The Q-Loop: The Art & Science of Lasting Corporate Change

Preface

The year was 1997. The meeting was the culmination of 365 days of work—fifteen hours a day, six days a week. I had recently become a partner in the Financial Services practice of Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman), and was given the honor of working for the firm’s largest client on the largest project in the history of the firm. Our task: “Tell us how to reinvent our company and rethink how we can shape our industry to win in the twenty-first century.” As a strategy consultant, this mandate was as good as it gets—a blank slate, tremendous resources, and time.

We had more than thirty consultants putting out thousands of pages of analysis, running dozens of financial models, and doing hundreds of client interviews. As we ...