History
In 1992, a group of McKinsey partners in New York left the firm to start a Financial Services Group at A.T. Kearney, a Chicago-based competitor. The relationship soon soured as A.T. Kearney was in the process of selling itself to EDS, an IT outsourcing conglomerate. As a result, the original Mitchell Madison Group was created in a management buy-out with about 120 professionals in 1994.
The firm experienced rapid growth in the 1990s, primarily on the back of its successful Strategic Sourcing practice, serving many of world’s largest Financial Institutions. With a global footprint of 16 offices and almost 1,000 employees, Fortune magazine named it one of the top 50 firms to work for in 1999. The firm was sold in late 1999 for about $300MM to USWeb a Web design company which expanded during the dot-com boom into management consulting. Subsequently, USWeb merged with Whitman-Hart, another consulting firm based in Chicago. The combined company, a merger of equals, had over 10,000 employees with annual revenues exceeding $1BN and soon renamed itself to marchFIRST. With the burst of the dot-com bubble, marchFIRST went into bankruptcy in April 2001 and its assets were liquidated.
In 2003, Hans Dau with other partners, who were running the successful West Coast offices of the original Mitchell Madison Group, joined forces and decided to re-launch the firm by acquiring the brand name in bankruptcy court. Recognizing a need for new consulting model, where the client and the consulting firm share financially in the success of a project, they were able to build a high-end boutique firm with global capabilities that serves large brand name clients globally. By 2008, the firm had grown to about 150 employees with main offices on New York, Los Angeles and Manila and several satellite offices in Europe and Asia.
The firm is featured, although not by name, in Matthew Stewart's book "The Management Myth". Stewart takes care not to state the name of the firm, but he does say that it was bought out by an Internet company whose CEO was named "Joe" and believed in UFOs.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)