Editor's Note: The Eye of the Storm

Still cocooned within the ranks of 30-somethings, I can't claim to have ever been counted among the flower children of the 1960s. But, provided a little leeway in the interest of new insights, or maybe just a snicker or two, I think you can gain a sense of the post-flower child experience by observing the throngs of dot-com revolutionaries now looking for the counterculture's escape hatch.
To think that nine months ago we were still reading stories about MBA students dropping out of top B-schools to join what they dubbed the Dot-Com Revolution. Well, it's back-to-school time for these deflowered children of the Web, and the three Rs have given way to the three Ss, or skills to the third power.
No profession is better prepared to deliver the new skill-building curriculum than consulting. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that consulting's expansive skill-building opportunities will alone supply to the profession the muscle needed to emerge victorious from the Talent Wars' next big battle.
As the participants of Consulting's inaugural Human Capital Roundtable reveal in this issue, the profession's next talent battle will not be waged against an army of fledgling dot-com companies, but against the Web itself, and the X-ray powers it now bestows upon every consultant who has ever pondered opportunities beyond the four walls of his or her firm.
According to our roundtable attendees, it's a battle that will be fought with the rewards of greater individual empowerment and career choices — choices made visible by the very X-ray powers that now illuminate outside opportunities.
It was within this escalating fray that Booz-Allen early last year fired an impressive opening salvo, when it tweaked its staffing strategy to weigh individual career development needs more heavily than client needs. As this issue's Special Talent Feature reveals, the expected outcome of Booz's new approach is being calculated using a cryptic formula that balances individual needs with client requirements. For its part, the firm is now striving to meet 40 percent of its consultants' "first choice" engagement preferences, a percentage other firms are now likely to study closely as they look to maximize the career options of their own consultants.
If perhaps you are not interested in studying the Talent Wars' advanced algorithms, we invite you to escape within the pages of some of our more pacific features. Of course, if you're really peace-loving, you'll want to stay clear of our embattled diarist Rayne Maker, late of Armadillo & Pounce, now of The Armadillo Group — at least for today. It would appear that A&P/TAG could use a career-development staffing formula of its own.
Now, as dot-com refugees return to school singing their bell-bottom blues, the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars. It's the age of opportunity for a profession prepared to bare its skill-building options before a world of talent — a world where choice and independence rule.