The Cut Above

Susan DeVore set a goal for herself every year during her 19 years in Ernst & Young's healthcare practice: Find an account and grow it $5 million to $10 million a year. Each year, she accomplished that goal.

Her ability to go to clients as an account leader and establish long-term relationships for a wide variety of E&Y services quickly made her a rising star. DeVore made partner in 1992 and upped her own ante. "Now, every year I wanted two or three accounts of that magnitude," she remembers. So she got them.

"I loved doing client work and helping them solve business problems," she states simply.

During her two decades in consulting, DeVore has watched the healthcare practice, then the central practice at E&Y, attract new clients and spawn new practices within the firm. "We've evolved from zero to a $3 billion company and all the things that go with that. I've seen the focus change from geographic to industry to service line," she says.

Today DeVore continues her mission as vice president and sector leader for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's High-Growth Middle Market practice, where she's charged with the strategy, direction, and operating results of the 600-consultant practice.

Senior executives at CGEY expect DeVore's client-building acumen to help it tap into the 6,000 potential clients that are considered middle-market companies.

"The things that impressed me the most were her intelligence and work ethic," says partner Terry Linn, who hired DeVore. "She finished her undergraduate work in three years while working part-time at Mercy (Mercy Hospital in Charlotte, NC), and had a perfect 4.0. She finished early so she could get on with her life and get to work and succeed. Her drive to succeed is remarkable even in our culture."

DeVore credits her success to Linn; to her father, who led his own healthcare consulting business; to legacy E&Y chairman Phil Laskaway; and to then-CEO Dale Wartluft. Laskaway and Wartluft "gave me my first opportunity to sit on an executive committee of E&Y. They gave me a chance," she says. This, after DeVore took a break from E&Y full-time and for almost four years while she began raising three children, and then returned to the firm.

"She thrives in a consulting environment, helping clients and developing people, and needs the positive feedback that comes from the professional satisfaction inherent in her work," Linn adds. "She did indeed come back, and has been enormously successful in pursuing what truly makes her happy: her sense of accomplishment in helping others."

DeVore is also well known for her ability to inspire her team. "I'm a strong believer in inspiring the people around you, having fun, growing them, and watching them succeed and take your place."

Looking ahead, DeVore plans to continue upward, as she continues to motivate those around her. "I would like to go anywhere in CGEY next that would impact any group of people. The more people I have an impact on, I also get that in return from them."

Mark Fulford

Title: Customer leader

Age: 40

Years as a consultant: 11

Standing behind a pharmacy counter in the mid-1980s, counting out prescription pills by fives, Mark Fulford knew there had to be more to life. His disillusionment with the practice of pharmacy led him back to graduate school, where he found his muse.

"The first course I was taking was Organizational Behavior," Fulford recalls. "The clouds broke open, and the sun shone down on my desk. That's it! That's what I want to do."

Fulford's instincts were right. After earning his master's degree and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and HR management, several years as an independent consultant, and a stint in academia, he now heads DeCotiisErhard, Inc.'s largest customer account and is poised to take a leadership position in the Colorado Springs-based firm.

Fulford was recruited by DeCotiisErhard in 1998 to handle the firm's largest account, Darden Restaurants, which includes more than 1,100 Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, and Smokey Bones restaurants in North America. The restaurants lacked direction, and needed a clear mission and an employee retention program — to name a few obstacles.

DeCotiisErhard's founders helped Darden lay the groundwork for the transformation in 1997, and Fulford was brought in to execute the plan.

Today, Red Lobster has increased revenues at each of its 630 U.S. and 32 Canadian restaurants by $500,000 annually.

Other Darden restaurants are also seeing improvements, executives say. Fulford says that the ability to establish true client relationships is the key to any project's success.

"I've been leading the partnership with Darden for the entire three years. Senior managers there think I'm employed by Darden. That signifies a true relationship, when they start to see you as one of them," Fulford says.

In addition to his customer leadership role, Fulford also handles DeCotiisErhard's internal finance and accounting, a position he volunteered for because of his interest in "the way we look at our bottom line." He also developed and implemented a pricing model for the firm, to provide a more systematic method of pricing services and evaluating the profitability of potential projects.

This can-do attitude gives Fulford high marks from managing partner Tom DeCotiis. "There's a willingness there to do whatever it takes to take care of the customer and go outside the lines," DeCotiis says. DeCotiis plans to step away from day-to-day operations in the next five or six years, and says that Fulford is a strong candidate to lead the firm — a prospect that affirms his feeling about what his muse has been telling him all along. "That's extremely compelling for me."

Rob Frazzini

Title: Global director, eTechnology Integration

Age: 33

Years as a consultant: 10

Seven years ago, Rob Frazzini claims, he didn't even know the term "Big Five." Today, he's one of its youngest partners and fastest movers.

At 33, Frazzini is a partner and global director of Deloitte Consulting's eTechnology Integration practice, a united worldwide group of hardcore technology consultants.

Since joining Deloitte in 1996, Frazzini has been charged with uniting a handful of fragmented technology groups within Deloitte, and cultivating a new breed of techie who also has business expertise. The eTI practice aims to cater to the business needs of CIOs by integrating technology to serve its many customer-facing channels.

"We've become true consultants, not technology hired guns," he says. "We're not, 'Give us five technical guys.' We can go do an integration solution for you."

Today, the eTI practice is the second largest technology component of Deloitte Consulting and its fastest growing unit, with more than 2,500 professionals worldwide.

Hard to believe that this was Frazzini's first introduction to the big-name consulting world.

Armed with only a high school diploma and a bulldog attitude, Frazzini started a small technology consulting firm called MIS in Albuquerque, NM, in the late 1980s. The firm developed a software program that managed the public sector's Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs.

In the early '90s, Frazzini partnered with Deloitte Consulting on a couple of engagements using his WIC software program. In 1996, Deloitte acquired the software, and Frazzini with it. "I'm kind of a unique breed for them to even be interested in me," he admits.

Deloitte Partner John Gibbons remembers his first interviews with Frazzini and describes him as "cocky," but Gibbons quickly learned that Frazzini had the skills to back it up.

"When you look at Rob, you realize right away that he's got tons of talent, and I never confuse education with talent. Sometimes I think that in our business we do that," he says. "You can't motivate people. So if you find someone who wants to knock down walls and has an extreme, intense desire to succeed, you hire those people because they always do well."

So what's next for Frazzini? Right now, his eTI practice is "right in the center of the solar system" where channels are converging and sharing information is king. Still, Frazzini sees his own future as wide open. "I'm a little kid. I have no idea where I'm going. My passion is growing and driving businesses."

"I think that Rob could run Deloitte Consulting someday, or if we decided to have a tech spin-off, he could run that," Gibbons says. "He's a natural leader."

Hugh Courtney

Title: Associate principal, Global Strategy Practice

Age: 38

Years as a consultant: 8

Hugh Courtney is a world-class economist at heart. As an economics professor at George Washington University in the District of Columbia in the early 1990s, and a doctoral candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Courtney dreamed of having a profound impact on the economy. But in reality, economists "had to pay their dues for a long time — 10 to 12 years — before they had access to the powers that be," he recalls.

Courtney decided that consulting would allow him to have a tangible impact more quickly. So in 1993, he joined McKinsey & Company and saw his contributions make an instant impact.

As a first-year associate, he helped redesign an electric power company with a new organizational structure and operational portfolio. "Eight years later, they're a real market leader." That experience sealed Courtney's fate.

Today, Courtney is McKinsey's guru on strategy under uncertainty and strategy in oligopoly markets. His research has impacted hundreds of McKinsey clients, and his coalition of believers has Courtney poised for partnership.

Courtney is part of a unique breed of McKinsey consultant on the "expert consulting track," devoting half of his time to client work and half to research. Joining the expert track was considered a bold move eight years ago, because "there wasn't much experience in successful advancement in that track," Courtney recalls. But he took the risk in order to continue researching.

At McKinsey, Courtney has built a strong group of backers for his ideas, beginning in 1994 with his strategy initiative theory, which led to new approaches in thinking about how McKinsey does business-unit strategy. "Those ideas were picked up by hundreds of client service engagements," Courtney says. That research led to a Harvard Business Review article in 1997 that he co-authored with colleagues Patrick Viguerie and Jane Kirkland. This, in turn, became the basis for Courtney's first book, 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World, which hit the booksellers in October.

"It's the notion that we should stop treating uncertainty as all or nothing," Courtney says. "20/20 foresight doesn't mean perfect vision, but it is the best that humans can do." Foresight is about learning to separate what can be known from what can't, and then using that residual uncertainty to tailor every aspect of the decision-making process, he adds.

Courtney plans to author a second book in the next few years — on applying game theory to business strategy. "The first book was our initial volley in the effort to raise the level of thinking. We're not there yet. There's so much more to be done."