Top 25 Consultants 2005 - Douglas Lattner, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Thirty years later, the one-time graduate recruit can't escape his early days. "Hopefully, I'm still not a test case," says Lattner, who without hesitation rattles off the names of more than a half dozen people when asked who were his mentors. Some of those on Lattner's list are retired or no longer living, while others today live in different parts of the world, but all have worked or currently work for Deloitte. It's no doubt a politically safe list, one containing no firm martyrs or sword-wielding renegades.

Lattner's firm, after all, is Deloitte, an enterprise that has never rejected the label "mild-mannered" even when it's been mischievously applied by its more boisterous Big Four rivals. However, such words would hardly sum up the firm's most recent chapter.
Twenty-four months ago, Deloitte's U.S. consulting operations were severely shaken by an 11th-hour decision not to split off from their parent firm. Lattner, who at that time headed the firm's global energy practice, was quickly appointed chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting USA, a leadership role that put him in charge of a business experiencing multiple internal rifts. More than 25 partners would exit the consulting unit in the days ahead, most of them from the U.S. operations. "The move to bring consulting back into the firm and reintegrate it caused great anxiety not only within the consulting part, but within the nonconsulting parts, too," recalls Lattner, who claims that the U.S. consulting business today enjoys a renewed peace, as it reportedly exceeds revenue and earnings expectations. Client turf wars — common at the time of the firm's reintegration — have largely subsided, allowing Deloitte consultants to once again focus on their clients, says Lattner, who appears to have been the correct prescription for the shaken firm.
As one former Deloitte partner puts it: "Lattner has passed his true leadership test."