It's Monday, December 3, 10 a.m. — and KPMG Consulting chairman and CEO Rand Blazer is standing on a traffic island in the middle of Times Square. Less than an hour earlier, news outlets had begun reporting that Israeli helicopters were firing missiles in the Gaza Strip, and now Wall Street's excitable minions have turned the Nasdaq Tower's ever-glistening stock portfolio into strings of downward-facing arrows.
None of this would probably be worth mentioning, except that we're here to photograph Blazer and capture his likeness in front of the giant tower — which at this very moment reveals quite a lot about our troubled times.
This issue's cover story on KPMG Consulting came about through a series of discussions beginning in the summer and proceeding into the fall. Our original interview with Blazer had been scheduled to take place at 10 a.m. on September 12, a day that many of us may now think of as "The Day After." Naturally, we rescheduled, and along with the rest of the country we hunkered down for nearly two weeks while awaiting a sign that life had returned to normal.
Our original story concept had been simply to report the milestones of the consulting firm's first year as a public company, and while we haven't strayed too far from that concept, an important chapter is missing from our story — one written six to 18 months prior to KPMG Consulting's IPO. That installment details the consultancy's resolve to separate itself from the upstart clan of publicly held e-consultancies. Despite the boisterous welcome Wall Street once offered this nebulous sector, KPMG kept its distance — refusing to present itself as anything other than what its partners deemed the firm to be — a systems integrator. The wisdom of its ways would quickly become evident as the e-consultants fell out of Wall Street's favor.
Today, it's that same rigid resolve that receives Wall Street's adoration. KPMG Consulting's one-time partners are now managing directors, and it is to the credit of the firm's management that most of the 605 "MDs" march in lockstep — an observation that supports the idea that the conversion from partnership is complete.
In certain ways, the story of KPMG Consulting's debut can be broken into two parts: pre– and post–9-11. That's not to say that the firm's outlook changed in any drastic way, but what was once a routine tale of private-to-public conversion suddenly became burdened with larger, more complex questions involving Wall Street, its symbols, its superstitions, and the global powers of persuasion.
No, you will not find all of this in our cover story on KPMG Consulting. But as KPMG Consulting's CEO stood beneath Nasdaq's fiery temple, the picture told the story. Going forward, life would be anything but normal.
Jack Sweeney, Editor-in-Chief
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.