You Need Someone
To Tell You To Get
More Trash Cans

Finding 1: More trash cans. Finding 2: Empty them more often. Finding 3: Tell people not to litter. These findings were contained in a 2-page memo written by a Department of Sanitation employee in 2017. The memo was dismissed internally as "insufficient analytical rigor." After our 84-page report made the same recommendations with 14 data appendices and a McKinsey-style 2x2 matrix titled "Receptacle Density vs. Pedestrian Volume: Strategic Deployment Framework," they were implemented. We are not embarrassed by this. We are describing a real service: translating known truths into formats that organizational hierarchies can act on. The price is $200,000. A junior analyst wrote the 84 pages. The 14 appendices are footnotes rendered as appendices. The 2x2 matrix took 40 minutes. The employee who wrote the 2017 memo was not consulted during our engagement. This was not an oversight. Consulting the employee would have undermined the independence of our analysis.

The 847 pages were generated by a large language model using a prompt we developed over two days. The LLM is commercially available. The prompt is proprietary. The 12 senior consultants each reviewed the executive summary (14 pages). The executive summary was also AI-generated, then edited by one consultant for approximately 4 hours for tone and jurisdiction-specific references. One consultant read pages 1-200 of the full document. No consultant read pages 201-847. This is disclosed in the methodology appendix (pages 831-847, which no one read). The key finding - "AI will transform government service delivery if deployed strategically" - was agreed upon in the project kickoff meeting before the document was written. The 847 pages support it. This is how consulting works. We produce the evidence for the conclusion. The conclusion was the client's. The evidence is ours. The fee is $500M. We are not the only firm that does this. We are the only firm that writes it down here.

The public built this water utility over 40 years at a cost of $2.1B (replacement value). We advised them to sell it for $340M. The buyer has since raised rates 340% over 8 years, generating a 23% annual investor return. The citizens now pay 340% more for access to the infrastructure they paid to build. Our success fee was $2.72M (0.8% of $340M). Our advisory fee was $22M. Total: $24.72M. The structural conflict: our success fee was calculated on the sale price, not the public value. This gave us a financial interest in maximizing the sale price while also maximizing the buyer's post-acquisition pricing flexibility (which would be higher if the sale price was lower). We managed this conflict by disclosing it in Section 14 of the engagement letter. The city government signed the engagement letter. They did not read Section 14. We know this because they also didn't read the final report, which noted in Section 9 that the $340M sale price represented a 83.8% discount to replacement value. They read the executive summary. The executive summary said: "transaction successfully completed." We consider this outcome a success. Our client satisfaction score: 91%.

"Adjustment costs" means: the 38% GDP contraction was experienced as unemployment, poverty, loss of housing, loss of healthcare access, and reduction of life expectancy. This happened to real people. These people were not our clients. Our clients were: the multilateral institutions that funded the program, and the domestic and foreign investors who acquired the privatized assets during the "extraction window" - the period immediately following liberalization when asset prices were suppressed by economic chaos. The 9 oligarchs who emerged from 0 are among the wealthiest people in their region. The population that experienced the "adjustment costs" has recovered partially. Recovery time: 18 years. Some have not recovered. We have refined the methodology since the 1990s. The current version produces similar outcomes with better communications infrastructure. We no longer call the extraction window an "extraction window." We call it the "transition opportunity period." The program was considered a success by the institutions that funded it. GDP growth resumed after 18 years. The oligarchs' assets appreciated significantly. The peer-reviewed literature on this methodology is divided. We cite the favorable papers.