The Once <amp></amp> Future Consultant

Dave Ulrich was one of the world's top management gurus until he gave it all up three years ago to run a Mormon mission in Quebec. Now he's heading back to business with a fresh eye -- and some fresh ideas.

Dave Ulrich sees systems. Not just in the typical places -- our offices, our halls of government, our sports fields -- but in places you'd never expect. It started in college, at Brigham Young University. For his honors thesis, he examined the organization of the entire English department and asked: "Was the department designed to deliver value to its students?" The fall before he was to graduate, he presented his findings to the faculty. His conclusion: BYU fell woefully short in teaching its students how to write, and the university's practice of hiring its own graduates reinforced the problem. They kicked him out of the department. Or, as the dean put it the next morning in his office, "We don't think you should graduate with an English degree." Ulrich's diploma, unframed and stacked away, is for something called "university studies."

BYU's professors may not have appreciated Ulrich's diagnostic eye for organizational flaws, but today's business leaders tell a different story. In 2000, Forbes named Ulrich "one of the top five business coaches in the world." Business Week disagreed, ranking him the world's number-one management consultant a year later. As a sounding board to CEOs at such corporations as GM and GE, Ulrich built his career listening to (and ultimately resolving) complex organizational problems. He has published eight books on organizational behavior, human resources, and change. Rather than relegate HR to mundane chores such as benefits and company picnics, Ulrich calls for strategic systems that instill a deeper feeling of culture and community. Such intangible assets, he believes, motivate workers to produce tangible returns like revenue and market value. "Dave really takes a problem down to its generic roots," says Steve Kerr, a former professor and colleague of Ulrich's who is now the managing director and chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs. "He frames things in a way that makes them susceptible to solution."

While the Business Week ranking solidified Ulrich's standing as a guru, it only exacerbated his hectic schedule. He was already on the road three to four days a week. Over the years, he'd racked up 8 million frequent-flier miles speaking and coaching. A diet of airport snacks and stress added 100 pounds to his frame. When an embolism in his leg nearly kept him from attending his daughter's wedding in California, he knew something had to change. That's when Ulrich -- raised a Mormon -- dropped everything to answer the Mormon Church's call.

Since the summer of 2002, Ulrich has been working as the Quebec mission president for the Mormon Church. It's a full-time job overseeing 32 wards, 9,000 members, and some 150 19- to 25-year-old missionaries spread across 600,000 square miles. Accepting the appointment meant he had to step away from the consultancy he cofounded, Results-Based Leadership, and say good-bye to his colleagues. Many found his departure hard to understand. Ultimately, for Ulrich, the choice was simple: "Faith is belief times action," he says. "If you have a belief, you espouse your belief. If you don't act on it, your belief is moot."

Ulrich and I met outside the Montreal-Trudeau airport, where he picked me up for a couple of days of hiking and activities with 40 of his missionaries. After a few minutes of polite conversation, he fell silent and cleared his throat. "So what's all this Sarbanes-Oxley stuff about?" he asked.

Yes, Ulrich has been out of the game for a while. But his work over the past three years has been harder than anything he ever did in the business world. There are no vacations. There are no weekends. Ulrich must act as parent, boss, and spiritual leader to his missionaries. Their schedules, apartments, vehicles, medical care -- everything falls under his jurisdiction (his wife and a small handful of volunteers help out). Now 51 and lanky, Ulrich has shed more than those 100 pounds since he left the States. Other things have changed, too. "All my life, I've tried to build organizations as systems," he says from the modest home supplied by the church. "But in all honesty, I have not thought as much about people. In the past three years, I've been knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye, and soul-to-soul with the people around me."

There are no balance sheets or stock prices to chart Ulrich's influence in Montreal. Here, the indices of his leadership are individuals, and victories and setbacks are personal. Polaroids of 150 missionaries gaze out from a whiteboard on his wall. Location, duties, seniority, country of origin -- it's all there, shifting each day. But there are some things that don't make the board. Three months after Ulrich arrived in Montreal, one of the missionaries disappeared for three days. Months later, he ran out again, this time for a week. Each time, it fell to the Ulrichs to make the calls -- to the police, to the hospitals, to shelters, and ultimately to the boy's family. After the second episode, the missionary was sent home. "In the business world, if there's a problem, I can fix it," says Ulrich. "Here, there are some problems I'm not going to fix."