Our discussions with Sam Albert, arguably one of the most beloved IBMers of all time, always began the same way. Whether in person or over the telephone, Sam would begin by repeating the name Jim Kennedy — two, three, even four times. Finally, he would deliver in a robust cadence: "Let me tell you about Jim Kennedy!" It was the late 1990s, and Kennedy Information had just launched the first issue of this magazine. With our editorial team being the latest addition to the Kennedy clan, we had many readers approach us to share their thoughts about the contribution of different members of the consulting world. However, none were perhaps as direct as those thoughts that attempted to spotlight the contribution made by the founder of the company to which we now belonged.
Mr. Kennedy founded Kennedy Information in 1970, after relocating his family to the Monadnock region of southwestern New Hampshire, a land of blue skies and lakes and rustic beauty — a perfect match, perhaps, for a focused mind with little patience for excess clutter.
With the launch of his newsletter Consultants News, Mr. Kennedy clicked the consulting world's lights on. Each month, consultants could now bring their rivals into full view as well as themselves. Moreover, consultants could now dare to view themselves as belonging to not just a firm or an elite group of experts, but something much larger: an industry.
Hal Higdon, another pioneering management consulting journalist and author of the book The Business Healers (Random House, 1969), said at the time that many consulting firms did not want to be drawn out into the light.
"Those inside didn't understand how anyone could write about management consulting and not actually do it. And the response was. 'Wait a minute! Isn't that exactly what management consultants do?,'" explains Higdon, who remembers having Arthur Andersen and George S. May threaten him with lawsuits. Higdon said that his first publisher dropped his book because of potential lawsuits.
Jim Kennedy faced similar threats as he fine-tuned an approach that borrowed from the best traditions of industry newsletters — a mix of gossip, news, and commentary that perhaps might be considered a precursor of today's informed bloggers.
From the start, there were no sacred cows. In the June 1974 issue of Consultants News, Mr. Kennedy wrote: "From his lofty perch, Drucker is hurting consulting by perpetuating the myth that it is some arcane art practiced mysteriously by super-loners. Without detracting from the respect for his brilliant writings, let's not further the notion that he's a management consultant."
When it came to Peter Drucker, it's clear that Mr. Kennedy saw an aberration capable of fogging over the notion that consulting was now an industry where thousands of people pursued a discipline each day.
He kept a watchful and critical eye on the consulting world's industry associations and from time to time found himself banned from their meetings. His commentary in certain ways foretold the collapse of Arthur Andersen 25 years later.
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Christopher McKenna traveled to Kennedy's New Hampshire headquarters from Oxford University to meet Mr. Kennedy, as he began to research a book that would detail the history of management consulting in the 20th century.
"He was a real pioneer in taking a wider view of consulting at a time when it was fragmenting. His perspective was truly singular, since he was writing from the wilderness — in both senses of the word," recalls McKenna.
Others found their way to Mr. Kennedy in a more figurative sense. The late Sam Albert was a colorful IBM sales executive who was tasked by the giant computer maker with pioneering relationships with consultants in the late '80s and early '90s. Albert would blaze a footpath that in the years to come would arguably direct his company into an entirely new industry — one where people are the assets. Armed with a copy of Consultants News, he found the fodder he needed to engage consultants and open doors. In a way, Sam was IBM's own voice in the wilderness, and just who he found when he got there has never been a mystery. Even today we hear Sam's words: "Let me tell you about Jim Kennedy!"
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