The Top 25 Most Influential Consultants 2004 - Jim McTaggart, Chairman and Cofounder Marakon Associates

For its part, Marakon origins are arguably unlike those of any other firm its size in terms of where it was established (San Francisco) and the types of offerings it first produced to swing open client doors.  Marakon's early work largely focused on helping companies determine how value was created and destroyed in their business portfolios. To do this, McTaggart and his fellow cofounders developed a series of performance measures that they bundled and sold to financial clients as "value-based strategic planning."
"In the early years, we really didn't even think of work as consulting," says McTaggart, who over the years has enjoyed close working relationships with  a roster of CEOs, including James Kilts of The Gillette Company and Travis Engen of Alcan Inc.

Later, Marakon broadened its practice to tie strategic planning to capital investment planning. Reflecting this expanded focus, the firm's founders renamed their approach "value-based management."
As the firm grew from a specialist boutique to an international strategy outfit in the 1990s, Marakon continued to stick to its knitting in strategy and finance and altogether ignored the so called opportunities within the dot-com arena.
"We knew it wasn't what we do," says McTaggart, who believes some of the more sizable strategy outfits have over the last decade attempted to evolve their offerings to better resemble Marakon's, rather than the other way around. McTaggart believes Marakon's imitators are fooling themselves, since the firm's offerings are really the firm's people — a restrained resource.