sensation of having been fired, even if it's from something you hate in concrete terms.
Numerologically
So I'd say his main point wasn't "look at me, I stuck to my morals" but "I'm corruptible but not infinitely corruptible". (The reason for mentioning the $16k in the title isn't to say "look how much money I turned down" but to say "look how much money they offered me for this".)
Right. It's to emphasize the fact that not only were they morally corrupt and doing horrible things, they were incompetent to the extent they though they could shut him up with a measly 16 grand.
If he gets a book deal out of this he'll be laughing pretty damn hard at a bribe attempt that, really, isn't even a house payment.
"At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, "Yes, but I have something he will never have...
Enough."
http://www.johnboglemedia.com/component/content/article/1-la...
EX: Ignoring inflation, if you get a 10% rase a year and get a 10%ROI on your investments every year then you need to save 40% of your income to for 35 years to retire on what you made 5 years before you retired. (Assuming you can live safely on 4.5% of your capital / year)
Most people aren't willing to be this frugal, however. It seems some people making this much even have trouble "making ends meet", because they buy so much crap that they can't afford. Ah, consumerism.
(In the interest of fairness, I am almost as bad -- I love buying stuff. I just stop when I don't have any more money... and I might even be able to retire before I'm 90 :)
The guys who signal to each other with these accessories are subtle and understated - their messages are intended only for others of their type. Anything a rapper would wear is out! Think Pierce Brosnan in Thomas Crowne or James Bond. He's a actor who is "faking it", playing the role, and doing that on screen takes a wardrobe professional who studies this full-time and the budget to spend not $2000 but $20,000 on a suit (really, that's what Brioni costs, and what the production spent) and I'm sure there are real "upper class" people who glance at Bond and spot all the little mistakes straight away.
Even Richard Branson puts on a suit from time to time tho'.
It's possible if your employer is paying for your relocation. In 2004 (IIRC) I went on training teams for clients of ours continuously for about two months (with a brief stop at home in the middle). Not only I accumulated a respectable mileage, I spent about a third of what I usually spend in my home town (São Paulo, Brazil).
I'm 40, married for the second time, with a 14 year-old boy from the first marriage and would not be able to reduce my expenditures to that level, but it's quite doable if you are in your 20's.
After 10-15 years at one of the top consultancies you could have completed outright the major capital purchases of your life (e.g. a house or two, maybe a boat) and could downshift to something much less stressful but you certainly couldn't stop working altogether. And these houses would be nice, sure, but we're not talking mansions with helicopter pads and servants here. Basically you would be established in a solid upper-middle-class lifestyle, but you would still need to work to maintain it.
The consulting business pays very good wages, but you don't get to build any significant equity - what you need to retire on - until and unless you make partner.
If you live frugal a little goes a very long way.
A good consultant could probably retire at 55 having set up his family well, private education for the kids, a bit of a trust fund, a comfortable retirement and bit of an interitance and so on. But as I say, this is not what most people would consider "rich". There's a good bit in Wall Street where Gordon Gekko is trying to explain this to Bud Fox. $100k salary and flying business class everywhere is not the same as $50M in the bank and a private jet.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the...
WOW that is dead on. I get the feeling half the world is like that.
I don't want to defend cargo-cults, but people copy because it works.
You could look at it as investment fraud with plausible deniability. Take money, hire consultants, look busy. The only thing is, I don't think it's that explicit or intentional. I think there's a breed of person out there in the business world who does not grasp the distinction between actually doing something and imitating the appearance of doing it.
Reminds me of a shirt I saw somewhere from a cartoon I've never seen: "What's this? I'm going to go do some Science on it!" Seems very similar to: "I'm a business man"
A lot of the fakers and cargo cultists are trying to do business about business to do business... they're not delivering any value because they don't know how.
My definition of cargo-cult is when you copy everything except the parts that are hard or make you face unpleasant reality.
Edit: many of the other cynical explanations further down in the thread are quite valid too (scapegoat theory et al)
Everyone is protecting their turf and their headcount that you almost have to have "Bob and Bob" come into, even though they don't know anything themselves.
When I was working for a professional organization as a consultant, sometimes I would go into gigs where I literally knew nothing about the product that I was supposedly an expert on. I remember specifically one case where I spent a frantic weekend learning about a tech that I was supposed to help this company plan a rollout for because I was the expert. The worst part was these employees had been preparing for this rollout for weeks, so they already had a good grasp of the core and I was still trying to learn all of the acronyms.
- When you hire BCG or McKenzie to (for example) value a business segment or recommend an acquisition, their feedback can be touted as expert and unbiased.
- BCG will do whatever it takes to deliver what's asked, even if it's a banal Power Point. So the person who decided to hire them is taking a minimal risk by doing so.
- In many cases it's a chance for the client company to get insights on how competitors have solved similar problems. Albeit in the story everyone's right out of school, I've seen cases where a pharma company will hire a group from a place like BCG because they've also worked for a competitor.
- Lastly, it's a chance to work with some talented folks who might make good permanent hires at the client company.
Bottom line, is that this type of consulting is usually a huge waste of money. But it's also one of the only ways huge companies can get a group of talented degree-toting individuals to work on important temporary projects with the assurance that company will get exactly what it wants.
Before middle management makes a big decision, they need to prepare the ground work of excuses they will use if the project fails.
Expert report is an excellent tool to show your boss and shift the blame. (And hey, the company is paying for it).
However it's up to you to actually have something like that in mind in the first place... I can't think of anything offhand myself!
In companies there are people who are paid to decide things. They also have budgets. Often they are called managers. There are consequences with decisions.
Managers learned a trick: Give the money of your budgets to consultants to make the decision your company pays you for.
If the decision was a good one: The manager was the one who hired the consultants!
If the decision was a bad one: Who could blame the manager, even the top consultants of BCG/Berger/McKinsey couldn't make the right decision, he hired the best!
Either way: The manager outsourced the work he was supposed to do but still gets paid and freed himself from the consequences. Heaven!
Exactly. Another case of idealism colliding with reality. It's refreshing and makes me sigh at the same time.
I wonder how many children get sent to college by dads like that.
Given the amazing human capacity to rationalize everything, I would guess -- a lot.
You're a guy with a degree from the top technical school in the world and you've got one of the world's most prestigious consultancies on your resume: you don't think you could go on to find a job in which you could afford your kids' education AND not be a hypocrite?
I respect him for standing up after the fact and saying "I'm a wealthy hypocrite." But I don't respect him for going to work there in the first place. You'd have to have spent junior year of college buried in sand not to know it's a game, mostly dirty.
But still, even if he didn't know beforehand, he figured it out very quickly upon arrival and then stayed for a long time for the money, so I agree with most of your point.
http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-... seems to imply that he started there in June 2009. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-impe... seems to imply he was still there in October.
... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are together in one handy bundle at http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2010/03/dubai-and-... .
So, he was apparently there for at least 4 months and at most 9 months. I wouldn't call that "a long time" in this context.
Being moral about the NDA does not weigh up against working there in the first place, and I don't know what $16 K means to a high profile Dubai consultant, it may have been substantially less than the severance pay he was entitled to anyway.
(Since he appears to have been there for something like 6 months before getting fired, I'll hazard a guess that his severance pay wasn't all that spectacular.)
So the severance could be anywhere from $5K up to a very substantial amount of money. The fact that they're willing to pay another $16K just for signing an NDA suggests it was a pretty high salary.
Given what he's possibly done to their reputation (I don't know; perhaps everyone already thought they were corrupt and dishonest anyway) that he wouldn't have been able to do if he'd signed the NDA, I don't see that an explanation in terms of salary is required: getting everyone to sign the NDA greatly reduces their exposure to this kind of bad publicity.
Respect.
My oldest is 7 now, and I hope he'll be able to say that his father showed him that living with a clear conscience is worth even more than a top-notch education.
Large consulting companies often tell their clients what they want to hear, which more or less negates the point of consultants but can often pay better. There are ethical concerns here.
I like the story, but the article itself has way too many metaphors that cloud the point.
Or maybe I'm just too used to having all my stories condensed into 140 characters...
Consultants suck.
It was TL, I DR it.
I've seen this in action, both from the client side (management brought in absurdly highly paid consultants to back up what they wanted when their own people wouldn't support it) and the other side (friends and friends of friends who went into consultancy firms; few of them have stayed there much longer than this guy).
What I don't get is why shareholders (for big companies) or government auditors (for government organisations) don't openly criticise the policy of wasting money hiring these completely unqualified people who either offer no real benefit or actively cause harm to the projects they join. Obviously a genuine expert could offer useful consultancy in their field of expertise, but that doesn't seem to be the MO of these big multinational consultancy shops.
In the past, Buffett has criticized consultants.
1995 Letter:
Concluding this little dissertation on acquisitions, I can't resist repeating a tale told me last year by a corporate executive. The business he grew up in was a fine one, with a long-time record of leadership in its industry. Its main product, however, was distressingly glamorless. So several decades ago, the company hired a management consultant who - naturally - advised diversification, the then-current fad. ("Focus" was not yet in style.) Before long, the company acquired a number of businesses, each after the consulting firm had gone through a long - and expensive - acquisition study. And the outcome? Said the executive sadly, "When we started, we were getting 100% of our earnings from the original business. After ten years, we were getting 150%."
“I would rather throw a viper down my shirtfront than hire a compensation consultant.” -Charles Munger
Shareholders start to care once a lean competitor enters the scene. Someone who does away with all the fluff and is more profitable. These things happen. But my reaction as a shareholder is to become a shareholder of the better company and dump the stock of the inefficient one. I'm not trying to make the inefficient company more efficient. Some activist shareholders do that, but most don't.
There is one very important truth that too few people are considering: Shareholders are not entrepreneurs. Most shareholders have no interest in improving a particular company. Their interest is in choosing undervalued companies and selling them when they are not undervalued any longer, preferably at a higher price.
The distinction between investors and speculators is a lie. There is no difference between the two. The important difference is the one between owners and entrepreneurs.
What happened since then is that legislators and courts have become hostile to corporate raids, and have mostly made it toothless. We would have plenty of shareholder activism if it wasn't for that.
`Corporate raid' is a term as backwards as `piracy' for copyright infringement. Those `raiders' buy a company with their own money (or money they borrowed) from shareholders willing to accept their price. They should be allowed to do whatever they want with their newly acquired company.
Incidentally, if such a pump and dump scheme was performed, the guilty party is completely obvious. A minority shareholder lawsuit would be readily forthcoming.
That's incorrect. As a shareholder, I can sell my stock and reinvest the proceeds into a company in a whole different industry. Thus, companies must compete for shareholders.
Of course the likelihood of a more efficient competitor entering a market becomes higher the more inefficient the incumbents are. There are more than enough examples for that.
Oh, man, it'd be awesome if we had that. But then, much of the Web 2.0 "industry" about which this site revolves would not exist.
Not necessarily a good idea, but somehow it caught on. One possible reason is that it was one of the earlier widely available pieces of software for doing declarative, dependency-based modeling that auto-propagates updates: if box A and box B are linked by a "B = 2*A", then B auto-updates whenever A changes, without you manually writing a propagate-updates loop. You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent (e.g., it's one of the new features JavaFX variables have).
Saying "Lisp had it X years ago" sounds perhaps a little weenish, but... that sounds a lot like the Cells library, and the even older Garnet KR. Granted, they're quite a lot less accessible than spreadsheet programs.
FRP seems to be modern take on it. It's being very actively researched in the Haskell community.
On the other hand ... Sketchpad: 1963. (Constraint satisfaction, but not embedded in a general-purpose programming system.) Prolog: 1972. And Guy L Steele wrote a nice general-purpose constraint system in 1978. ("Constraints", MIT AI Memo 502.)
Once you get your brain around the paradigm, it can be a powerful tool.
I would grant that honour to SQL Server. In fact, I regard SQL Server as Microsoft's third best product, lagging behind both the Natural Keyboard series (a must) and their mice ("honest value", reliable and comfortable). Never thought that, but Excel could be the fourth product in this list.
Presumably you mean IronPython integration in a different sense due to it being a .Net library? Got any links with examples of how that looks / what it can do?
That, however, looks pretty darn cool. On the odd occasion I've used Python/COM/Excel together, I've really wished for a Python shell inside Excel to do things like:
for cell in Range('a1:a10'):
cell.Value = cell.Value.split('-')[0]
Alternatively, there's PyXLL (http://www.pyxll.com/), which lets you write Excel user-defined functions in Python, but doesn't have a console.
(Full disclosure: I work for Resolver Systems.)
1) Its actually pretty powerful. Since the cells update in real time it provides a nice way to do "what if" analysis pretty quickly.
2) The solver is pretty good.
3) Most people in business can read excel so it provides a good common ground.
4) Since all the intermediate steps in a calculation are in a cell somewhere, its pretty easy to trace through logic.
I certainly wouldn't use excel to handle huge amounts of data, but its a good tool as long as your computational requirements aren't that big.
In high school there was a girl in my class that preferre to do everything in excel. And that included writing papers, because it made the formatting easy.
Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
Maybe he needed to scream out loud to bring a bit of relief to his abused up moral.
He did quit, but it was probably because everyone else saw the ship sinking and was jumping off.
His $16k "sacrifice" at the end was not much if he claims he would have made enough to retire by 30s and just live off interest. So, yes, he had a bit some moral struggles, but it sounds like he managed to successfully "overcome" most of them via rationalizations.
The blog post was written just to make himself feel better and to somehow turn not taking a little bit of hush money into a great moral victory. Perhaps his future employee will read how honest and devoted to the truth he is...
Ever talk or scream in a pool? Muffled, distant sound, but is still there.
The key thing to notice, though, is that the author screamed. I have screamed, and life is bloody awful at those points in life.
He even said that he decided that he would rather have a "hypothetical children" have a rich morally bankrupt father that could pay for college than one with integrity.
edit: oops this is pointed out above.
as far as judgment, i don't consider attempting to predict someone's behavior a judgment. i didn't say "he is an awful person". that'd be judgment. i was implying, though, that you shouldn't be impressed by his turning down $16k. the only thing that tell us about him is that his price is above $16k, and below $200k/yr.
and, there was no giving up of his job, in the end. i quote: "I was not surprised the day I lost my job."
I'm not surprised that someone whose ideology makes him believe that Einstein's contribution to society was smaller than that of the bosses of Lehman or AIG would be disappointed by reality. Or is it that reality itself is a "negative externality"?
No, I think the issue is one of faulty interpretation of that ideology. It's a serious mistake that people make all the time. They mix up statistical probabilities and individual causality. The average efficiency of markets includes scams as well as geniuses. It includes people who contribute a lot but market themselves badly and it includes the exact opposite.
Would you care to clarify? I genuinely don't see where you are getting this from.
People work for all kinds of reasons. Money is just one of them as you yourself allude to when you mention reputation. So wages representing the value a worker provides is clearly nonsense.
They just represent _expected_ value for those able to pay, and it includes all kinds of distortions like immigration controls.
In other words, you're experiencing the reality shock _everybody_ experiences when engaging with, and learning about, the corporate world.
It seems you'd be happier in Academia, a research institute, or perhaps creating something on your own.
(BTW I'm not sure I'd recommend academe for someone with his mindset. The politics are perhaps even worse and the monetary gains much lower. A startup - even though far from the Disneyland some HN posts paint it as - could be a good place for someone like that)
Even better perhaps: "you only know that someone else will know it when they see it".
In his own reasoning "I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite."
Acting as if financial success equates to dishonesty. While in the very same piece the author praises free market, and money in exchange for true value does not compute. Does he believe, or not believe in the power of a free market, or has he come to develop a disbelief in honest trading?
Voluntary exchange is not a moral system. A free market doesn't have morals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
in 1759, pondering the issue of why people behave morally when they could simply guard their own self-interest. As Smith pondered the issue more, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
in which he discussed how free-market trade provides incentives to moral behavior. EVERYONE who is well educated should recognize this quotation:
"But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
In other words, society can be structured so that people will help you or other people who need help while looking out for number 1.
Hayek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Hayek
is good author on contrasting economic systems, showing how they can be actively immoral.
The choice here is not between different economic systems, but between different moral systems.
You cannot make a free market your moral system because markets are amoral. That is, it is not that they are not immoral and so should be replaced with something else; rather, they have no moral content - morality comes from somewhere else.
You can pay someone to punch a third party in the nose. You get the value of knowing that someone is going to get hurt. The other guy gets your money. The transaction, in the free market, by itself has no moral content, though. A free market just means exchanging value for mutual gain. It doesn't say that those values have positive or negative moral worth.
Capitalism believes in a government which protects private property and human life with physical force. You can pay someone to punch someone else, but that's inconsistent with capitalistic philosophy.
What, in a free market moral system, prevents slavery? The justification must come from the free market, if free market is to be the moral system.
How can there exist a free market without the guarantee of the protection of private property? Without that you have anarchy (whoever is physically strongest wins).
I've never heard of someone invoking the idea of a "free market" without implying that the agents of the market are protected from physical harm.
This is by no means 'official' but from the first sentence of the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market:
"A free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to outlaw and prosecute force or fraud."
When people say "free market" this is what they imply.
What, in a free market moral system, prevents slavery?
The government.
See "anarcho-capitalism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be provided by voluntarily-funded competitors such as private defense agencies rather than through taxation, and money would be privately and competitively provided in an open market.
You continue...
> > What, in a free market moral system, prevents slavery?
> The government.
No. Slavery is prevented because the income generated by those would-be slaves is less than the income generated when those people fill the role of "consumer".
Also, if there are non-consensual exchanges, then by definition it is not a free market, but that simply avoids the question...
That said: the government does make an effort to prevent it, which I'm not sure can be said for the free market.
On the whole, both regulation and the free market are able to deal with most of slavery. But at the margin, it becomes cost-ineffective to mop up the very last instance. In both cases, the instance is low enough that most of us will never come face-to-face with slavery. But ferreting out one more evil person costs society more than it would benefit.
The thing that scares me about a truly free market without regulation are issues of coercion. Force may be eliminated, but there are so many other ways to take advantage of compromised people. Drug addicts, homeless, desperate parents, etc. Also, for a truly free market to work, you need enough information on both sides for people to make educated choices, but either side would prefer he have the information advantage.
Basically, I just don't see it working any better than the current system, but perhaps it would.
He didn't miss your point. He saw your point, and thinks it's wrong.
His policy proposals on that latter point are pretty pragmatic, and he endorses regulation when he thinks it has relatively large gains for relatively small downsides. For example, he proposes that the government ought to require employers to pay their employees in hard money, and not permit them to pay in promissory notes or in goods. His reasoning is that this prevents unscrupulous employers from tricking employees, either by paying them in goods whose value has been misrepresented, or by convincing them to work for promises of payment that the employer doesn't really intend to keep.
Are you really claiming we dont need "coercion or force" from regulators like the SEC or FTC?
It is naive to think any one human agents or regulatory agency is able to prevent those "complex unregulated derivatives" or not be corrupted by unethical firms/special interests/etc.
The free market system already have a "fail-safe" or "regulatory" function through the bankruptcy of entrepreneurs and rewarding prudent entrepreneurs with the leftover possessions of the bankrupt one. Failure is at the heart of the free market enterprise system. It is a feature, not a bug.
It is those who wishes to prevent these failures at all and any costs that keep our society stagnated or hurling down to its destruction as they keep funding economic activities that is out of reality with human needs and desire.
You can hire someone to murder someone else. Nothing wrong with that transaction in a free market. Similarly, you can be a credit card processor for child pornography - you take your cut, but since you don't do the deed, it's not your problem.
Do you see the problem?
(Hint: morality isn't emerging here. It comes from somewhere else.)
And I have no idea why you mentioned some "other economic system". I didn't. Why? Because I wasn't contrasting economic systems. I was contrasting moral systems.
Secondly, your view of free markets is naive. Lack of transparency and the problem of monopolies are only a few of the many problems that completely free markets suffer from. We have an FTC, because markets need to be regulated. Leaving them completely free leads to morally unacceptable results.
I wasn't trying to say that I thought free markets were immoral, or that they were not moral. (And so we should find a different economic system, or something).
I was trying to say that you cannot replace your personal morality, your moral system, with a free market (whatever that even means). That is, I was trying to say that markets were amoral, without moral content.
But some moral systems are consequentialistic [1] and for its proponents, the means are justified by the ends. A free market could be seen as a means to reach the moral end. Thus, they are often mixed up.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consul...
Not at any of the small businesses I ever worked for, where the guys at the top probably decide these things themselves.
Not at a very, very large business I worked for, where the guys at the top probably didn't know the name of anyone in my building and everything was done by HR and Legal automatons.
And not at any medium sized businesses I have ever worked for, either.
The only time an agreement like this is standard is when you know you're doing something you shouldn't be, and you know you're about to lose your legitimate influence over people who could out you, so you try to buy their silence because to you the cost is cheap.
Bottom line, I think it's much more likely that he's misinterpreted the document than that they're trying to silence him.
What are they afraid of, that he'll reveal big consultancies tell clients what they want to hear? That's not really a news flash, is it?
But then again I left of my own accord, and wasn't laid off or 'made redundant', so the situation might be different then.
What country are you in? In the UK this is pure boilerplate text.
It's only boilerplate text if you're the kind of person who also accepted the "We own copyright to everything you ever do, at work or otherwise" clause in the employment contract.
In the end, I chose to pursue management consulting, which I've been doing for the last 2 years.
Now, I debate with my friends on which career is worse, ibanking or consulting because frankly, after sifting through so much corporate BS, I've come to realize that all these jobs need to be prestigious in order to get ivy league grads to pursue them. In reality, we're either glorified excel junkies, or overpaid powerpoint formatters.
I'm crossing my fingers now hoping that this start-up I'm working on takes off... I really do want to leave the corporate world for good. The realization that the preparation we had in college is absolutely useless in the real world, and that any semi-intelligent high-schooler could do our jobs is a depressing thought.
"Like downloading MP3s, it was a victimless crime."
After all these years we know better than to say this carelessly. Is stealing code from a hardworking programmer a victimless crime?
If you want to have a discussion about copyright though, you're poisoning the well by calling infringement stealing.
I lasted 8 months in that job. No regrets about leaving.
Also, $16k is piss-poor for a severance package in a brand-name consulting firm like BCG. Given the economy and the likelihood of a necessary career change, OP should have asked for 6 months' base (including COBRA) and an "office firing" (you're terminated but can use office resources for the job search and retain the right to represent yourself as employed).
I'm guessing they gave him 2 months pay and nothing for the move back, from Dubai (which is a dangerous place to lose your job, by the way). They also seem to have given him nothing in terms of exit counseling.
To answer the question you raised: his article and the fact that it got published is the leverage he had. I bet it's circulating around BCG right now. It has the potential to be a morale and image problem, and not the Goldman Sachs style of image problem (where people hate GS but consider them good at what they do).
There are rational reasons for firms to pay decent severance packages. It's not just something they do to be nice.