Accenture - Spent years fighting to keep a name, lost, and it was the luckiest defeat in consulting.

The consulting practice grew inside Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm founded in 1913. It was formally constituted as Andersen Consulting in 1989 under a Swiss holding entity, with an arrangement that would cause everything that followed: the consultants generated most of the revenue and shared a portion of it with the accountants.

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.

The timeline

Three years, not one
The arbitration was requested in December 1997 and the award was not issued until July 2000. Two and a half years of proceedings, during which the consulting business continued operating inside an arrangement its partners had voted unanimously to dissolve. The duration is the part that gets lost: this was not an event but a condition, sustained for the length of a normal product cycle.
Paid from money already withheld
From 1998 the transfer payments owed upward were placed into escrow rather than handed over. When the settlement came due, a substantial part of it was money the consultancy had been holding back for two years - which is a detail that changes how the figure should be read.
And then they hired them
On 1 March, alongside the releases and indemnities that finalised the separation, the two sides entered service agreements under which Arthur Andersen would provide services including tax work to Accenture for six years at $60 million a year. Having fought for three years to get away, the first thing the new company did was sign a six-year contract with the firm it had left.

Flagship products and solutions

Strategy and consultingThe advisory business the firm is named for, and the smaller half - the part that decides what the larger half will then be paid to build.
Technology servicesSystems integration, application development and cloud migration at industrial scale, delivered largely from offshore centres. This is the bulk of the revenue and the direct competitor to the Indian services firms elsewhere on this timeline.
OperationsRunning processes on a client's behalf - finance, procurement, customer service. The outsourcing business, and the one that turns a project firm into an annuity.
SongMarketing and creative services, assembled from dozens of agency acquisitions. A consultancy buying advertising agencies is a bet that the two disciplines were always adjacent, and the reviews have been mixed.

Key innovations

The precision that matters about the rulingThe tribunal's finding is usually summarised as a defeat, and the company's own filing puts it more narrowly: Andersen Worldwide, the coordinating entity that sat above both businesses, was found to have breached its material obligations. That is not the same as a finding against the accounting firm, and the distinction is exactly the sort that matters when a criminal prosecution later reaches for everything connected to a name.
Separation as a legal structure rather than a feelingThe point the entry above makes is worth restating in its narrow form: what protected the consultancy was not distance or reputation but the fact that a tribunal had already ruled it a distinct entity with no continuing obligations. Corporate separations are usually judged on whether they made commercial sense. This one is judged on whether it would hold under a prosecutor's reading, and it did.
A name chosen to mean nothingThe brief for the rename was to find a word with no meaning in any language, precisely so that it could not carry a bad one. That is the opposite of how brands are usually built, and it is a rational response to having just discovered how quickly a name with eighty years of meaning can acquire the wrong one.

Main markets

Large enterprises and governments across more than a hundred and twenty countries, at a scale where the firm is simultaneously a consultancy, a systems integrator, an outsourcer and an advertising group.

It competes with the strategy houses at the top, the Indian services firms on delivery cost, and the technology vendors' own professional services arms - and increasingly with the software its clients buy, since automation reduces the hours it can bill.

Analyst standing

Assessed as the largest firm in professional services by revenue and headcount, with the recurring analyst question being margin under offshore competition rather than demand.
The structural exposure worth naming is that a business selling hours is the most direct beneficiary of complexity and the most direct casualty of its removal. Every tool that makes an integration simpler reduces the work it can charge for, and the firm's own advisory practice sells those tools. That tension is not new - it is the same one every consultancy has carried since the first systems study - but the rate at which software now removes labour is.

Accenture (Britannica) ↗

From the company

Official site ↗

Sources