McKinsey & Company, the
management consulting giant, is buying Lunar, the design consulting
giant. The deal illustrates just how central design is to business
today—and how design’s influence is growing beyond the tech industry
into the corporate world at large.
On the surface, the acquisition announced today might seem unlikely.
Lunar is a top design firm, known for its work with clients like Apple,
HP, and SanDisk. McKinsey is, well, McKinsey—“the most well-known, most
secretive, most high-priced, most prestigious, most consistently
successful, most envied, most trusted, most disliked management
consulting firm on earth,” as a Fortune profile once put it. But to those who’ve been paying attention, the deal is another example of a well-established trend: big companies paying big bucks for design expertise.
Lunar will keep its name and continue operating out of its offices in
San Francisco, Chicago, Munich and Hong Kong. It will continue taking
on new business. But it will also draw on its three decades of design
experience to help McKinsey solve problems for its clients. According to
Lunar President John Edson, this help could take many forms. It might
be figuring out how to best execute a particular product—or how an
incumbent player can integrate design into its long-term strategy.
McKinsey basically sells expertise to the world’s most important
companies. Its clients, to name a very few, include Johnson &
Johnson, Shell, and the governments of the United Kingdom, Mexico, and
Taiwan. Its interest in Lunar is proof that the business world is
increasingly seeing design as a necessary competency.
Apple’s rise from floundering underdog to the most successful company
in history set a powerful example. Now corporations are scrambling to
bring designers into the fold. GE is building a massive team dedicated
to user experience. IBM is hiring an army of designers, by some accounts
the world’s largest. Others are expediting the process by absorbing
entire design firms. Last year, CapitalOne bought UX pioneer
AdaptivePath. Google picked up mechanical design firm Gecko. Facebook
has swallowed up Hot Studio, Bolt Peters, and, most recently,
Teehan+Lax.
see more: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/consulting-giant-mckinsey-bought-top-design-firm/
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