Around the World in 365 Days
Imagine working for an organization in Nepal with the unusual motto "Promote the carpet, save the children."
Or sitting in a restaurant in East Timor with the leader of the student independence movement whose goal was to make East Timor an independent country. Or helping the Peace Corps develop a rural credit union for a community in Lithuania.
Most consultants wouldn't confront such challenges during their entire careers. Jason Hecker, 27, an interactive strategist in Organic's Chicago office, experienced these and more in one year.
In June 1998, Hecker set off on a yearlong trip around the world. Although he quit his job with CSC Management Consultants, he didn't leave the profession. He lent his consulting brain to three development organizations for six months. "I wanted to do it on three different continents to get to know three different places in greater depth," says Hecker, who devoted two months to each.
His consulting endeavors began in Asia, where, after touring for four months, he ended up in Nepal, working for a government-sponsored group that was fighting child labor. "Nepal is the third poorest country in the world, and the carpet industry is its largest export. It came out in the news in Germany that there was child labor, and it destroyed the industry." To revive it, the government started the organization with the paradoxical mission.
Next stop: a rural village in Kenya that had no electricity, running water, or telephone. Here, Hecker worked for a San Francisco–based group that educated local residents on AIDS prevention.
From Kenya, Hecker went to Tanzania, hitchhiked through Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia, and took a bus to South Africa. Throughout most of his trip, he had planned to wind up in Turkey to look for his third organization. When he got to Cape Town, though, he heard that the Kurdish separatists had renewed their bombing in Turkey's capital, Istanbul. Turkey was out; Estonia was in.
But Hecker never set foot there either. The closest he got was Latvia, where his frequent flier miles were accepted. And, then he got distracted. "I wound up meeting some American Latvians, who were working for a development organization," says Hecker, who wanted to find an established group he could learn from. "So I put together my resume and started meeting with organizations about what their goals were."
The one he found was the Open Society Foundation, which was developing a business plan for the first career center in Lithuania. "I figured I didn't know any more about Lithuania than I did about Latvia than I did about Estonia," Hecker recalls. So off the consultant went.
The Resident Court Jester
Julie Brej's parents are amused at what kind of person their daughter has become.
"As a kid, I was so shy that my parents thought I was mentally off," says Brej, 35, a partner at Diamond Technology Partners who works in Chicago. "I would hide behind furniture and quiver when people came over. They wanted me to start school with my younger sister because they didn't think I would be able to make it on my own."
Today, Brej gets up in front of huge groups of people for one of her favorite pastimes — improvisational comedy. And, she even has a reputation at Diamond for being the company court jester. "Where there is some levity required, I'm one of about six people they'll call upon," says Brej. She is a graduate of the Players Workshop of the Second City Improvisational Theater, a Saturday Night breeding ground whose alumni include Shelley Long and Bill Murray.
Brej is even getting some of her coworkers into the act — literally. At last summer's company talent show, she dragged some of her fellow associates onstage for a skit.
Improv is an interesting avocation for someone in consulting, says Brej, who holds a master's degree from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. The core skills used in improv — being able to think on your feet, be collaborative, be spontaneous and adaptive — are definitely used in her full-time job. "There are also certain things that are scene killers, just as at client meetings there are things that can stop a meeting dead," says Brej, who also cofounded The 44th Floor, an improvisational theater troupe in Chicago.
"In improv, until you know the people you are working with, you should resist saying, 'No.' The other person doesn't know how to respond. It's the same thing in a professional situation. You have to have a can-do attitude."
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