Booz Allen Hamilton

During World War I, Booz was drafted as a private but moved quickly through the ranks by performing personnel work and helping the Army reorganize its bureaus' business methods. Booz left the service in March 1919 as a major in the Inspector General's Office and returned to Chicago to start a new firm, Edwin G. Booz, Business Engineering Service. One of Booz's first clients after the war was Sewell Avery of the State Bank & Trust Company of Evanston, Illinois, who helped Booz get a loan for his new venture. In return, Booz conducted a bank survey for Avery. During the early 1920s, Booz's client list grew to include Harris Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago, the Walgreen Company, and Booz's alma mater, Northwestern University. In 1924, Booz changed the name of his firm to Business Surveys, to more accurately reflect his firm's focus: business surveys and subsequent analysis and recommendations. Unlike other early 'efficiency-engineering' consulting firms, Booz adopted a personnel-oriented, applied-psychology approach that included interviewing employees as part of the process of studying the organizational structures of companies. In 1925, Booz hired his first permanent, full-time assistant, George Fry, another Northwestern alumnus. That year, Business Surveys began working for U.S. Gypsum Company (then under the direction of Sewell Avery), which remained a staple client throughout the decade. Other Business Surveys clients during the latter half of the 1920s included the Chicago Tribune, Hart Schaffner & Marx, The Chicago Association of Commerce, Eversharp, Inc., Stock Yards National Bank, and Chicago Daily News publisher Walter Strong, who agreed on Booz's recommendation to build a newspaper office across the river from the Civic Opera House. In 1929, Booz moved his own office into the new Chicago Daily News Building and hired a third consultant, James L. Allen, who had just graduated from Northwestern. By 1931, Avery was back on Business Surveys' client list, this time as chairperson of Montgomery Ward, which was losing sales to the new retail operations of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Booz took an office just down the hall from Avery, where he worked full-time and pioneered the 'multi-vector' executive appraisal method, which used cross-checking independent criteria in evaluating and hiring managers. By 1936, Booz had helped push Montgomery Ward back in the black. Informing the company that Avery had been its central problem, Booz resigned from the assignment and returned to his firm's office, where Allen had recently resigned and Booz Surveys itself was in need of organization. By February of that year, Booz had persuaded Allen to return and had hired another consultant, Carl Hamilton. The firm then became a partnership and adopted a new name: Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton. The following year, the firm moved into the new Field Building in Chicago, where it would remain for the next 44 years before relocating its headquarters to New York City and taking more modern space for its Chicago operations. By the late 1930s, the firm's marketing brochure was promising 'independence that enables us to say plainly from the outside what cannot always be said safely from within.' The firm was also providing executive recruiting services for its clients, which during the late 1930s included the Chicago Title and Trust Company, the University of Chicago, General Mills, and the Washington Post. During this period, Booz personally conducted the first-ever study of a nationwide institution, the American National Red Cross, which propelled the firm into institutional consulting. Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton entered the 1940s with a significant midwestern client base and a newly established New York branch office. In 1940, the firm expanded into military consulting, when U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, former publisher of the Chicago Daily News, hired the company to assess the Navy's preparedness for a major war and to evaluate the Navy's sh