Here is a sampling of our recent consulting experience:

Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid

We were part of a group that provided an independent review of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic games. The review, commissioned by the Chicago City Council, was to advise the council on whether it could afford to grant a blanket guarantee that the city would cover any financial issues that arose if the games were awarded to Chicago. (While the games would have been privately financed, the International Olympic Committee required a blanket financial guarantee from the host city.) The final report is available at the Civic Federation website.

Large ISP

We advised a large Internet service provider in a potential 2008 acquisition of AOL’s dial-up business.  Working directly with the chief operating officer, we identified red flags about problems that might occur when it came to retaining AOL customers, extracting economies of scale and merging back-office systems. In the end, the potential acquirer decided to pass—and is delighted it did.  It picked off many AOL customers without having to buy the business and deal with messy integration issues.

Fortune 100 financial services company

We are advising a large financial services company on the redesign of its corporate strategy and innovation processes.  The core issue is that the company operates  in mature markets, where incremental improvement will not deliver the growth that investors demand. Yet the company has trouble fostering truly innovative efforts, partly because they seem to be too small to merit much attention from senior management in their early stages. We are helping the company understand how to foster its innovative ideas, from their inception all the way through to the point where they will be large businesses.

Here is a sampling of recent management workshops and industry conference presentations on topics related to our work:

• Allscripts — presentation to an executive forum of more than 100 executives from Allscript’s key clients
• Allstate — briefing to the senior management team
• American Medical Association — briefing at Board of Trustees planning retreat
• Association for Corporate Growth — briefing to 100+ Chicago-area members
• Center for Corporate Innovation — briefings to four groups of their clients, with roughly two dozen executives attending each session. Two groups were CEOs of Silicon Valley companies, many of them household names. One group consisted of CIOs from Silicon Valley companies. One was health-care CEOs.
• Churchill Club — briefing with some 60 Silicon Valley executives
• City Club of San Francisco — briefing to a dozen executives
• Delta Dental Plans Association — briefing combined meeting of board members of regional Delta Dental Plan companies
• Diamond Management & Technology Consultants — presentations at two gatherings of 50 senior executives from major companies in a range of industries
• European Internet Gaming conference — keynote speech in Copenhagen at a conference attended by 1,600
• National Investor Relations Institute — keynote speech to more than 500 members at NIRI’s 2009 annual conference
• Northeast Delta Dental — briefing to board members
• Radio Flyer — briefing to senior management team
• Stanford Breakfast Briefing — briefing to more than 100 Silicon Valley executives
• Texas General Counsel Forum — annual conference
• Turnaround Management Association — briefing to about 75 members
• Wharton Business School — presentation with David Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab, to 200 executives who are Wharton alumni