It’s all in the &

By Fiona Czerniawska

Ever since the deal between PwC and Booz & Company was announced in late 2013, there’s been speculation about the latter’s new name (when Booz & Company separated from Booz Allen Hamilton back in 2008 it agreed that, in the event it was acquired/merged, it would surrender its name within 90 days).

The augurs weren’t encouraging: PwC is, after all, the firm that gave the world the infamous ‘Monday’, a rebadging of its consulting practice in the aftermath of the dotcom boom which was apparently predicated on the fact that people liked turning up to work there on a Monday morning.  90 days didn’t leave much time for the exhaustive consultation process Accenture went through in 2000 when it was forced to drop the Andersen Consulting name.  Moreover, PwC was never likely to adopt the latter’s approach to the problem in the external market – throw hundreds of millions of dollars at advertising to a point where the collective business community accepted it could not laugh at the trumped up name.  On top of this, there are plenty of PwC and Booz’s competitors who’ve been waiting for the moment to fall about laughing, wagging their fingers and saying, ‘we told you it would never work.’

With failure likely and derision a certainty, Booz’s new name, Strategy&, is very clever indeed.  It retains the all-important strategy component (what PwC is buying and Booz prides itself on delivering) but makes it open-ended.

The phrase ‘strategy and execution’ is on every consultants’ lips these days, but Strategy& leaves a blank that clients can fill with their own alternatives, Strategy& people, change, transformation…  It makes the point that this firm will continue to lead on strategy, and that strategic thinking should be the starting point of any discussion, but is never the endgame.

The challenge now, of course, is to make the & a reality by bringing the PwC and Booz consulting organisations together enough to work effectively without the one being absorbed into the other.  So far so good: PwC has recognised the advantage of the international structure and identity of the former Booz & Co business and is maintaining that.  But that’s just the start: there are still some serious risks to be managed if the & isn’t to become an either/or.