Yetch, as usual, went to one of the empty meeting rooms to work on his deck. Rajni and I worked at our workstations. We worked non-stop for four or five hours before I decided that I had enough material to take a USB drive back-up for safety. Mine was full of clips from De Niro movies I am using to prepare for the corporate communications film. So I thought I’d use one of Yetch’s drives. He carries four or five all the time—every piece of work he’s ever done at Dufresne plus banking, consulting, private equity and venture capital versions of his résumé.

When I went to the meeting room Yetch was missing. He’d probably gone down for a cup of tea or something. So I grabbed a USB drive that was lying on the table and then flipped open his laptop to check if the drive had enough space.

Which is when I discovered, after months of wonder and amazement, the ‘Yetch method’ of making humongous motherfucking presentations.

THE BASTARD WAS JUST COPYING ENTIRE WIKIPEDIA PAGES!

He had opened the Copper page on Wikipedia and was sitting and making PowerPoint slides paragraph by paragraph. The rest of us idiots were reading dozens of analyst reports, industry white papers and the comprehensive but unusable Dufresne Online Knowledge Bank portal for our decks.

He already had two hundred and thirty-two slides in his Copper deck. I had twenty-nine in my Titan-fucking-ium deck. The bastard was screwing us over using Wikipedia! And this wasn’t even ethical. Our clients don’t pay us to use publicly available information and then bill them for it. That would be a violation of half the clauses in the Dufresne Code of Ethics. I was disgusted by what I saw.

I was feeling very pissed about this and went and spoke to Rajni about it. I told him that Yetch was screwing us over and probably putting Dufresne’s reputation at stake with every deck he made.

Rajni took me down for coffee and told me why I wasn’t getting it. Why Yetch was not, in fact, a scheming, unethical bastard, but a brilliant consultant. And why I should learn from, rather than judge, Yetch.

Of course, I was scandalized. I told him that nothing justified giving our clients poor, unverified information in the course of a project. And besides they don’t pay us crores of rupees to browse the Internet.

But once Rajni started explaining things to me I realized that I was just overreacting.

In fact, I eventually realized that using Wikipedia actually made pretty good sense for the client. Rajni reminded me that our primary role as consultants was to provide the client with as much input as possible to help solve a business problem. And this information could come from anywhere. Even Wikipedia. He said our job, as analysts, was not to judge the information but to locate it, clean it and transport it via PowerPoint. He said that I should think of myself as an explorer of information rather than a creator. Only principals and partners could create information, he said.