| Topic Name: |
Big 4 consulting...what is it? |
| Message Name: |
Big 4 strat |
| Date Posted: |
12/17/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
It seems like the majority of what Big 4 consulting firms(ACN, CGEY, Deloitte, etc.) do is IT and Operations. How big are their strategy divisions and is there any chance of an undergrad getting into a strat division at one of these firms in this economy? |
| Message: |
The strat divisions at the Big 4 (Breaking Point/KPMG, Assenter/Andersen, CGEY, D&T, the former PwC consulting) are smaller than the population of females in a remote Alaskan oil town. In fact, the publicly-traded consultancies have been pulling further and further from the strat market--both business strat and (surprisingly) even IT strat.
If you're running a public company, you have to generate regular, predictable quarterly earnings. Strategy consulting provides anything but regular and predictable earnings--revenue could double in one quarter and fall by half the next. The Big 4 are now focusing on outsourcing and programming, where they can sell multi-year deals that provide Wall St. a stream of consistant earnings. (e.g., Booze is trying to dominate the goverment market.) The "convergence" of the consulting industry has become divergence. I've done strategy bake-offs against the Big 4, and they typically try to win the business by convincing the client that the problem is really a programming or systems problem, not a strat problem.
The one publicly-traded strat firm could be said to be Mercer, although Marsh owns so many companies that Mercer's strat earnings are a small piece of the pie.
The biggest players in strategy consulting are M/B/B, Mercer, Monitor, and Marakon. McKinsey has the largest operations capabilities among this group.
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