In 2005, Martin Kihn cracked open a world that, until then, largely operated behind frosted-glass conference rooms and perfectly bound slide decks.
His memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, was part confession, part dark comedy, and part industry autopsy.

Kihn wrote from the inside. As a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, he lived the flights, the jargon, and the quiet collusion that made big consulting so profitable. What he exposed wasn’t just a few bad actors—it was an architecture of performance.

• The manufactured framework. Slide decks that recycled old insights under new names.
• The expensive pantomime. Meetings that were as much theater as strategy.
• The willing client. Boards and executives who often hired consultants not to transform anything, but to signal seriousness to shareholders or regulators.

The book’s subtitle barely hid the truth:

How Management Consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time.

Kihn wasn’t simply skewering an industry; he was diagnosing a business model that prized appearance over alignment, where the end product was often the optics of problem-solving, not the substance.

Twenty Years Later…

Fast-forward to July 2025 and Joe Nocera’s piece in The Free Press, The Consulting Crash Is Coming, lands like the long-delayed sequel to Kihn’s story.

Nocera spoke with Peter Thiel, who said

If the consulting business was a stock, I’d be shorting it right now.

He traces the arc. In the 1980s, management consultants were indispensable. Corporate raiders and loosened antitrust laws sparked a merger boom. Consultants integrated cultures, cut redundancies, and delivered the efficiencies that Wall Street demanded.

By the early 1990s, though, the low-hanging fruit was gone. Corporations were already lean. The justification for armies of PowerPoint-savvy associates began to wobble. Yet the big firms—McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, PwC—kept scaling. They built a pyramid where each partner’s wealth depended on leveraging ever more junior consultants and ever more billable hours.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Generative AI now does in minutes what once justified weeks of consultant time: analysis, scenario planning, strategic modeling, even slick presentations.

Today:

• CFOs are questioning million-dollar invoices.
• Boards want proof of value beyond “we made the deck.”
• Boutique firms and in-house strategy teams are outpacing the old guard.

What Kihn identified as cultural theater has become structural crisis.

Beyond Consulting: A Mirror for All of Us

It would be easy to read this as a niche industry shake-up yet, it isn’t.

The deeper lesson is about the cost of mistaking motion for meaning.

Every organization, large or small, nonprofit or for-profit, is susceptible to the same drift:

• We build systems and rituals that once had purpose but now persist mainly because they exist.
• We reward what we can count—hours, meetings, reports—while neglecting what actually compounds value: trust, insight, innovation.
• We outsource clarity, hoping an external expert will see what we can’t or won’t face.

The Hudson Alignment Framework™ is a deliberate counter to the drift toward busywork. It focuses on the two pillars that truly drive everything else:

• Zone of Genius – Where you and your team’s irreplaceable value lives. This is the deep well of motivated abilities and expertise that, when fully harnessed, naturally fuels authentic marketing and compelling offers without forcing them.
• Client Retention & Referral – Where relationships deepen and trust compounds. When this pillar is strong, it becomes the engine of both client attraction and consistent revenue growth, rendering many traditional marketing and sales “hacks” unnecessary.

When these two pillars are aligned and alive, Client Attraction & Marketing and Sales & Revenue stop being separate, heavy lifts. They emerge as natural outcomes of a business that knows its unique genius and consistently delivers value worth talking about.

AI is only the latest force making the invisible visible. When a machine can replicate your output, the real differentiator is no longer the cleverness of the slide but the depth of the truth you embody.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

If an unflinching audit—human or AI—stripped every layer of polish from your business tomorrow, what would remain that undeniably matters?

Let yourself sit with these sub-questions:

• Which routines or reports are performed out of habit, not necessity?
• Where is your team excelling at “looking busy” instead of creating lasting value?
• What practices still nourish your mission at its core—and which merely signal that you care?
• If a long-standing ritual or service had to be retired to free space for genuine progress, what discomfort, politics, or fear would you have to face?

In other words: Where are you sustaining a performance you no longer believe in, and what would it mean—practically and philosophically—to let it end?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson—a writer, possibility thinker, Strategic Alignment Facilitator™, and MCODE Legacy Coach.

I start each engagement by examining your organization’s Zone of Genius quotient, a practice that helps answer, in part –The One Question™ at the heart of sustainable growth: What will it really take to leverage your people-potential + expertise, get real results, and transform your business to maximize profit? Because when that question is answered, the work that remains isn’t performative…it is transformative.