Your Problem Is Solved (February/March 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 2)

Your Problem Is Solved

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Authors: Peter Baida

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February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2

In 1921 Wilson & Company, a Chicago meat-packer, was hired by Arthur D. Little, founder of the management consulting company that bears his name, to throw one hundred pounds’ worth of sows’ ears into a big pot, cook well, and provide him with ten pounds of the gluey goo that came out. Little squeezed the goo through a spinneret to turn it into thread. He soaked the thread in a glycerin solution to soften it, and then, on a special loom, he wove the thread into a silky material. Out of that he made two purses, thus proving that an ingenious chemist could, in fact, make a silk purse out of sows’ ears.

Little did not stop there. He was not only a good chemist but a good businessman, and he ordered the preparation of a promotional booklet: “Does it not seem reasonable to you, dear Sir and Reader, that an organization which includes chemists that can make silk purses out of sows’ ears, just for the fun of doing it, is also qualified to do other things? To solve problems for instance which hold back the progress of industry … ? Who says it can’t be done? Let’s dig in and find out.”

One of the two purses that Dr. Little made in 1921 has been on display for many years at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The other, now insured for forty thousand dollars, remains the property of Arthur D. Little, Inc., which celebrated in 1986 its centennial anniversary. The story of this unusual enterprise—the story of one hundred years of digging in and finding out—has been told in detail in a new book, The Problem Solvers: A History of Arthur D. Little, Inc. , by E. J. Kahn, Jr. (Little, Brown).

Any comprehensive history of consulting would have to begin with the Delphic oracle. It is only in the twentieth century, however, that business consulting has itself become a big business. Top firms like Arthur D. Little (ADL), McKinsey & Company, Inc., and Booz, Alien & Hamilton Inc. employ thousands of people, operate in dozens of countries, and generate revenues of well over a hundred million dollars a year.

What exactly do these organizations do? ADL describes itself blandly as an “international research, engineering and management consulting organization” whose business is “to help industry, governmental agencies, and institutions throughout the world solve the problems and exploit the opportunities inherent in change.” Its professional staff, ADL goes on to explain, includes experts in “food and agribusiness, chemical industries, petroleum, utilities, metals, health care, construction, banking and other financial industries, electronics, automobiles and transportation.”

An ad published in 1907 was more concise: “Other people’s troubles are our business.” More recently ADL defined its business as the “application of research principles to solution of the problems of people who are willing to pay to have them solved.” Broad as