| Topic Name: |
Mitchell Madison |
| Message Name: |
the truth part III |
| Date Posted: |
03/26/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
It was a merger greeted with a skeptical eye by Wall Street. Whittman-
Hart shares would drop 31 percent to $54 the day the deal was
announced, and ensuing snags, including last month's writeoff of $6.8
billion, have led the firm's shares to plummet to under $2. It's any
stock owner's nightmare, but no group of shareholders now has more at
stake in the aftermath of the stock's spectacular tumble than those
feral but well-heeled consultants formerly of MMG.
When the Hunters Became the Hunted
Exactly one year after the newly minted firm's stock began trading,
MMG LLC, the company responsible for distributing marchFIRST stock to
Mitchell Madison shareholders, has had its board of directors ousted
and its assets handed over to provisional li quidators by order of
the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands.
It's a situation created by marchFIRST's stock's breathtaking
nosedive and the hefty liabilities tallied by a strategy firm that
had been riddled with acrimony. With the limited liability compa-ny
deemed technically insolvent by the Grand Court, former MMG partners
now say that marchFIRST stock would need to be trading at a value
greater than $14 a share for the holding company to cover its current
liabilities.
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| Message: |
With marchFIRST's stock recently trading under $2, MMG partners have
been given little reason to hope that the stock will rebound enough
to keep the provisional liquidators from performing their duties. In
fact, a number of former MMG partners fear tha t they could possibly
lose their long-awaited third "tranche" - 3.2 million shares of
marchFIRST stock that are scheduled to be distributed later this year
to former MMG partners as the final payoff of the MMG buyout.
To those familiar with the meteoric rise and subsequent fall of the
fiery clan of MMG renegades, such a calamity may seem to be the only
fitting epilogue for the upstart consultancy, whose appetite for
growth ultimately abbreviated its vision and reduc ed its guiding
principles to those grounded in the profession's "hunter model,"
where the central strategy is just "Kill meat!" The fate of the firm
and its shareholders may now disclose a stunning reversal of fortune,
when the hunters became the hunted.
But MMG's high-wire finale is far from the only cliff-hanger in this
rebel tale in which a group of entrepreneurial consultants mounted
consecutive insurrections inside both McKinsey & Company and A.T.
Kearney before founding the firm they would dub Mi tchell Madison
("Mitchell" for the street in upstate New York where the plan was
hatched, and "Madison" for the firm's first Manhattan address).
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