Editor's Note: The Soul of a Profession

I'm not sure who put the thought into words first, and in what century it may have originally been done, but the adage "that which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" may be the latest de facto motto of the consulting profession.
Whether it's McKinsey battling dot-com start-ups hungry for people, or a Big Five consultancy splitting apart to escape the government's regulatory factions, some of the profession's most formidable players are under siege. It's enough to make you yearn for the Go-Go Eighties, when the lines between business strategy and technology implementation seldom if ever blurred and the label strategist was used only sparingly — reserved for those who stuck to calculating formulas of competitive advantage, rather than broadband capacity.
But consulting's loyal minions can take heart: The profession has recently gained some pounds, and it's mostly muscle. This March, when a market correction led to the April collapse of many dot-com stocks, an array of new workforce initiatives were already underway within the consulting sector, spurred in response to a rising tide of consulting talent flowing freely into the once high-flying dot-coms. Now, as the toothless dot-com tigers nurse their lagging stock prices, the consulting profession is busy breaking ground on an array of initiatives that promise to multiply consulting's career options, as they enhance its reward structures. Such developments are powerful medicine for a workforce that often toils nights and weekends and eats more than its share of airline food.
To better underscore these developments, in this issue of Consulting we share with you the stories of four consultants who, sensing their careers adrift, chose not to abandon the profession, but instead to discover new career paths inside consulting. In our feature, entitled "Career, Interrupted," we hope you'll find a few morsels of career-building wisdom to reflect on and, perhaps, to help you tap into your own new vein of career opportunity. If the profession has learned anything from the ongoing war for talent, it's that its best people also have private lives and family responsibilities. To keep them, the profession will need to refrain from making "forfeiting lifestyle" a prerequisite for career advancement.
And as if the talent wars weren't enough to contend with, there's always "The Much Talked About, Often Disparaged, but Increasingly Evident ASP Threat," or so our story bearing the elongated headline explains. In our article, we take a look at the emerging school of players known as application services providers (ASPs), the new breed of company that for a fixed monthly fee will gladly take over your client's applications deployment. All right, so what happens to those consultants who have long toiled in the applications consulting sector?
As we look for answers, we invite your feedback and raise a more pointed question: How do you protect the soul of a profession when its body is ever changing around it?
Our prescription this issue is an excerpt from The Trusted Advisor, a new treatise authored by three of the consulting world's foremost pundits.
While it may not be a vaccine, it's without a doubt chicken soup for the profession's soul.