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Skilling infused Enron with ideas he had learned at McKinsey, including the importance of periodically culling the herd. Either advance in the firm or leave. McKinsey called it “up or out.” At Enron it was “rank and yank.” McKinsey validated Enron’s strategy, including risk taking, securitizing loans to gas purchasers, and its “asset light” approach. As the McKinsey Quarterly explained, Enron became a world leader in private power generation “because it saw that profit did not depend on construction and operation skills, but on deal structuring and risk allocation.”
According to QuantumBlack’s home page, it helped a soccer team assess the “health of its players and identify the physical metrics that might signal impending injuries.” QuantumBlack’s evaluations were so detailed they included taking saliva samples. “Using objective medical markers and information from prior injuries, we identified the features that correlate to injury onset in the hamstring, upper leg, and lower leg,” the company said. As if to differentiate its work from the speculative chatter of sports radio and TV analysts, the company reported that its blind historical testing “correctly forecast 170 out of 184 non-impact muscle injuries.”
so bleak
Some McKinsey consultants, especially younger ones, were bothered that the firm would so willingly help the House of Saud, a family from Riyadh whose patriarch conquered much of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s and whose sons have overseen a ruthless theocratic autocracy ever since. They argued that the firm should reduce, or possibly even end, its work there. Said one, “Saudi Arabia is a country that shouldn’t exist.”
not wrong lol
The people who remained would have to work harder. McKinsey calculated that 1.7 percent of a doctor’s time was lost to tea breaks and said £400 million in savings could be realized if weak medical providers “achieve standard performance.”
But slashing jobs wasn’t enough. McKinsey also called for the end of “low value added healthcare interventions.” Translation: cutting back on what McKinsey deemed unnecessary medical procedures. For example, reducing certain hysterectomies by 70 percent could yield £80.6 million in savings; another £118 million could be saved by cutting knee joint surgeries by 30 percent.
My friends from Florence came, Bianca and Marta returned, and even Gianni. I said it was drowsiness that had sent me off the road. But I knew very well that drowsiness wasn’t to blame. At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.
[...] I had wanted Bianca, one wants a child with an animal opacity reinforced by popular beliefs. She had arrived immediately, I was twenty-three, her father and I were right in the midst of a difficult struggle to keep jobs at the university. He made it, I didn’t. A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.
Your life wants to become another’s. Bianca was expelled, expelled herself, but—everyone around us believed it, and we, too, believed it—she couldn’t grow up alone, how sad, she needed a brother, a sister for company. So, right after her, I planned, yes, just as they say, planned, Marta to grow in my belly, too.
I was twenty-five and every other game was over for me. [...]
I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, it was my second-born who was tearing me away from the first. I have to go to Marta, I’ll be right back, wait. She would begin crying.
I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehead pressed against the bars of the railing. I picked her up, she let herself be held, yielding. I kissed her for a long time, I hugged her as if I wanted to take her back into my body. You hurt me Mama, you’re hurting me. I left Elena’s doll on the sofa, lying on her back, belly up.
The storm had moved quickly to land, violently, with blinding lightning and thunder that sounded like cars exploding, full of dynamite. I ran to close the windows in the bedroom before everything got soaked, I turned on the bedside lamp. I lay on the bed, arranged the pillows against the headboard, and began to work with a will, filling pages with notes.
Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself.
Yet I began to pay more attention to myself, as if I wanted to keep the body I was accustomed to, put off its departure. When my daughters’ boyfriends came to the house, I tried to make myself more attractive to receive them. I barely saw them, when they entered, when they left, saying goodbye to me in embarrassment, and yet I was very careful about my appearance, my manners. Bianca took them into her room, Marta into hers, I was alone. I wanted my daughters to be loved, I couldn’t bear them not to be, I was terrified of their possible unhappiness; but the gusts of sensuality they exhaled were violent, voracious, and I felt that the force of attraction of their bodies was as if subtracted from mine. So I was content when they told me, laughing, that the boys had found me a young and good-looking mother. It seemed to me for a few minutes that our three organisms had reached a pleasant accord.
But my anxieties didn’t disappear. I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy. Bianca, I sometimes thought, is unlikable, and I suffered for her. Then I discovered that she was much loved, she had girl and boy friends, and I felt that it was only I, her mother, who found her unlikable, and was remorseful. I didn’t like her dismissive laugh. I didn’t like her eagerness to always claim more than others: at the table, for example, she took more food than everyone else, not to eat it but to be sure of not missing anything, of not being neglected or cheated. I didn’t like her stubborn silence when she felt she was wrong but couldn’t admit her mistake.
You’re like that, too, my husband told me. Maybe it was true, what seemed to me unlikable in Bianca was only the reflection of an antipathy I felt for myself. Or no, it wasn’t so simple, things were more tangled. Even when I recognized in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.