| Topic Name: |
The day consulting died |
| Message Name: |
AT Kearney |
| Date Posted: |
01/26/2003 |
| In Reply To: |
Mr. Bower was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 1, 1903, and grew up in Cleveland, where his family moved when he was a child. He went to public schools there and graduated from Brown University in 1925.
At that time, he had no fixed idea of how he wanted to make a living. His father, who was deputy recorder of Cuyahoga County, persuaded him to study law.
In 1927, he married the former Helen M. McLaughlin, who worked to help him through Harvard Law School and then Harvard Business School. She died in 1985, and Mr. Bower married Clothilde de V??ze Stewart three years later. She died in 1999, as did Mr. Bower's son Peter.
After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1930, Mr. Bower was hired by the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Cleveland. The firm assigned him to serve as secretary of a number of committees of the bondholders of troubled companies.
"No one asked why these companies failed ?? or how much earning power the new bonds could support," Mr. Bower said in an interview with MBA magazine quoted in Investor's Business Daily in 2000.
In 1933, he secured an interview with James O. McKinsey, a former University of Chicago professor who had started a firm of accountants and engineers in 1926. He liked Mr. Bower's ideas about a professional management firm and offered him a job.
In 1937, when Mr. McKinsey died of pneumonia at 48, Mr. Bower and another senior partner, A. T. Kearney, disagreed over how to run the firm. Mr. Kearney kept the Chicago office and eventually named it after himself ?? A. T. Kearney & Company. Mr. Bower named the New York firm for his departed partner.
He persuaded his colleagues not to follow other consulting firms' lead in selling themselves to other companies or public shareholders. His strongest argument was made by example: he sold his own shares back to the firm at book value when he turned 60 ?? far less than he could have received on the open market. In essence, Mr. Bower considered McKinsey too good to sell.
"Would the Vatican go public?" asked Forbes magazine in an article about McKinsey in 1987. "The First Marine Division?"
Not that Mr. Bower did not embrace change. In the early 1960's, he recognized that offices had become less formal. So he showed up for work without a hat, becoming the first to break his own rule.
Mr. Bower is survived by his sons Richard, of Bronxville, N.Y., and James, of Providence, R.I.; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
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| Message: |
Funny that they should mention AT Kearney, or should I say EDS. With all of the consultancies selling out to systems integrators and hardware vendors, I wonder who will eventually buy McKinsey. HP? Dell? Wipro?
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