This began as a strange story. And it got stranger as time passed. Or perhaps we've been away so long that we're just strangers in the strange land of consulting.

In March, the Fast Company Consultant Debunking Unit's near-empty inbox suddenly overflowed with a raft of messages alerting us to a weird phenomenon sweeping across Europe. An email with a link to a KPMG Consulting song from the firm's German corporate Web site was spreading like wildfire through offices around the globe. Recipients in adjoining cubicles began playing the song in stereo.

Intrigued by the song's popularity, we wondered if it was a spoof or if it was a sincere effort to capture the firm's spirit in audio. Perhaps KPMGers were eating their own dog food about 360-degree branding.

We sang. We laughed. We vowed to get to the bottom of things.

As it turns out, the firm commissioned a Frankfurt musician-songwriter to write a perky ditty for the annual consultants' conference in 1999. Consultants from Germany and several other European countries were scheduled to attend. Drawing on his classical and jazz background, the composer, Tom Schlueter, had already written jingles for other companies. His KPMG challenge: to craft the right sound for a firm whose nebulous mission furrows the brows of even the brightest college grads.

"The song needed to balance between being not too hero-like, not too fast, not too smooth -- not extreme in any direction -- to stay true to the KPMG identity," Schlueter says, apologizing for some misplaced prepositions as he translates from German to English.

The resulting jingle's rousing chorus: "KPMG -- a team of power and energy. We go for the gold. Together we hold to a vision of global strategy."

Hendrik Ansink, COO of KPMG Consulting AG in Germany, told Schlueter that his song hit the highest note. "[The lyrics] could have been my own words," wrote Ansink.

We knew that our untrained ears were missing something. To us, the anthem sounded like equal parts Family Ties theme song and Olympian flair. We also thought that it was pretty extreme for KPMG to hire a composer for an internal song. The audience members were consultants after all, not the A&R team at Sony Music. Or were they?

In 1998, consulting firms Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand commissioned a song to celebrate the recent merger that created Pricewaterhouse Coopers. That brainchild emerged from Meint Waterlander, a spokesman for PWC Holland's board of directors. The firm also approached a popular artist to tackle that assignment.

Ruud Mulder, former guitarist for the Dutch funk/disco band Spargo, created "Your World/Our People," a decidedly anti-funk, male-female duet. Waterlander armed Mulder, who speaks impeccable English, with the "Your World" slogan and a couple of English phrases containing corporate-speak like "no more frontiers." Such "bullshit lines," as Mulder describes them, were really "unpoetic."

A particularly precious verse: "We don't sell no dogma. All we've got is skill. Doing each and every client's will."

The goal of the PWC song? "Team spirit," according to a proud Dutch PWC spokesman. The anthem even greeted callers on hold at the PWC switchboard. At the merger party, PWC staffers weren't required to sing the tune, just to listen and marvel. Mulder hired singers to belt out the melody at the party. Thanks to a CD single distributed to 10,000 consultants, spirited employees could sing along years after the event.