A New Name for a Familiar Face: Renaming Athena Management Consulting
What's in a name? For our Management Consulting team, it's much more than a unifying force. It's the intersection of high-level strategy and hands-on execution that defines their work.
My colleague recently wrote about the impact of AI in the workplaceBlog post preview: Why You Should Care About AI. AI might feel like a move away from people, but for us, it amplifies human-centered creativity and productivity.; while combing through her literature review of articles about how consulting firms need to evolve the way they work with clients in response to AI, some familiar themes emerged. Organizations should pivot to high-level strategy but be willing to spearhead hands-on execution, help them utilize technology to scale those strategies, and build collaborative relationships to tackle complex organizational problems. These ideas weren't new to us—it was how we'd always operated.
Capturing Capabilities
Earlier this year, I realized that my department was developing an identity crisis. We were the Project Management team, a concept that was easy to understand. Talking to a new client or meeting a colleague at a networking event, it was simple enough to say, “In my department we are project managers.”
But then the inevitable follow up question, some variant of “Tell me more about that,” led to an expanding list of how this practice group helps our clients: Identifying gaps in strategy and process, knocking down silos, crafting realistic plans to achieve goals, bringing solutions to life, and winning employee buy-in to transformational changes. We do that across our client industries, with tailored support for their sales, government affairs, corporate communications, customer experience, and technology organizations.
I was engaged in this very conversation at a recent conference and the person I was talking to said, “That sounds like a lot more than project management.” It was this exact insight that was beginning to dawn on us.
Clear and Simple
This solidified for me the realization that “Project Management” didn't capture the wide range of ways in which we partner with clients. With intern hiring season approaching, we were determined to choose a new name that would better reflect our capabilities, differentiate us from other teams at Athena, and convey our versatility to our clients. My team leaders and I sequestered ourselves in the conference room with sticky notes, a whiteboard, and a no-bad-ideas creative mindset.
After several rounds, we were at an impasse. Our options felt over-engineered and too wordy. Even ChatGPT was frustrated with us. The “a-ha” moment came as it often does, when our CEO Maggy Wilkinson stopped in, looked around at the cluttered whiteboards, scribbled notes, and crossed-off ideas, and said, “I've always thought of your department as Management Consulting.”
Clear, simple, and classic. That was it.
Our Product is Partnership
Management Consulting is more reflective of how we partner with our clients to develop, validate, and execute novel business strategies. The name expresses how we drive change management by embedding ourselves in our client teams to help them identify and communicate with stakeholders, keep their projects on track, and foster visibility across their business.
Our new name also helps us better convey our value to clients amid the transformational changes brought by AI. As companies start to adopt automated solutions for day-to-day project management tasks, what they need most is the kind of hands-on strategic partnership our team provides from our principals all the way down to our junior consultants.
As we like to say at Athena, our product is partnership.