CoverStory: The Mitchell Madison Story/First of Three

By Jack Sweeney

Where hunters thrive, teamwork and collaboration are always a poor substitute for opportunism and a flexible compensation system. Or so might read the epitaph of the Mitchell Madison Group, the meteoric but short-lived consultancy founded in 1994 by a renegade clan of former McKinsey consultants. The upstart strategy firm would be sold five years later to Web services kingpin USWeb/CKS as part of an all-stock deal, valued at the time at more than $300 million.

"I think it's hard to ask people to work for years and not harvest [the rewards] if there's a ready opportunity — now, the subsequent decline in the market is another story — but the USWeb transaction stands by itself as far as that point in time goes," says Steiner, who takes credit for spearheading not one, but two consultancy insurrections before helping establish MMG, where he served as managing partner.Acquired by USWeb/CKS in September 1999, the gooey residue of Mitchell Madison's past had little time to dry before the firm became a lesser appendage of the much larger anatomy created by the merger of USWeb/CKS and Chicago-based consultancy Whittman-Hart — the combined firm later dubbed marchFIRST.