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Strategic Thinking
Deloitte adds Monitor to the mix;doubles the size of its U.S. strategy practice
Michael Canning is the
National Managing Director
of Deloitte Consulting’s
U.S. Strategy & Operations
practice.
Bansi Nagji is the former
President of the Monitor
Group and now a Principal
of Deloitte Consulting and
co-leader of the U.S.
Strategy Service Line.
Last month, Deloitte officially inked the deal to
acquire Monitor’s global strategy consulting
business. The deal follows Monitor’s bankruptcy
filing in November 2012. As part of that bankruptcy, Monitor agreed to sell its assets to
Deloitte for $116 million, according to court
documents.
Monitor’s assets along with about 800
employees (including about 100 partners)
will combine with Deloitte’s Consulting
strategy service lines to begin operating
under a new Monitor Deloitte brand.
“What the Monitor acquisition does for
us right away is allows us to be better at
talking with our clients about their strategic
issues,” says Michael Canning, National
Managing Director of Deloitte Consulting’s
U.S. Strategy & Operations practice.
“Clients don’t want reports; they want
insights, and they want help to achieve
business results. This helps us more richly
discuss these issues with clients.”
Canning says Monitor is equal in rev-
enue to Deloitte’s current strategy business
in the U.S. (Deloitte doesn’t report the rev-
enue of specific practices or geographies
but its overall consulting revenue world-
wide was nearly $10 billion in 2012. The
U.S. strategy business would just be a frac-
tion of that amount.) “It doubles the size of
our U.S. strategy practice, and it gives us
the opportunity to play at a much larger
scale in the marketplace,” Canning says. “I
think it’ll be exciting to see what we can
build in the next several years.”
From Monitor’s perspective, joining
forces with Deloitte will allow the firm’s
consultants to stay with their clients from
strategy all the way through execution,
something the firm has never been able to
do before, says Bansi Nagji, the former
President of Monitor and now a Principal of
Deloitte Consulting, co-leader of the U.S.
Strategy Service Line and co-chair of the
firm’s Global Strategy Board.
The Backstory
Monitor was launched in 1983 by six
Harvard Business School graduates, including Michael Porter. The firm fell on hard
times with the economic collapse at the end
of 2008. For a firm that cut its teeth on high-level strategy work, it was tough sledding.
“Our product suite is really oriented towards
growth and innovation and it was a tough
market to be selling those,” he says. “So, we
weren’t seeing the type of growth we need-
