Are You on the Right Track? Part 2

Over the past 10 to 15 years, the management consultants at Bain & Co. have tried to break out of that trap, particularly in Bain's San Francisco office. They have shaken up a strict hierarchy, creating more collegial teams so that one person needn't shoulder round-the-clock responsibilities to make sure that things get done right. They have created an in-house culture where consultants can strive for work-life balance without being seen as lazy. And they have started talking with clients about saner ways to get projects done, instead of treating every assignment as a manic cross-country odyssey.

The goal: "We wanted to make this a great place to work," says Tom Tierney, who was head of Bain's San Francisco office in the late 1980s. He encouraged even his best young consultants to take time off if they felt weary or to work part-time for a while if doing so made it easier for them to devote time to their children. That was a jarring message at first, he concedes. "We've always recruited very high-voltage MBAs, and they're intensely competitive" he says. "But the only competition should be with themselves. And if people can have a fuller life by going part-time for a while, that creates a new model for others to follow."

That transformation is best seen in two of Tierney's protégés: John Donahoe and Lisa Walsh. Both joined Bain in the early 1980s and became two of the firm's top-performing partners. In the process, though, they broke away from the consulting industry's longtime habit of success at all costs -- and found a wiser pace instead.

Donahoe's turning point came early, barely a year out of college, when he was working in Bain's Boston office and sharing a romantic dinner near the downtown waterfront with his fiancée, Eileen Chamberlain. He had started to boast about his bright prospects at the firm -- but the more he talked, the warier his fiancée grew. A theology student at Harvard, she could glimpse the dark side of a consultant's life: too much travel, too many late evenings, and too little time to make deep, personal connections with anyone.

Was that what he wanted? she asked. No, Donahoe insisted. Absolutely not. He pulled out a pen and fumbled in his wallet for a piece of paper. All he could find on that autumn day in 1983 was a Shawmut Bank teller's receipt. It would have to do. On the back of the receipt, he wrote: "I will not live the life of a management consultant." He signed it with a flourish and gave it to her.

Five years later, it was time to make good on that promise. Donahoe and Chamberlain had married and were living in San Francisco with two small children. He was still at Bain; she had just graduated from Stanford Law School and was being offered a clerkship with a renowned federal judge. They agreed that it was a great career opportunity for her. But the job started at 7:30 AM each day. If she took it, who would wake up the children and get them started?

A few weeks later, Donahoe walked into Tierney's office and said: "I'd like to work part-time for a year." He would spend the early morning with his children and start work at 9:30 AM or so. He would travel as little as possible. And he would take a pay cut. A decade earlier, only a lunatic would have made such a proposal. But Tierney gambled that Donahoe could make it work and could be both a better father and an effective consultant.

For the next year, Donahoe split his mornings between oatmeal and org charts. It was much the same juggling act that any working mother endures. But at Bain it was a rarity to see male consultants choose that path, especially one who was seen as a rising star. With the firm supporting his move, Donahoe was able to show colleagues and clients that while his arrangement was unusual, it wasn't unnavigable.

Confined to the San Francisco area, Donahoe got lucky. He couldn't chase clients with operations across the United States, so he began working very closely with a local financial-services company in the midst of a major strategic overhaul. It became one of Bain's most productive projects that year. So when colleagues looked around, they didn't notice Donahoe was coming in late. They noticed he was getting a lot done.

"John never felt as if he was putting his career at risk that year," his wife recalls. "Not being able to travel was stressful for him. But he was realistic about what he could and couldn't do. Besides, he developed his own routine to take care of our boys, and that was great to see."

Some Bain colleagues, in fact, suspect that the year of living domestically helped Donahoe develop a more savvy management style. He couldn't do everything himself, so he became especially adept at sharing authority and at helping colleagues grow into bigger jobs. That team-building ethic paid off in 1992, when Tierney left the top San Francisco job to become Bain's worldwide managing director -- and Donahoe was picked to replace him.