By Eric Krell
Unlike other consultants who leave the profession, former Deloitte Consulting partner Peter Giulioni found his decision to enter higher education was a no-brainer. "I have the coolest job in the world," says Giulioni, the career resource center director for the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. "And the transition was pretty doggone easy."
Giulioni's final years as a Los Angeles-based consultant were anything but. A human capital expert who helped build the firm's change management practice, he was part of the senior group that attempted to purchase Deloitte & Touche's consulting practice in 2001 and 2002. He then served on the change leadership team that managed the subsequent (and fairly contentious) reorganization, which culminated in a number of early retirements—including his own. "It was a great move at that point in my life," says Giulioni who was 52 when he left in 2004.
He intended to restart a private consulting practice that he had placed on hold after becoming a Deloitte partner in the mid-1990s. Prior to joining Deloitte, initially as an independent contractor providing change management expertise on large enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementations, Giulioni was an organizational design pioneer in the 1980s. Giulioni also wanted to teach, so he reached out to USC, where he served as the contact partner between Deloitte's Los Angeles office. He recruited from the business school and also judged business case competitions there.
The dean of the business school was glad Giulioni called. The business school had suffered a drop in the BusinessWeek rankings, which identified the school's career resource center as an issue. The dean asked him to identify process improvements and staff up the career resource center. "I thought, 'Oh, that's going to take six months,'" he recalls. "Well, that was in October 2004, and I'm still here, and having a ball. I get to hang out with smart-as-a-whip, Type-A 28-year-olds. It's kind of like being at [Deloitte] and mentoring new senior consultants, but I'm mentoring 200 to 300 instead of 20."
One of his past students, Tricia Kennedy, recalls hearing about Giulioni when she was deciding between Marshall and other business schools. "I heard that he recently came from the business world and in just a couple of years had attracted a record number of companies to campus for interviews," she recalls.
Kennedy enrolled at Marshall and credits Giulioni with providing "honest and straightforward advice about the consulting industry and the lifestyle inherent to it, as well as an insider's knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of various firms and how a student's personality might best fit with the various cultures of different firms."
Giulioni frequently leafs through his Rolodex to contact former colleagues on behalf of students, like Kennedy, who is now a senior consultant with Hitachi Consulting. "When I get them on the phone, without exception they'll say, 'How did you do it? You sound so relaxed.' And their next comment is, 'That's exactly what I want to do.'"
Giulioni says he's lost weight and exercises more since leaving consulting. Yet, he's also found a way to quench his consulting thirst. "I'm a Type A personality, as most consultants are," he notes. The trick to finding a fulfilling pursuit outside of consulting, he says, is "finding something with lots of challenges that involves doing good work with great people and leaving an imprint on their lives…
"My compensation is significantly lower than it was as a partner at a top-tier firm, but the non-monetary rewards of my role are at or above the level of anything else I've experienced in my previous life."
If you know a former consultant pursuing a passion or unique endeavor, please e-mail your suggestion to customercare@alm.com .
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