The 10 Lives of George Stalk

But Stalk's hardball approach to life was taking its toll, and his colleagues and clients could see it happening. "To a fault, he would show up when he was ill," says Marvin Adams, senior vice president at Ford, who worked with Stalk on a project around that time. "You could tell he was really starting to wear down." Stalk felt it, too, but thought that if he could just make it to the following spring, things would get better. "One doctor asked, 'What did you think was going to be different in the spring?' I said, 'I don't know, but it was far enough out there in the future that something had to be different.' "

He was right. One cold February day in 2003, he was in a Boston hotel room when he began to vomit blood. He decided to go back to Toronto, and by the time he got there, he had lost so much blood that he went straight to the emergency room. In a total system failure, a series of blood vessels ruptured in his stomach. Then, after a few weeks in the hospital, he lost consciousness and found himself trapped in limbo. Making matters worse, the SARS epidemic had hit Toronto just before he went into the hospital, which was placed under strict quarantine. His friends were unable to visit, and his wife and children were allowed in only sporadically, when it seemed most likely that Stalk was going to die.

At some point during Stalk's coma, his hallucinations changed from those of a man who knew he was dying to those of someone with a chance of survival. He launched into a series of rehabilitation dreams, all of which involved arduous tasks he had no choice but to complete.

Sent to an island in the Caribbean, Stalk realized that in order to survive, he had to go through an obstacle course while scuba diving. But he was unable to move and to breathe, so he was always the last to finish what he called the "mobility challenge." Suddenly, Stalk was on a mountain outside Las Vegas along with a group of invalids. Caught in a snowstorm, they had to fly a helicopter with a heavy hospital bed attached to it up the mountain. If they didn't make it, none of them would survive.

Next came a version of Survivor, set in the 1700s. A random group of people had to work together to create everything from food to guns to fire. As Stalk had often observed with clients, the group quickly degenerated into a bunch of separate groups, all flailing away at the same time. It fell to Stalk to figure out the proper sequence of events, creating fire first, then, with the ashes, making gunpowder and finally steel for a gun to use for hunting.

"Who are you?"

"What's the date?"

"Where are you?"

Every morning, Stalk dreamed that the doctors would ask him the same three questions, and every morning he would get one of the three wrong. "I'm George Stalk. I'm in England. It's February 21." His only chance at getting better was to answer all three questions correctly.

On May 5, the same day his BCG partners were praying for him in Paris, Stalk came out of his coma.

"Where are you?" a nurse asked him.

"England," he said.

"No," said the nurse, "You're in Toronto."

Stalk didn't believe her. He insisted she wheel in a television set. A few days later, when he regained the ability to speak and was able to call his wife, he realized that he was alive.

On May 28, 2003, Stalk was released from the hospital, with no sense of whether he would live another month or another decade. Typically, he immediately planned to return to work. But he soon realized that his expectations were a hallucination of their own. First, he was so weak that he could barely stand. Then there were the memory problems. "It took me several weeks before I could read a newspaper," he says. "I couldn't get to the bottom of the page without forgetting what was at the top."

He kept pushing himself -- until things reached a head just over a month after he came home. "In the space of 24 hours," he says, "C. Henri caught me driving my car and making plans to fly to Hong Kong. Then Carl Stern [then managing partner of BCG] called to complain about me because I was calling too many people. [C. Henri] came in and said, 'Look, if you want to kill yourself, kill yourself. I'm here to help you [survive].' "

Chastened, Stalk pulled back, but it wasn't easy, as a memo he wrote to his staff in July made clear: "While the doctors are happy with the pace of my recovery, I am disappointed. I hoped to have this wrapped up and behind me by the end of August." Stalk returned to work full time in June 2004 but says he has sharply curtailed travel and a lot of on-the-ground client work. He makes a point of being home with his family and admits to feeling exhaustion as the day stretches on.