This month's cover story focuses on PwC's acquiring Booz & Company and creating the co-brand Strategy&. In retrospect, the move itself wasn't all that surprising. PwC had made no secret about the fact that it wanted to acquire firms to bolster the strategy side of the advisory business.
Recently, they had done just that with the much smaller, and targeted acquisitions of PRTM, Diamond and parts of BearingPoint.
From Booz & Company's perspective, the firm although successful, struggled to find its footing after splitting with Booz Allen Hamilton back in 2008. By 2011, rumors were popping up about possible mergers and/or acquisitions for Booz & Company. At 3,000 consultants, the firm just didn't have the scale, or the brand equity in the high-rent district of strategy consulting, to compete with other top-notch strategy firms.
For the "Practical Strategist," as CEO Cesare Mainardi describes the firm, scale is paramount to taking clients from strategy through execution. And PwC has scale in spades, and a strategic desire. And as Mainardi points out, plenty of firms—from the Big 4 to the traditional strategy players–are seeking those strategy through execution capabilities, but it's not easy to do. And certainly not easy to do organically.
Which brings us to Strategy& and what may be just the first domino to fall in the full-service, soup-to-nuts world of consulting convergence. Clearly, PwC and Booz & Company were the first to throw down the gauntlet in this duel. Whether or not they actually draw first blood remains to be seen.
But as Tony Poulter, Global Head of Consulting with PwC, says in our cover story this month: PwC moved first, but there will be others. Certainly Deloitte, which already scooped up Monitor in 2012, EY and KPMG have similar interests.
Is A.T. Kearney, Bain, BCG, or even McKinsey ripe for a repositioning? It seems impossible to imagine the consulting landscape one day won't have one or more of these storied brands, but it won't. And it may be sooner rather than later.
Joseph Kornik
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
jkornik@consultingmag.com
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