A.T. KEARNEY AND THE NEW “DEFINING ENTITY”

A.T. Kearney and the New “Defining Entity”

A.T. Kearney and the New “Defining Entity”

Introduction

This literature review is on the case study with the name of A.T. Kearney and the New “Defining Entity”. Being one of the world's leading management consultants, A.T. Kearney has been to demonstrate and devise one of the most pragmatic elucidations and supported customer's implemented recommendations that generated tangible results and improved competitive advantage. The company was well acknowledged for the capability to deliver value and results throughout the management process, from strategy development to business market analysis to operations, process and technological transformation. This mix of strategy and operations combined with a focus on implementation has differentiated A. T. Kearney from its competitors and driven the firm's outstanding results for over a decade. The leaders of the firm emphasized strong lasting relationships (at the CEO level) with fewer, larger clients. To this end A. T. Kearney has been quite successful. Continuous challenging themselves to exceed their clients' expectations, more than 75 percent of their business volume was generated from clients who had used A. T. Kearney's services the previous year (Adler, 1991).

While striving to help a global clients' gain and sustain competitive advantage, A. T. Kearney pursued its own goals of globalization, growth and leadership. Before integrating with Management Consulting Services (MCS) EDS's management consulting arm, the firm has 40 offices in 22 countries. It was expected that over 65 percent of a A. T. Kearney's revenues would be generated outside of the United States by 1997. This was quite remarkable considering that only 10 percent of the revenues came from outside of the United States as late as 1980. Accompanying its aggressive move towards globalization, A. T. Kearney had experienced tremendous growth over the last decade. From a staff of only 230 in 1984 to over 1,100 consultants in 1994, the firm had enjoyed double digit revenue growth for each of the last 13 years. A. T. Kearney has doubled its size every three years since 1983 and was recently listed in Consultants News as one of the five fastest-growing consulting firms in the world. Brent Snell, a President in Toronto office, suggested that A. T. Kearney was, in fact, “growth-constrained only by having insufficient numbers of highly qualified new people at all levels of the organization.” (Bass, 1996)

Electronic Data System (EDS)

EDS started in 1962 with Ross Perot and a $1,000 investment. The fledgling company began by offering routine data processing services for Dallas-area companies on computers they did not even own. In 1985, a year after Perot sold the information technology giant to General Motors for an estimated $ $2.5 billion. EDS reported revenues of $3.4 billion, a 264 percent improvement from the previous year. By 1995, as a subsidiary of the auto manufacturer, EDS was making most of its money running the computer networks of its clients more efficiently than they could. It helped customers use information and technology to recast their economics and ...