Mark Gerencser, senior vice president at McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen Hamilton, insists that “serving clients really is my passion,” although you couldn’t be faulted, judging from his résumé, if you thought that sitting in committee meetings was his true calling.
No doubt the turnaround Salil Parekh, executive chairman, Capgemini India, engineered in his previous position as CEO of Capgemini North America was impressive. With Parekh at the helm, the operation went from a $100 million loss in 2004 to a break-even business in 2005, and recorded a $100 million profit in 2006. “We had the benefit of an improving economy,” he notes, but cost-cutting and the refocusing of the operation’s efforts were what made it possible.
David Schuette tried to leave his sales job at IBM on several occasions, but each time his manager refused to accept his resignation. His manager would tell him that the Dallas Cowboys would never trade their back-up quarterback, a role he felt Schuette fit perfectly. Then a funny thing happened. The Cowboys did trade their back-up quarterback and Schuette clipped the headline, fired it off to his manager along with his latest resignation letter, and left on a path that eventually took him to where he is today, chief strategy officer at BusinessEdge Solutions.
Tamra Chandler, managing vice president of global solutions and people at Hitachi Consulting, started her professional life as an engineer at Boeing, but when she got to consulting she quickly was attracted to the people side of the business. For a people person like Chandler, Dallas-based Hitachi Consulting, a product of six consulting firms merged together, offered an irresistible challenge of building a unified culture. “Here were a bunch of great people who came from different places. I saw this as a great opportunity,” she says.
Shahzad Bashir, vice president for legal operational consulting at Huron Consulting Group, just might have some issues separating business life from his personal life - even at an NBA playoff game. Bashir had his BlackBerry on and handled e-mails throughout Game 7 between the Houston Rockets and Utah Jazz. “Years ago I realized I could never really balance personal and professional life.” At best, he concludes, “you have to manage the imbalance.”
During the 1990s M&A fell out of favor, when books like Barbarians at the Gate by Brian Burrough and John Helyar, which chronicled the RJR-Nabisco merger, were hitting the best-seller lists.
In 2000, Forrester Research anointed Sapient the top e-business consultancy. Then the dot-com mania collapsed. “So we were number one in a defunct category,” recalls Alan Herrick, president and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Sapient. The firm then set about re-inventing itself in a second act. Last year, Sapient posted a 29 percent increase in annual revenue, and today, more than half of its 5,000 people are based in India.
How Business Intelligence is Helping Global 2000 Companies Gain New Visibility into Their Data
Throughout the 1990s, large enterprises spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build data warehouses, data marts, OLAP (online analytical processing) capabilities, ad hoc query and reporting, data mining, and more. Clients engaged consulting firms repeatedly for everything from building the data warehouse to populating it to maintaining it. They would do enterprise data modeling, data cleansing, data normalization, and more.
No one doubts that the technology mantra known as Software as a Service will bring forth enormous opportunities for the consulting world's extended family. The only question is whose cousin will be on the menu?
It’s no secret that IBM and EMC have become one of the tech sector’s most combative rivalries. What is not well known is that consultants are now throwing the hardest punches.
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