The consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton specialized in helping companies align their business-unit operations and economics to corporate strategy, but had difficulty in communicating the processes, outcomes, and value of the service offering under its longtime labels, “New Business Model,” “Economics of Organization,” and “Strategically Aligned Organization.”

Working with the senior partner and principal overseeing the firm’s Organization & Leadership Practice, our team renamed the service offering, “Organizing for Growth,” developed an underlying form of analysis we termed “Organizational DNA,” identified the four “bases” of Organizational DNA, and created an online tool that enabled executives of any company to anonymously “diagnose” their own firm’s Org DNA. The firm’s Org DNA work was featured in publications ranging from USA Today to Harvard Business Review, which labeled Organization DNA “one of the breakthrough business ideas of 2005.” The work became the basis of the book our team authored, Results: Keep What's Good, Fix What's Wrong, and Unlock Great Performance, by Booz Allen partners Gary L. Nielsen and Bruce Pasternack, which became a Wall Street Journal best-seller.

Between July 2003 and December 2005, we collected 60,000 profiles from hundreds of companies, providing statistically significant understanding of performance norms across scores of industries; reasons for performance shortfalls specific to industries and companies; and strategies and processes for reinforcing alignment. In FY 2006, the service offering recorded $12.5 million in bookings from 17 clients in four continents, in the health care, financial services, auto and industrial, consumer and media, energy and utilities, and public sectors.