Monitor was an international consulting firm that worked with the world's leading corporations, governments, and social sector organizations to drive growth. Monitor offered a range of services-strategy and uncertainty, innovation, leadership and organization, marketing, economic security and competitiveness, and social action-to deliver sustainable results.
Monitor worked across virtually all industries, including health care and life sciences, telecommunications, industrials, energy, consumer products, financial services, tourism, automotive, media and advertising, public sector, and high technology.
2.) Companies Motives:
The firm provided business unit strategy guidance, corporate finance advisory expertise, geo-strategy advisory, and risk and uncertainty advisory (through the firm's Global Business Network).
In innovation, Monitor helped its clients develop new products, identify unmet needs, generate new business concepts, and prototype those new businesses.
The economic security and competitiveness practice contributes to solving some of the world's most intractable problems by shaping the next generation of thinking on economic growth, job creation, governance models and sustainable wealth creation, and by influencing leaders around the globe on policy choices and their implementation decisions that affect these issues.
Finally, the company's social action specialists advise non-profit, philanthropic, and social-sector institutions on how to make innovative, step-function changes in their mission-related performance.
3.) Reason for Failure:
“Monitor Group was a consulting firm co-founded by the business guru, Michael Porter. By November 2012, Monitor was unable to pay its bills and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection”- (Steve Denning, author of ‘What killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group’)
According to Steve Denning, Monitors downward spiral to bankruptcy had been happening for a while. The 2008 financial crises did not help matters by slowing down their business. The company ended up relying on partners to bail them out by paying them millions in advances for bonuses. They also borrowed a further 51 million from Caltius Capital Management, a private equity firm to which they were eventually unable to make interest payments and were forced to file for Bankruptcy.
What happened to Monitor that led to its epic failure is one of many discussions. There are many hypotheses as to why Monitor fell with claims of negligence; the negative reputation blow surrounding them and Lybia’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was a client that hired Monitor to improve his image in the Western media; pricing itself out of the market; or ironically the poor execution of its own Porters Strategy. Others think it was a clever ploy to sell its assets to the newly formed Deloitte. Another claim, and in my opinion the most conclusive certainties direct from the fact that the world has changed, along with customer needs and demands and Monitor simply just could not adjust or keep up.
4.) Suggestions to help sustainability
Made more cuts- The recession almost certainly caused a structural decline in Monitor’s revenues. At the time, in 2008, Monitor had around 1,500 consultants in 27 offices. While they reduced the number of employees by about 20% and closed a few small offices, it clearly wasn’t enough. They should have cut much more deeply in order to survive. They didn’t, and four years later in 2012, they ran out of the cash needed to support an unprofitable business.
Protected its Reputation- It takes a lifetime to earn a good reputation. It takes a few days to lose it all. You are judged by the company you keep… in other words, your reputation is assumed to be of the same calibre as the reputation of the people around you. In my opinion, Monitor should have been much