Paul Gordon / The Boston Consulting Group
Excellence in Leadership
When Paul Gordon joined The Boston Consulting Group more than 30 years ago, he did so because he was looking for four things; the ability to have a real impact at clients, a wide variety of issues to work on, a set of colleagues who were motivated, driven and fun to be around, and—of course—good compensation. "Those four factors are still why I enjoy the job today, he says. "The impact we've had helping clients both as companies and as individual leaders has been very important to me."
Gordon is a Senior Partner & Managing Director at BCG, which he joined in 1985 in the London office before transferring to Chicago in 1988. He is a member of the North American Leadership Team and formerly led the Industrial Goods Practice in the Americas.
He has extensive experience with a variety of clients on issues of business integration, manufacturing and supplier management including: Plant network optimization and consolidation; operational improvement efforts through complexity reduction, de-bottlenecking and factory floor redesign; post merger integration; sales force integration deployment and compensation system design; and, sourcing strategy development. His experience encompasses Industrial Goods, Consumer Durables, Logistics and Transportation.
"Overall, I'm proud to be part of the journey and making my contributions to a firm that has grown to be more than 100 times the size it was when I joined more than 30 years ago," he says. "I doubt there are many places where you can go through that kind of experience. It's a very different place, but with the same values as when I joined."
More recently, while Gordon says "after 33 years in this profession, I tend to think longer than 12 months, but if I had to pick something, it would be around successfully navigating through a number of client relationship transitions while maintaining continuity."
Gordon says he is also proud of his role in both mentoring other newer partners to help them be successful, and also in the firm's North American partner team role to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of BCG's partner promotion, development and evaluation processes while the firm has almost doubled the number of partners.
"I played a lot of team sports growing up and being part of a winning team and not letting my team mates down was always a big source of motivation," Gordon says. "That same outlook applies to me for being part of the BCG team. That and my father's saying the 'if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well'."
As far as being recognized as one of the profession's Top 25 Consultants, Gordon says it's a great honor for this kind of recognition and, in particular, for "the trust of those that nominated me."
Q&A: What's been the biggest factor to your success?
Gordon: "Great mentors along the way have been key. They helped me learn and develop the craft. They taught me the importance of recognizing that clients should be forever, even if they go quiet for a period of time. They taught me the willingness to put the hard issues on the table, but to do it in a respectful, non-arrogant way."
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