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McKinsey tops the IT anthem charts

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 Mar 2002 14:30 GMT

What happens when top management at a normally sensible company decide they want a corporate sound? They draft in professional musicians to produce an inspirational song that will rouse the troops. The result is always dire, and usually quickly buried. But these musical monstrosities are being preserved for all to hear at ZDNet UK.

"Corporate anthems" were popularised last year by programmer Chris Raettig, who created a vastly successful page to celebrate this little-appreciated musical genre. Among the greatest hits were KPMG's Our vision of global strategy, which inspired several home remixes and a Nokia ring-tone.

The story was taken up by the mainstream media, and Raettig quickly found that the demands of Corporate Anthems were too great for his own site, and took the music files offline, although the original page remains here.

Now the chart has been resurrected and, since all the anthems were actually from tech companies, been renamed "IT Anthems". The site has been launched with Raettig's favourite, an upbeat number from McKinsey Knowledge Center (McKC). It will be updated according to the popularity of the songs; there are unconfirmed reports of corporate anthems for Andersen Consulting, Enron and other companies in the public eye.

Among the more interesting songs is the Sun-Netscape entry. "It's not rap, and it's not hip-hop," said a radio producer who asked not to be named. "It has a dance backbeat and bad rhyming. They are the African-American version of Bros aren't they?"

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