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I’m on a Caro kick. Anything that the über-biographer Robert Caro has written, I’ll read—and, thirty-eight years ago, he wrote The Power Broker.
Why is this pertinent? Because in this issue we produce, for the first time, The Knowledge Brokers, our ranked list of the world’s most influential consultants working with pensions, endowments, foundations, insurance funds, and sovereign wealth funds. But what is influence?
Caro, through the story of Robert Moses, New York’s mid-20th century “Master Builder,” shows us. For those who failed to read our (awkwardly belated) review of the book in the spring of 2011, here is a synopsis: Moses, having never won an election of any kind, managed to design and build most of the modern bridges, tunnels, and highways flowing through the city and state. He amassed this influence in subtle and ingenious ways—out-legislating legislators and besting bureaucrats—that allowed him to operate for nearly fifty years in his quest to match the Empire State’s moniker with its infrastructure.
In parallel, consultants named as Knowledge Brokers now possess similar influence over the asset owners of the world. Their computers contain the most robust lists of potential asset managers; their birds-eye view of the industry’s most impressive funds allows them to be the bridge between LP and GP; and with a few sentences, they can persuade skeptical CIOs of a strategy’s value. They amassed this influence with years of education, networking, trend-reading, and correct calls.
But a permutation of influence is power—and, potentially, the power to do bad. If influence is the ability to persuade people of their own self-interest, power is indifference toward this self-interest. Influence is the guiding hand; power is the hammering fist. Power can be used for good, of course—think of the power held by Caro’s other mega-subject, President Lyndon B. Johnson, to force through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But power can be used for bad purposes as well. Indeed, Moses acquired power in startling—some say evil—ways. Most involved insulating himself from the criticism and external forces that endanger most men nakedly seeking power: he actively courted the press, spinning the positive before anyone else could define the story for him; he handed out construction contracts to people who, in turn, supported politicians who would hand Moses more power; he was not above blackmail.
I’m not suggesting consultants are open to blackmail—although whispers do circulate about how inchoate managers can get on some consulting buy-lists. It does, however, raise the question of what can happen when a consultant moves from being influential to being powerful—and when this power (which can, of course, do good) is used to harm their client’s interests.
I would argue that a consultant, given his or her mandate, should never cross into the realm of power as defined here. Today’s premier consultants do their best work when convincing clients of the cold logic of action; if they cross into the realm of imposition in lieu of persuasion, that mandate has been breached. Thus, the purpose of this list: to highlight those using the influence they have acquired for the purposes of good—to help clients, desperately in need of support, with neutral advice unimpeded by unspoken conflict.
The conclusion of Caro’s The Power Broker is revealing. After holding domain over New York’s infrastructure for nearly four decades, Moses wanted to divide and destroy 1960s’ Greenwich Village (my current neighborhood, incidentally) with a superhighway. He came up against a modest local housewife, Jane Jacobs. He was, at last, exposed not as a subtle influencer but as megalomaniacal power broker, a man bent on subverting public sentiment to his ego. He lost. He never built anything of consequence again.