Jerry Greenberg of Sapient

When the dot-com business began self-destructing in 2001, Sapient's future hung in the balance. "When things got bad, we had two choices," recalls Jerry Greenberg, who, with co-CEO Stuart Moore, cofounded the business and IT consulting firm 14 years ago with their life savings. "One, we could just have a rough time and weather it out, or two, we could be more aggressive and change our fundamental model so that when the world became better, we'd be better positioned."

Most of the young companies in the Internet solutions business chose the first approach. You know what happened to them. Greenberg and Moore, however, took the alternate route. The results? In 2003, the $250 million consulting firm returned to profitability and saw its first quarter revenues jump 30 percent over the same period last year.

Ask Greenberg what differentiates Sapient from its competitors — and why it was able to survive the dot-com collapse — and he'll probably start with the company's ability to reinvent itself. Consider that Sapient started out in the client-server business; caught the e-business wave early and emerged as a leader there; and then built upon an its already existing presence in India to create what Greenberg calls a global distributed delivery (GDD) capability. That capability, he says, enables the company to reduce costs and increase value to the extent that its 2004 client satisfaction scores were the highest in its history. It has also brought Sapient into the outsourcing business on a selective basis.