Diane Davies of Deloitte

Deloitte had been making a special effort to attract and retain top women consultants for 10 years when the company, in December 2003, asked Diane Davies, principal, to head up the effort nationally. The program, although initially successful, had stumbled during the economic turndown. "We started seeing an increase in the number of women leaving the firm," notes Davies.

Given her passion for mentoring, Davies proved to be the right person for the task. In the short time she has headed the initiative, she has built a robust professional development program to groom strong women leaders and fill the pipeline. She does so by recruiting senior management across the practice for mentoring, coaching, and succession planning. "Our Women"s Initiative continues to be an engine for innovative professional development and retention programs that benefit not just our women, but all of our people," she says. The women's program, however, is only part of what Davies does at Deloitte. She also leads Deloitte's health plan practice on the West Coast. In this effort, she gets directly involved with the management teams at many of the West Coast's leading health insurance plans, helping them to develop corporate strategy and improve business unit operations.

Still, the best part of her job at Deloitte is how it "allows me to be an entrepreneur, but do it in a large company. This means that I can sell the work I like to do and am passionate about and have the support infrastructure behind me," says Davies. This allows her to sell an idea requiring an esoteric skill fully confident that somewhere within Deloitte the skill is available.