| Topic Name: |
Mitchell Madison |
| Message Name: |
Hey |
| Date Posted: |
03/26/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
In the years that followed, MMG would enjoy eye-popping growth, while
dazzling on-campus recruits with its provocative vision of a strategy
firm determined to liberate its consultants from a profession's
growing bastion of hierarchical consultancies. M MG was meant to be a
firm where creative thinkers thrived in a freedom-based culture. It
was an inspired vision, but one MMG former partners say became
stifled by a frat house culture and an unyielding drive for growth -
a firmwide mandate that would ulti mately lead to a boardroom scuffle
and the exit of five of MMG's founding partners and directors.
MMG's story is one that speaks to the clandestine and clubbish nature
of partnerships within an industry that's been slow to adopt
professional standards. It's a tale in which MMG consultants become
as much a victim of their firm's appetite for growth as they do an e-
consulting stock bubble.
Hunters & Farmers
"We spent about two years at A.T. Kearney, and then we bought
ourselves out to start Mitchell Madison, and there was one other
person and myself who started the firm in 1994," says Arnab Gupta,
one of the former McKinsey consultants who looms large in the history
of MMG.
Gupta's words would likely be something of a revelation to the firm's
25 other former founding partners who helped establish a financial
services practice at A.T. Kearney before breaking away to form MMG.
But for those who run with the renegades, team spirit has never been
ranked high among consulting's prerequisites.
As the chief architect of MMG's sourcing business, Gupta, along with
MMG partner Vikas Kapoor, is credited with having built the practice
responsible for capturing 50 percent of MMG's annual revenue - a fact
that elevated his and Kapoor's stature withi n the $250 million firm.
Asked about the necessity of instilling shared values or principles
inside the professional services construct, Gupta prefers to boil
down what he views as a firm's critical components.
"In professional services you hire good people, you allow them to
control their own franchises and have them get the clients going, so
they can build it," explains Gupta, who, like a true renegade, once
again broke away from his adopted consutancy, mar chFIRST, and last
May established Zeborg, a marchFIRST spin-off specializing in
business-to-business sourcing. Prior to the sale of USWeb, Gupta
would play a central role in MMG's efforts to evaluate and enhance
its compensation scheme.
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