Seven Leaders on the Front Line

With significant breadth of experience in a number of industries on a global scale, the new managing partner and CEO of Andersen Consulting is well-suited to create a bold future for the firm and its clients. Or so reads a press announcement released by the consultancy last November when Joe Forehand emerged from Andersen's vast reservoir of management talent to become the firm's new leader.
What cannot be denied is that this up-and-comer is today facing the greatest challenge of his 27-year consulting career. His predecessor, George Shaheen, long credited as one of the "true leaders" of the consulting marketplace, exited the profession last September to strike IPO gold as CEO of Internet start-up WebVan. His abrupt departure left a bitter taste in the mouths of certain Andersen partners who had put their own notions of dot-com riches on hold to complete business at hand. That business now includes finalizing the arbitration that will allow the firm to split off from its sibling, Arthur Andersen, and the difficult migration of tens of thousands of Andersen consultants away from giant enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects to new smaller-scale e-business assignments.
Clearly, if ever there was a time Andersen required strong leadership, it's now. And few can deny that 51-year-old Forehand appears qualified. All told, his leadership, experience covers 11 of the 16 industry segments Andersen serves. Before being named CEO, he was the managing partner of a unit responsible for 25 percent of the firm's revenues.
Still, Forehand's leadership task is enormous.  Exactly a year after Forbes dubbed Andersen's Shaheen the business world's "Digital Messiah," consulting pundits are left to wonder whether the ascension of Joe Forehand marks the Second Coming or, perhaps, a detour on Andersen's road to future riches.

Cathy Benko: Deloitte Consulting

When Cathy Benko is asked to sum up her home and professional life these days, you could easily mistake her for a venture capitalist.
"We've got a diversified portfolio," explains Benko, whose choice of words may seem odd anywhere else but in Silicon Valley — the geography she calls home, and where her career and family converge into a highly-caffeinated yet rewarding lifestyle.
No matter what you call it, there's no question that Benko's work/life portfolio has grown substantially over the last year. Twelve months after giving birth to daughter Elyssa, the 41-year-old mother of two is busy wiring Deloitte Consulting's central nervous system to better answer the demands of the Internet economy. It's a challenge she now relishes, and one colleagues say is being met at a speed Deloitte's Big Five rivals have yet to match.
Seven months after Benko was named the firm's first global e-business practice leader, Deloitte's one-time fragmented e-business vision is dead, replaced by a leadership perspective that conjures up collective and combined benefits just as it makes naysayers disappear. This year, Deloitte expects its e-business revenues to climb to $1.1 billion, up from $422 million in 1999. What's more, the dedicated e-business head count is expected to grow to 5,300, from the previous 2,400.

What kinds of competitors does Benko lose sleep over? Not Big Five consultancies, or even e-business juggernauts such as Viant and Scient. Instead, Benko says it's the venture capitalists — the determined wealth creators who have given birth to the likes of Viant and Scient and an untold number of yet-to-be-born e-business consultancies.
"The venture firms have critical mass in terms of their portfolios, and it's all about every member of the portfolio or extended enterprise or family benefiting by doing business with another member," explains Benko, who has wasted little time in leveraging Deloitte's own diversified offerings.

Frank Roney: IBM Corp

After years of playing a minor role in IBM Corp.'s vast global services production, IBM's consulting workforce is finally taking center stage as the technology giant makes business consulting the star of its $30 billion global services effort.
Having recently completed one of its largest reorganizations to date, the computer services giant is now poised to do battle inside the consulting arena like never before. And no one consultant is more eager to lead the charge than Frank Roney, a former partner with Price Waterhouse, who this January was named general manager of IBM's newly formed global business innovation services.
"We took our best consultants early last year and asked them to think holistically about the kind of service capability we needed for the e-business world, and this service line is the result of that," says 44-year-old Roney, who adds that IBM's innovation services approach will combine new business designs with industry best practices and IT strategy.

Why is IBM dispersing its consultants throughout its global services organization? Explains Roney: To better respond to a surge in small- to midsize e-business projects with greater time-to-market demands, and to a groundswell of clients who now insist that their e-solutions help grow revenue and not just cut costs.
Roney joined IBM in 1993 to head up the firm's systems integration business, and later became chief of the services organization's global competencies (including consulting and system integration and managed operations). Perhaps known best for its technology consulting capabilities, IBM does not come first to mind for its business consulting prowess — yet that is the fastest growing sector of its services business, says Roney.
As companies increasingly look for an end-to-end service provider — one who can not only work with a CEO to craft a long-reaching, sustainable e-business strategy — IBM's profile will continue a steady rise, or so Roney tells us. Given all of what IBM has already anted up in the high-stakes e-business game, who could doubt him?

John Donahoe: Bain & Co.

The ability to articulate what sets one consultancy apart from another is a useful skill for any consultant. For John Donahoe, Bain & Co.'s new managing
director, it's an art.
According to consultants who have worked closely with 39-year-old Donahoe, a brief discussion with him can help short-circuit any doubts about the firm's future, as well as help squash the high-volume chatter of its aspiring e-business rivals. In Donahoe's world, no matter what the strategic opportunity may be, Bain is the undisputed leader. Venture funding, consulting for equity, private equity placement: It was always Bain who threw the first pitch, explains Donahoe. And whether it's because of the brassy confidence he exudes or due to the power of his thoughts, you struggle to resist the opinions verbalized with his carefully chosen words.
Donahoe first joined the firm's Boston office in 1982 as an associate consultant, after graduating from Dartmouth College. He left Bain to pursue an MBA at Stanford, and later rejoined the firm in 1986 as a consultant in its San Francisco office. Along the way, he played a central role in the establishment of the firm's Private Equity Group, nurtured high-profile clients such as Continental Airlines, and helped launch bainlab, the firm's new e-commerce incubator. So, why does Bain have nothing to fear from the digital world's other hard charging e-consultancies?
Says Donahoe: "The public ownership structure of many of these [e-consultancies] is going to make it very challenging for them to sustain successful businesses, because — like momentum — high valuation is your friend when you're headed upward and a curse when your headed down." For the moment at least, thanks in no small part to the rosy outlook and considerable skills of Donahoe, Bain's Big Mo seems headed in the right direction.

Stephen Jennings: Monitor Company

Stephen Jennings was a high school teacher at Saint Mark's School in Southborough, MA, when he first decided to reinvent himself. "At the beginning of my third year of teaching, I began to imagine myself in my mid-thirties as a tired and not very interesting teacher."
Twelve years later, Jennings is a still-sometimes-tired yet always interesting 39-year-old consultant at Monitor Company.
"Good teachers get excited about the idea of teaching, but I had a hard time with the repetition," says Jennings, who believes consulting is as much about teaching as it is about solving client problems. For him, the change in careers also meant the opportunity to help build Monitor, a consulting and professional services firm known perhaps as much for its academic and conceptual thinking as it is for keeping a low public profile.
Jennings says that today he spends 30 percent of his time running many of the consulting company's core internal activities. The other 70 percent, he says, is spent on client work involving domestic and international projects and relationships in a wide variety of industries, ranging from retailing and financial services to pharmaceuticals and primary metals.
"We are now configuring to support our clients in a number of areas where consultants have not historically done very well, and in so doing create a number of internal opportunities for our people to learn from," says Jennings, who has recently helped architect an internal workforce development scheme wherein consultants rotate through different portions of the firm's business to gain the expertise they need to serve clients better.
According to those familiar with the plan, Monitor's consulting workforce has already learned many good lessons from its ever-devoted teacher.

Andy Zimmerman: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Back in 1975, 21-year-old Andy Zimmerman decided to hold off starting a career in accounting in order to tour with a traveling circus across Europe and Russia.
Today, Zimmerman's accounting career is still on hold as he continues to perform in the center ring. This time, however, his partners are not sword swallowers or agile jugglers, but an array of business-to-business technology vendors that promises to help him propel PricewaterhouseCoopers to a top billing inside the e-consulting arena.
 "We went through the same debates all of the major consultancies have gone through, which involved asking the question, 'Do we create a separate e-business entity, or do we try to embed it in everything we do?' We kind of came down on the side of the latter," says 45-year-old Zimmerman, who was named PwC's global leader of e-business consulting last July. To meet PwC's goal of embedding e-business in every aspect of its undertakings, Zimmerman has been aggressively pursuing alliances with a myriad of electronic technology vendors whose products augment transactions over the Web.

Beginning with I2 technologies, the supply chain giant into which PwC sank $5 million last September, PwC is now contemplating taking equity stakes in as many as a half dozen other b-to-b vendors. Just which partner PwC will likely align itself with next has everything to do with Zimmerman's discriminating eye and $2 billion in PwC funding — an e-business war chest that is now the envy of Big Five and strategy firms alike.
As the former partner-in-charge of Coopers & Lybrand's telecom and media practices, Zimmerman is described by his peers as a person who has never feared taking the road less traveled — it's a path that continues to keep him out front in the center ring.