Here's how Viant CEO Bob Gett, fueled by his desire to quit consulting, designed a work environment that nobody would want to leave. In the process, he may have reinvented the consulting business itself.
Bob Gett, fueled by his understanding of what made him want to quit consulting, designed a firm around the one benefit he knew employees desperately wanted
It was an unlikely setting for a life-altering epiphany: late at night in a Denny's in a small factory town in the middle of Ohio. But it was there that Bob Gett first began to accept the grim truth about his work. Before retiring to Motel 6 for the night, he blurted out to a colleague, who was sitting across the table, "I could never imagine doing this when I'm 40." Only 28, Gett had been a consultant for seven years. But instinctively he knew that he had just taken a bite of a reality sandwich. "Management consulting is grueling," affirms Gett, now 49.
Gett (pronounced "Jet") didn't quit, but the sting of that revelation stayed with him as his career progressed. Eventually, he rose to become president of North American operations at Cambridge Technology Partners, a systems-integration and consulting company that grew to $132 million in revenues during his tenure. Even then, he continued to believe that consulting companies tended to "put people in boxes" and rarely "maximized their potential." Their standard billing system of charging clients for time and materials encouraged consultants to spend as many hours as they could on one assignment. Newish buzzwords and freshly titled theories just seemed to describe the same old management practices.
The inevitable outcome? Looking for relief from the "staleness and boredom," Gett says, consultants moved around. "As soon as people stop learning, they stop growing and get bored," he says. "Then they leave." In the past that meant joining the next hot consulting firm, which would eventually prove itself to be just as numbing. But in recent times, with the Internet age in full swing, consultants have found themselves faced with the kinds of opportunities -- namely, the chance to do something intrinsically interesting -- that they can't resist. It is no surprise that even George Shaheen, the chief executive officer and managing partner of industry behemoth Andersen Consulting, bolted in September for the chance to run an ambitious Internet start-up. Gett understands the impulse only too well -- perhaps because he has done the same thing himself.
Four years ago two blue-chip venture-capital firms, Kleiner Perkins and Mohr Davidow, recruited Gett from Massachusetts-based Cambridge Technology Partners to run Viant Inc., then just seven months old. Viant, which helped companies build and maintain Web-based businesses, targeted the digital sweet spot of the economy. The work would be nothing if not dynamic. It also would be intensely competitive, attracting anyone who so much as glanced at the numbers.
According to Forrester Research, a technology-research company based in Cambridge, Mass., the sum total of U.S. E-commerce is expected to soar from $109 billion this year to $1.3 trillion by 2003. Lured by all that lucre, a new generation of Internet-strategy consultants have sprouted up, determined, at the very least, to look different from their fathers' consulting firms. They bear hip, uncorporate-sounding names like Scient, Organic Online, Razorfish, Diamond Technology, and Zefer. Indeed, they work hard to convey the sort of irreverence and flexibility that the Net is all about -- while recruiting from established brand names like Andersen Consulting and McKinsey & Co.
Viant, based in Boston, embodies all those edgy values that appeal to its blue-chip customers, which include Compaq Computer and General Motors. Gett, for instance, has a penchant for squishy titles, referring to himself as "chief cultural officer." But on a deeper level, he has constructed a company culture aimed at addressing the least superficial concern of any knowledge-based business: finding good people and then keeping them by making sure they are constantly broadening their skills. "It's our goal that what one person knows, everybody knows," says Gett. And just what kind of change does that entail? Utterly radical, as it turns out. Gett's efforts have earned Viant, which went public last June, membership in an elite band of upstarts that are "blowing up the standard consulting model," says Tim Bourgeois, vice-president of research at Kennedy Information Research Group, a company based in Fitzwilliam, N.H., that tracks consulting firms.
Or they are trying to, anyway. Some of Viant's fellow rebels, growing at breakneck speed, might actually be in the process of blowing themselves up. "Right now a lot of these companies can be successful because there is so much demand," says Greg Gould, an industry analyst at Goldman Sachs. "The key is whoever can build a solid business." Gett is betting he can. How? By shunning acquisitions in favor of organic growth. By rewarding employees not for how much they add to the bottom line but for their willingness to absorb and share knowledge. By taking time when it comes to hiring and training, willfully shutting out external pressures. By never forgetting, ultimately, that people bind tightest to their jobs -- no matter how many other opportunities swirl around them -- when they know that they are constantly learning and not being held back. That's the feeling Gett wanted so many years ago and the feeling that now infuses every aspect of Viant's culture.
"When Wall Street looks at all the companies in this universe that have gone public, a number of them look as though they've been bolted together," says Gould. "What I'm really impressed with is Viant's internal controls, processes, and methodologies. Viant has built a good foundation. And that makes it stand apart."
