Bain's Exclusivity-Intimacy Flywheel

“Bain’s iconoclasm had six interlocking planks: •  An extremely close relationship with the client organisation, and particularly its head. •  Equality of status between the client organisation and the consulting firm (Bain & Company), and between the client’s CEO and the lead partner from Bain handling the client. •  A long-term and continuous relationship, completely at odds with the consulting industry norm of specific and intermittent projects. •  Exclusivity between the client organisation and Bain & Company both ways – as Bain told prospective clients, ‘We won’t work with your competitors, and you won’t work with ours.’ •  Focus on increasing the value of the company organisation – strategy was the means to the end, not the end in itself; conversely, to Bain, ‘strategy’ meant ‘anything that we can help with which will increase the value of the client firm’. •  Bill Bain believed in a top-down, quasi-military chain of command, both within his own firm, and in the client. What the lead Bain partner and the client CEO agreed should be done, would be done, by fiat, through the client organisation and in parallel with the Bain & Company organisation.”

“The Bain philosophy was audacious in the extreme. You can instantly see the benefits for Bain & Company – long assignments and ever-increasing consulting fees within the client company meant huge inbuilt growth and profitability. Yet it wouldn’t have worked if it didn’t reflect the reality that consultants could be vastly more useful within such a relationship. They could understand the company better than it understood itself, and ensure that the chief executive could implement whatever was necessary for radical profit improvement, without brooking opposition from powerful internal executives. These were ‘barons’ – heads of functions such as manufacturing or marketing, or of country operations – excoriated by Bain because they often acted to protect themselves and their people from profit-maximising change. When I defected from BCG to Bain & Company, I was amazed at how utterly dissimilar the two outfits were. They used the same intellectual capital, but in totally contrasting ways. Bain & Company worked within clients in a much more intensive, expensive and remorseless way, leaving very little to chance – so achieving extraordinary results.”