BearingPoint's John Dulle may be in Iraq for the money, but cash marks the least important part of his compensation. Dulle leads his firm's Iraqi currency exchange work, which has moved the country from two currencies, the Swiss dinar and the Saddam dinar, to a single currency. His team works closely with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to drive and sustain Iraq's economic reform while supporting Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) activities and policies designed to foster a competitive private sector.
"The work has a huge impact on the people of Iraq," says Dulle from Amman, Jordan, during a rare breather from his yearlong assignment in Iraq. "Moving the country to one currency goes a long way toward building economic stability and uniting the country. We're working with the Iraqi people on a daily basis. They have the capabilities and the hunger, but they lack the tools. We teach them how to use the tools so that they can do it on their own. It's not often that you get to work at this level."
Dulle and his team planned and managed the movement of more than 2 billion banknotes representing more than 6 trillion Iraqi dinars. Their distribution plans guided the delivery of that currency from warehouses located throughout the country to 245 currency exchange banks.
In addition to his work on the currency exchange, Dulle led a project that supported the transition of the United Nations' Oil for Food Program to the CPA earlier this year. He is also responsible for housing, security, transportation, and communications for BearingPoint's entire Iraq operation.
Yet it is the currency project, with its multiple layers of client interaction, thorny complexity, and promise it holds for a bruised population, that represents Dulle's notion of his archetypal consulting assignment. He appears well suited to fulfill his ideal engagement, which BearingPoint's Darwin Johnson says Dulle accepted immediately upon receiving the call.
"John is fearless," says Johnson, who leads BearingPoint's multinational agencies group, the segment of the firm's public services practice with which Dulle and his team work. "That doesn't mean that he takes unnecessary chances. He doesn't. But once he's decided on a course of action that he thinks is prudent, he proceeds fearlessly, even given the inherent risks of working in an environment like Iraq."
Johnson also values Dulle's analytical prowess. "He has the focus, discipline, and ability to disaggregate a complex task into its many interrelated parts, develop a solution, and then make whatever personal commitment is required to see that the task is successfully completed," Johnson explains.
That quality is evident as soon as Dulle describes the fulfilling payoff of working with a team in a country still torn by war and a brutal dictatorship.
"First," he begins, "I want to break the word 'team' into a few components." One component is the BearingPoint-client team, which has included multiple layers of clients in Iraq. Another component is the team dynamic with the Iraqi people his work touches. A third dynamic includes his relationship with the consultants he has spent almost every moment with during the past 12 months. Dulle makes it plain that every aspect of his team's current work is more intense, by many orders of magnitude, than any other engagement.
"The hours are longer, the pressures are greater, the stakes are much, much higher," he says. "But that pressure really builds diamonds, and you see the brilliance of your teammates — on the client side, with the Iraqi people, and among your colleagues — on a daily basis. The team that conducted the delivery with me has given 150 percent every single day, seven days a week."
The skills he values most in his consulting teammates are simple ones. "Probably the most important quality is the ability to listen," Dulle notes. "Then, to think. Then, to write. Those skills have to be wrapped around a tremendous amount of flexibility."
To sharpen his own consulting capabilities, Dulle keeps current on his Project Management Institute literature and reads as much as possible on change management practices. "If you treat each client engagement as a project, then you know you can get to a definite outcome for your client," he explains. "You can also monitor whether you're giving your client 110 percent every day." The change-management insights reflect what he views as his profession's core purpose: helping people move from one point to another point.
Dulle is also adept at moving the discussion away from his own talents to a point he's much more comfortable with. "Anything I've accomplished is purely a result of the team that I worked with, both on the client side and our side," he adds, noting that the clients have made the recent work fulfilling, regardless of the extreme pressure. "Besides," he says, "the greater the pressure and risks, the greater the rewards. And I don't mean that monetarily." — E.K.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.