Accenture

**One early engagement belongs on this timeline for its own sake.** In 1953 the practice ran a feasibility study for General Electric that led to the installation of a UNIVAC I - among the first uses of a computer for ordinary business administration rather than for science or defence. UNIVAC appears elsewhere here as one of the BUNCH, the five manufacturers that spent the 1960s competing with IBM.

The relationship soured over exactly what you would expect. By the 1980s the consultants were producing the larger share of income while paying it upward, and in 1995 Arthur Andersen established a consulting arm of its own - which the consultants regarded as a breach of the spirit of the agreement, whatever the letter said. In December 1997 the Andersen Consulting partners voted unanimously to dissolve the partnership, citing serious breaches of contract and irreconcilable differences, and took it to arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce.

**The ruling, on 7 August 2000, went against them on the question they had asked.** The arbitrator, Guillermo Gamba, found that Arthur Andersen had not technically breached the 1989 agreement. He granted full separation anyway - but required the consultancy to pay a settlement, reported at around $1B and in some accounts $1.2B, **and to give up the Andersen name entirely by 1 January 2001.**

So they had four months to rename a global firm. An internal competition produced **Accenture**, submitted by an employee named Kim Petersen working in Oslo, from *accent on the future*. It was widely mocked as management-consultant nonsense, and the change cost somewhere between $100M and $175M to execute and promote. The firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2001, raising about $1.7B at $14.50 a share.

**And then Enron.** In 2002 Arthur Andersen was convicted on an obstruction charge connected to the Enron audits, and the firm collapsed. The name Andersen went from an eighty-year-old mark of professional respectability to a synonym for shredded documents in a matter of months.

**Which makes this the luckiest defeat in the history of consulting.** They had fought for years to escape a parent while keeping the brand. They lost that argument, paid a billion dollars, and were ordered to abandon the name at enormous expense. Eighteen months later the thing they had been forced to give up would have destroyed them. Forbes put it best at the time: after Enron, any name was better than Andersen.

It is worth being precise about what the arbitration actually did, because that is the part with a lesson in it. **The ruling did not merely rename them - it established them as a legally separate entity**, which is why Arthur Andersen's criminal conviction did not reach across and take the consultancy with it. The firewall was a condition they resented and it turned out to be the thing that saved them.

What followed is the ordinary arc at extraordinary scale: offshore delivery hubs in India and the Philippines, expansion into outsourcing and business process work, and growth from around $9B of revenue in 1998 to roughly $64B by 2024, with a headcount now approaching 800,000 across more than 120 countries.