The 10 Lives of George Stalk

It wasn't until the third time George Stalk Jr. was declared dead that his family agreed to turn off the life support. Just 52 years old, the peripatetic strategy consultant from Boston Consulting Group lay strapped to a hospital bed, a virtual skeleton with a ventilator tube protruding from his mouth. Stalk had been comatose for nearly three months, after the rupture of a blood vessel in his abdomen started a cataclysmic chain reaction of internal bleeding in February 2003. And although he'd fought back from the brink twice before, it was time, the doctors said, to let him go.

The physical contrast between the vital man of a few months earlier and the shell of a man lying motionless on the gurney could not have been starker. Stalk had been a crackling wire, one of the most energetic and intellectually curious people ever to roam the halls of corporate America. Intrigued by -- or obsessed with -- the X factor that makes one company more successful than another, the star consultant would eagerly jet anyplace, anytime, for the chance to nose around a company's manufacturing process, attack a byzantine cost structure, or convince a CEO that now was the time for change.

In Stalk's 26 years at BCG, he had gone to so many places and coined so many new ideas that his colleagues dubbed him Johnny Appleseed. In a world in which every dime-a-dozen consultant gets anointed a guru, Stalk was the real deal. He was the father of time-based competition, the concept that explained how Japanese factories were able to make better products more quickly. The most prominent name at one of the most elite strategy firms, he worked with some of the world's most powerful companies, including General Electric and Ford Motor Co., and had staked out a legacy as someone able to find solutions to vexing business problems before anyone else even figured out that there were problems. Whip-smart and ultracompetitive, he had little patience for those who didn't share his passion for helping companies figure out how to win. "He is brutally smart, and I choose those words carefully," says Michael O'Leary, former executive vice president at CIBC, which was a client. "He can be intimidating. But he is an absolute joy to work with. He is a verb, not a noun."

But while Stalk excelled at detecting toxic situations in his clients' organizations, he ignored the same warning signs when it came to his own well-being. As his wife, C. Henri, and six children whispered their good-byes, and his colleagues at BCG, meeting in Paris a few weeks later, bowed their heads for a moment of silence, the consensus was clear: George Stalk had literally worked himself to death.

Except that he wasn't gone yet. Deep inside his coma, trapped in the netherworld between life and death, Stalk's remarkable mind worked through a series of 18 intense hallucinations bursting with vivid characters, scenes, and dialogue. In them, Stalk was doing what he does best: solving problems.

Lying in a hospital bed at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Stalk knew he was going to die, although not from the nuclear strike he imagined Japan had launched against England. Stalk and his wife had helped rescue survivors. Now he understood that he wouldn't recover from the mysterious illness he'd contracted but that he would be going to Heaven. His first thought was that this meant he'd have a chance to see Jim Abegglen, a former mentor at BCG who had been killed in the war.

But how to locate him? "I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how Heaven was organized," he says. "How would you find someone? Was it by geography? Was it by ethnic origin? Was it by where the person was currently living?" Stalk began an analysis of Heaven's internal structure, but it soon became clear that it wasn't needed; the two men would somehow eventually connect. Heaven, it turns out, has no org chart.

Faced with imminent death, some people's unconscious might have journeyed backward through life. Others might have dreamed of exotic places, or lived out fantasies that their conscious minds would never have permitted. But Stalk's brain just doesn't work that way. "I remember waking up saying, 'Jesus Christ, I just went for three months and didn't have a single sexual dream,' " he laughs. "It was about work."

An engineer by training, Stalk accepted the scenario he was given and then began to analyze his way through it. His deconstruction of Heaven was typical. "That's him!" exclaims Thomas Hout, a senior adviser at BCG. "George is tireless. Even as he imagines himself dying, he still asks these questions."

Somehow, some way, Stalk, now 54, confounded the experts, emerging from his coma to make a full recovery. No one would have begrudged him for retiring to grow vegetables on his Toronto-area farm or fly the radar-controlled planes he loves with his children. But not only is Stalk back to work, he's also on the road again, promoting a new book written with Rob Lachenauer, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).