Leonardo DiCaprio takes a taxi to an insidiously nondescript office building. He rides the glass-walled elevator to the eleventh floor, and as he walks past the receptionist we see only the words “MANAGEMENT CONSULTING” in a thin, sans-serif typeface on the wall behind her. He enters a spacious conference room with a view of a park and sits at a vast, elliptical table across from Ken Watanabe, a white-haired senior director.

“I need you to take on a contract for me,” Watanabe says. “But in this case, instead of coördinating a facilitative approach in the light of the client’s tactical aims, you will take a prescriptive approach in implanting strategic objectives as part of a processual intervention in executive leadership.”

“I’ve done that before, as a junior associate, but it’s dangerous,” DiCaprio says with raspy wistfulness. He has a vision of privatized British hospitals crumbling into a foamy sea. “But the only way to do it is to infiltrate the client’s internal management consulting group to convince the board that it’s their own strategic objectives they’re implementing.”

“If you fail,” says Watanabe, “you will stay in ‘limbo,’ which means spending the rest of your life developing dynamic solutions for leveraged market-driven global enterprise frameworks across downstream cross-platform industry. If you succeed, I will help you return to your former career as an independent boutique retailer of imported artisanal tapenade.”

DiCaprio takes a helicopter to Wharton, where he meets his father. “Who’s your best student in the visual representation of quantitative information?” Ellen Page walks a few steps behind DiCaprio onto a roof. He turns to her. “You have three minutes to make a PowerPoint presentation that will take me three hours to click through.” Page and DiCaprio stand in the Wharton cafeteria. “I’ve seen your personnel file. I know you were on the project privatizing the British health-care system. You have to tell the team you’re putting them in danger. Do you want to be an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die?”

DiCaprio, Page, and Watanabe take a helicopter to Houston. They enter another tall, beige-and-glass building and walk into a conference room. DiCaprio says, “We will be embedding ourselves as part of the firm’s internal management consulting group in order to ramp the development of your five-year plan, from idea to implementation.”

DiCaprio asks upper management to imagine a password-protected folder on the secure server, kept at an off-site location, where their most treasured tactical objectives might be stored. Outside, I.R.S. agents in wetsuits rappel down from the roof.

DiCaprio, Page, and Watanabe excuse themselves to collaborate in the hallway.

“What we have to do now,” DiCaprio says, “is convince the parent company of this large, diversified management-consulting organization, with its range of IT services, that their ten-year business-development plan comes from the five-year plan their own internal consulting group has developed.”

Watanabe looks confused, which allows DiCaprio to explain the superfluous intricacies of the plot to the audience. “You mean,” Watanabe says, “that in the time it takes to construct a five-year plan one consultancy deep, we’ll be able to develop a ten-year plan two levels down?”

DiCaprio looks into the middle distance. “Yes,” he says, “as long as our methodology is proprietary enough. I’ve outsourced it to a subcontractor in a mossy basement in Bangalore. And, in the end, our own consulting firm will only need to charge eleven billable hours. We just need to make sure that we time the project milestones to be achieved so that we don’t end up trapped three or four levels deep in management consultation.” S.E.C. agents disguised as dolphins swim past the window outside.