Into this milieu came a group of business consultants from the Boston consulting group Bain. After a few years of trying to act as hands-off investors in corporations, the new group, called Bain Capital, decided to use the accumulated consulting experience among the founders and staff by purchasing businesses and applying their consulting knowledge to benefit the corporation and their own investment.
The idea was successful.
What made the idea successful was that many people in consulting to corporations accumulated a highly pragmatic set of skills and tools that are beneficial in the corporate environment. However, many corporations have such complex internal political problems that they cannot make use of the consulting advice.
It is into this world that the consultants moved. When they owned a company they could apply the consulting pragmatic tools that they had available, without others getting in their way.
What we ended up with was a market of fungible corporations that could be easily bought and sold. In between they could be improved using corporate consulting experience.
There is nothing magical about corporate consulting. After a consultant has seen the same problem in many corporate environments and occasionally watched successful changes occur in those environments, the consultant has pragmatic material to make future recommendations that will work.