ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief description of project work for a paper mill outlining that speed was one of the principal products that team of consultants sold. It describes a series of organizational features and work practices that established creating an intense temporality among ourselves, as a precondition for selling it to others. The chapter highlights the nature of alienation in the particular temporal context and the class-dependent ways of dealing with it. Apart from being a marker of our professionalism, speed also mattered as a source of profit within the mill’s productive processes. One way of ‘finding potential’ was to examine the work of forklift drivers in its largest warehouses. Management consulting was thus understood to take place in a state of exception, in the sense that decisions could part from established norms and high daily fees of consultancy companies could be justified.
