Editor's Note: A.T. Kearny's Seven-Year Itch

Dick Brown doesn't seem cut out to be a marriage counselor. EDS's hard-charging chief executive is known for his ability to shake up stodgy corporate cultures. When Brown rides into town, complacent executives better start packing, and so it goes in EDS's hometown of Plano, Texas, where over the past two years new leadership expectations have raised the accountability bar across every foot of EDS's sprawling campus. It's a shake-up that has left the giant integrator's strategy consultancy A.T. Kearney all but untouched — that was until earlier this year when, following the retirement of ATK managing director Fred Steingraber, Brown made his move.
New compensation and greater accountability are today counted among the initiatives EDS's chief has deployed to make the strategy outfit's wing-tipped consultants march in lockstep with the integrator's techie army. It's an alignment that has largely eluded the integrator through six years of matrimony, but one that may now help EDS finally realize its vision of expanding its reach into corporate boardrooms. It's a vision the integrator first talked about on the eve of its strategy nuptial, but one that has proven difficult to fulfill.
Today, as they did then, EDS executives like to boil down the rationale behind their strategy nuptial into simple arithmetic. One dollar of strategy work can pull through $10 of integration services — that is the simple equation they share as they seek to underscore better the wisdom behind their strategy consulting union. While analysts remain skeptical of the nuptial's pull-through dividends, it's clear that compensation and accountability hurdles are only minor obstacles.
A more daunting obstacle for EDS management is rooted in the very essence of strategy work — the mental and creative labor upon which such firms as A.T. Kearney, Boston Consulting Group, and McKinsey & Company were built. It's work that by its very nature requires free-flowing ideas and insights. As BCG senior partner George Stalk explains, "Technology (integrators) help clients take what they do and do it better. Strategy is about doing something different." Any attempt to fetter the bobbing intellect can't help but corrupt the quality of the strategy work — or so the logic goes. It's a quandary and one Dick Brown will need to consider as he attempts to draw ATK more closely into step with the $20 billion integrator.