Leadership Lessons from the
Rise and Fall of BearingPoint Inc.

Dear Douglas, This is an insightful book about the rise and fall of a business. Through your discussions, I think that you have made an impact on your readers about the importance of the decisions they make and how every single decision has an impact. I liked how you presented the book as if it were a play. It made for easier reading. I was also impressed by how much research you put into the creation of this book. Sincerely, Terry Jacobs ​Terry Jacobs, Manuscript Review Specialist

Hi Douglas, I can hardly see straight after running through your manuscript twice in entirety. Initially I must say that though I’m no numbers guy, I seriously wonder if you would have been a better CEO than most of the ones you described. Your knowledge and temperament sure made me feel that you had more of the qualities necessary to keep a company like BearingPoint afloat—even prospering. I know many would prefer reading a suspense novel. However, you often kept me on the edge of my seat, wondering when the next shoe would drop in the epic saga of BearingPoint’s gradual demise. Sad, but strangely mind-grabbing.

Anyway, I could definitely see your book as being a lifesaver, particularly for large companies who are headed in a disastrous direction yet may not be fully aware of the sharp rocks hidden just beneath the shoals. Someone with your drive and connections could surely find such companies through your vast network through the decades. I wish you the very best on your book—I know the labor involved was mind-boggling.

Your editor,

The revealing history of a failed business, The Epic Rise and Fall of BearingPoint Incorporated is an insider’s account of what went wrong at a large consulting firm in the early 2000s.

An anatomy of a company in free fall written by one of its former employees, Douglas P. White’s encyclopedic history The Epic Rise and Fall of BearingPoint Incorporated gives an overview of a three-billion-dollar bankruptcy and the many missteps that led there.

In the mid-1990s, KPMG was one of the world’s biggest professional service accounting firms. At the end of that decade, their United States consulting branch spun off in an IPO launch that sought to harness the rising wave of the dot-com era. This inaugurated BearingPoint, a new public company that the book says was plagued from the start by miscalculations, bad timing, and conflicts of vision. Covering details like the temptations of outsized gains, efforts at international growth, and broken incentive structures driven by inaccurate metrics, the book reflects on bad decisions within the organization.

Its pages filled with primary-source documents that range from personal journal entries to press releases and company emails, the book replicates the confusion of the company’s most tumultuous periods.

The book’s five “acts” cover a period of a decade and a half, from the lead-up to BearingPoint’s IPO to its 2009 bankruptcy. An expository act places KPMG in the 1990s into the context of its accounting-firm competitors; another section centers the IPO; a third follows the company’s decline; the fourth and fifth sections are dedicated to the bankruptcy and its aftermath. But the acts are unbalanced; most of the space is devoted to Act III, which overshadows the other parts of the book.

An insider’s account of what went wrong at a large consulting firm in the early 2000s, The Epic Rise and Fall of BearingPoint Incorporated is filled with the internal communications, facts, and figures of a company in decline.

Reviewed by Willem Marx

August 18, 2024

White provides an insider’s view of a company that should have been successful but went bankrupt instead.

BearingPoint Incorporated (known before its IPO as KPMG Consulting) was a company offering its corporate clients auditing, assurance, taxation, actuarial, legal, consulting, and other professional services. It was spun off of its parent company, KPMG—considered one of the “Big Four” in the professional services industry—in 2001. By 2009, it had filed for Chapter 11 protections. How did BearingPoint go from a promising new company launched by experienced executives from a massive and trusted business network to bankruptcy in just seven years? In this book, White, who worked for BearingPoint from 1993 to 2008, diagnoses what he believes were the 30 issues that contributed to the company’s ultimate downfall. “This is not a book about a ‘bankruptcy,’” he explains in the introduction; “It’s a book about ‘principles’ and what happens when egos are over-empowering, along with the importance of making good, well-informed, decisions and the impact of the bad ones.” There were baked-in problems with BearingPoint from the beginning, from the structure of the public offering to the lack of oversight from the board of directors to the leadership’s dearth of experience with publicly traded companies. The author goes through the company’s complex history to explain why it was successful in the first place and why the particularities of its IPO, combined with a number of other factors within the professional service industry and the economy at large, doomed it to failure. Ultimately, White places much blame on the four horsemen of the corporate apocalypse: greed, ego, arrogance, and ignorance.

The author unpacks these issues with a distinctively off-beat (if not entirely fluid) narration. Early on, the longtime BearingPoint employee describes the company’s downfall as being “like a play and included some comedy, a little bit of tyranny, lots of drama combined with a few significant twists and turns, but in the end, it became a tragedy, and I was in the orchestra pit for all of it, although I will admit there were times I wished I was in the upper balcony.” White is certainly thorough, and the amount of research that went into the work is apparent (and frankly staggering). The author is so scrupulous that he sometimes comes across as a little obsessive, and he admits as much:

White claims to have analyzed 1,500 SEC filings while writing the book, and he frequently quotes from them.