Top 25 Consultants 2005 - Mark Gottfredson, Bain & Company

Mark Gottfredson, partner and cohead of Bain & Co.'s capabilities sourcing practice, missed the recent wrenching downturn in the consulting industry. A 22-year veteran at Bain, Gottfredson took an extended leave, from 2000 to 2003, to work for his church in Japan. When he returned to the U.S., the consulting industry was already beginning to recover, and Gottfredson soon found himself smack in the middle of one of the industry's hottest areas: global capabilities sourcing.

"I'm grateful that Bain let me work for the Church in Japan. It was an opportunity for me to contribute to society, to give something back," Gottfredson says. Although his timing couldn't have been better, "I had nothing to do with it. I'm not a market timer. That was when the Church asked me to do it."Coming back to global capabilities sourcing, a controversial issue, proved interesting, to say the least. "Yes, it comes up at parties and leads to interesting discussions," says Gottfredson, who is today counted among the profession's foremost global sourcing experts. He makes a point that what he does is global capabilities sourcing, not necessarily outsourcing. "Everything a company does can be done by somebody else. It becomes a question of deciding what you want to do and what to give others to do," he explains. Having others do it for you does not necessarily mean it is going offshore, although often it does.

Like it or not, however, the issues of global capabilities sourcing and offshore outsourcing are now big business for the consulting marketplace. "We're seeing a major seismic shift in terms of global sourcing," says Gottfredson. Fueled by the economics of offshore sourcing and the telecommunications revolution that lets companies send almost any work someplace else to be done, "global sourcing is a trend that cannot be stopped," he notes.The most difficult part of being a consultant, Gottfredson believes, is not wrestling with controversial issues such as outsourcing but balancing work and personal life. Since every good consultant easily has more work to do each day than can fit in 24 hours, there is no question that "everybody has to draw lines," he concludes.