Niko Canner
Senior Partner, Organization & Change Leadership Practice
Booz & Company
Excellence in LeadershipNiko Canner is never one to shy away from a challenge. Ten years ago, he left McKinsey & Company to co-found the upstart Katzenbach Partners. Last June, he took the leap again when Booz & Company acquired Katzenbach. Today, he’s the youngest Senior Partner at Booz & Company and sits on the North American Management Team. His latest challenge? Leading the integration of Katzenbach into Booz & Company, a firm 30 times larger.
Canner is well aware of the checkered history mergers and integrations have in the profession. “Often, the acquired firm gives up its ability to make a difference. But in this situation, it felt like an amplification of that opportunity for Katzenbach to bring its skills to a much, much larger stage,” he says. “The exciting thing for me was the chance to be able to bring Katzenbach Partners into this unique moment.”
Clearly, culture will be a key differentiator for the firm. “We touched 1,100 of the firm’s 3,500 people worldwide in face-to-face, two-way dialogues about cultural aspirations,” Canner says.
“The chance to be part of an endeavor like that really represents an amplification of everything we tried to create in terms of institution building back at Katzenbach.”
Because of its sheer size, of course, not everything from Katzenbach is translatable, but the level of thoughtfulness and deliberate design around culture, are, Canner says. One immediate change Canner helped implement is how Booz handles campus recruiting, creating a team of partners and principles to drive the interviewing and hiring for North American MBAs.
In many cases, he says, Booz had four of its 18 senior partners at an interview. “That gives you a sense of the institutional commitment.”
So far the changes appear to working. Building on the momentum of integration, Booz & Company’s Organization and Change Leadership practice is up 40 percent. “If you look at the challenges that big enterprises face, a lot are at the intersection of strategy and organization, and that’s been the essence of where I’ve worked in my career,” Canner says. “The combination of the two firms gives me a much broader tool kit. In some ways, I believe the dream that we began at Katzenbach has come of age.”
—Joseph Kornik
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