This Martin Luther King Day I reflect upon my family’s white cat and black cat. The younger white cat picks on my much older black cat – can’t quite say that it’s a state of harmony, but at least there’s no blood. I enjoy both cats, each for different reasons.
The term "cat" is also used by musicians quite a bit. One of the (black) drummers that I am currently studying is Dennis Chambers. In his 1992 book, "In the Pocket", Dennis wrote, "One thing I liked about Miles [Davis] is that he finally realized that there are some funky white cats. A long time ago when I was coming up, if you wanted somebody to play funk, you hired a black guy. It was unheard of for a white guy to play funk. White guys were playing rock and roll or whatever."
Now the term cat is not really used to refer to management consultants. I’ve heard other terms used, such as "guns", "mercenaries", etc. What I will say is that the management consulting field tends to be a white male-dominated profession. When prepping for interviews with consulting firms during b-school in the late 90s, I recall looking at some of the brochures and websites of management consulting firms, seeing the non-diverse pictures of employees, and thinking something to the effect of "entering the consulting field is going to be a little bit of a shocker". Now I’m not the only person that has observed the non-diverse aspects of the management consulting field. For example, check out this message board post and this article.
Now the skewed demographic makeup of the executive ranks of Fortune 500 companies has been covered by many others. So perhaps the makeup of many consulting firms should not be a shocker. Whether the makeup of many consulting firms and corporate offices is right, I dunno, but I will say that when finding role models to follow within these businesses, I’ve often had to look at people who are nothing at all like me, when I would have preferred to have had at least a larger set of people to look at.