Mitchell Madison Group - History

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.

Read more about this topic:  Mitchell Madison Group

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
    —Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    “We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
    —Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    “It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
    —Albert Camus (1913–1960)