THE EPIC RISE AND FALL OF BEARINGPOINT INCORPORATED

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 the comprehensive “personal journal” that he kept “throughout [his] entire working career.” Given BearingPoint’s relative obscurity, and the fact that its demise did not have much of an effect beyond the circle of its employees and investors, the noteworthiness of its bankruptcy is not entirely clear. For all of his charts and diagrams—and there are many—White largely fails to sell the comedy and drama of the story that he promises in his introduction. Though this corporate chronicle may be of interest to those researching bankruptcy, it is difficult to imagine the work finding a wide audience.

A comprehensive if questionably relevant accounting of a corporate meltdown.