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What I Bargained For: A Top Team

The Talent: Lori Flees, 27, had more than a Harvard MBA going for her when she started shopping the job market two years ago. She had also worked at Intel, where she was a senior business analyst for two Flash-memory products and a member of two product-development teams.

The Offer: Bain & Co., one of the world's leading global-strategy and management-consulting firms, considered Flees a top prospect from the MBA class of 1997. Its offer: Join the company as a management consultant. Flees also considered offers from another consulting firm and from a building-materials conglomerate.

The Dealmaker: Typically, business-school grads who join Bain start in its general consulting ranks. But Flees wanted more than a cookie-cutter job for Bain newbies. Her long-term plan is to buy and run her own company, and she wants her experience at Bain to serve as a crash course in evaluating acquisitions.

She asked for an assignment in Bain's Private Equity group, which focuses on leveraged buyouts and portfolio work. Bain was hesitant to go against precedent by allowing Flees to jump directly into its hottest team, but she had been a stellar performer during her summer internship at the company. After some dickering, the deal was done.

The Payoff : Flees is on the fast track. She's worked on five cases in five months - most of her peers handle just two or three cases in that span of time. The intensity has helped her develop flexibility and broad expertise. "I've been on a very steep learning curve," she says, "and everything has been accelerated by working in this group."

Coordinates Lori Flees, lori.flees@bain.com

What I Bargained For: A Hot Home Office

The Talent: Shane Coursen, 30, an all-star fighter of computer viruses and a key player on the team that developed Symantec Corp.'s popular Norton AntiVirus software.

The Offer: Dr Solomon's Software Inc., an antivirus software company based in Britain, wanted Coursen to sign on as a senior technology consultant. The assignment: Troubleshoot viruses for the company's clients and dispense advice on computer-security problems.

The Dealmaker: Coursen, an avid surfer (the wet kind), was reluctant to move from Malibu, California to Burlington, Massachusetts, where Dr Solomon's has one of its U.S. offices. So he made a counteroffer: He'd stay in Malibu, and the company would outfit his home office with a full-fledged lab for testing computer viruses. Dr Solomon's, which was eager to expand its presence on the West Coast, agreed. To Coursen's own custom-built 200 MHz Pentium computer and his 386 test machine, the company added a Gateway 2000 NT server, a Gateway Pentium laptop, seven Zip drives, and two keyboards - all connected to a local area network.

The Payoff: The home lab allows Coursen to remain on the West Coast and to be a master of his own schedule. Dr Solomon's has gained a heavyweight virus-buster who responds to problems in real time. Recently, when publishing giant Ziff-Davis suspected that a virus was lurking in its systems, its people sent an urgent email to Coursen late in the evening. He was up until 6 a.m. the next day, pounding away on a solution. By the following morning, he'd helped the company whip the problem. "My career is what I am - it's what I do," he says. "I worked last night until 2 a.m. I'd never work that late if I was in a 9-to-5 office."

Coordinates: Shane Coursen, shane.coursen@drsolomon.com