Jean-Pierre's entrepreneurial drive kicked into high gear years later when, as a newly promoted Bain partner, he was sitting in a room filled with corporate road warriors and listening to a highly respected private equity investor describe the success of Hotwire, a dotcom phenom. The start-up invented a business out of selling distressed travel inventory to leisure travelers. Jean-Pierre knew something about dotcoms—at Bain, he specialized in advising worried European CEOs on how to navigate the emerging digital economy, a game-changer that threatened their time tested business models. The Hotwire story sparked an idea. "This could work in the high-end as well," Jean-Pierre recalls thinking. "If I can advise people on how to do it . . . then I should try my own business." Exactly one year later, Jean-Pierre, along with Bain alum and friend, John Perkins (who had gone on to Dell, as the European head of marketing and sales), launched Egencia, a groundbreaking online travel service for corporate customers.

Their decision to rely on Bain's playbook and alumni network helped turn the start-up into one of the world's leading Internet business travel companies. John, now CEO of Play.com, describes their co-CEO relationship as a "unique experience" where they jointly made the big decisions, a process made easier by Jean-Pierre's "open and honest communication style." They drew on each other's strengths—Jean-Pierre's strong analytical and management experience in ecommerce and John's extensive sales experience and contacts. But Egencia faced a triple whammy in its early years—the dotcom bust, which dried up IPO financing, the September 11th terrorist attack and the Asian flu epidemic. "In 2002, no one wanted to travel anymore and I was in the corporate travel business," says Jean-Pierre.

How did Egencia survive—and ultimately dominate—when so many dotcom wonders vanished virtually overnight? They adhered to two Bain fundamentals: stay the course by picking the right business strategy and build it to last. Even in the worst stretch, Egencia continued eking out steady growth, reassuring investors and clients that the pioneering corporate travel business wasn't going away. Jean-Pierre's and John's team focused on the power of innovation to fill a void for corporate clients. Amid a travel recession, Egencia empowered businesses by offering online tools and services that reduced costs and made it more efficient and easier to book and track employee travel.

By 2009, when Jean-Pierre left to become CEO of the PagesJaunes Groupe, Egencia had been acquired by Expedia, and was established as one of the world's leading Internet business travel companies.

In his current post at PagesJaunes, the 47-year-old's challenge is a variation on the one he faced as an ecommerce pioneer: how to rapidly transform the printed phone directory business model into an innovative online platform for search, advertising and other business services. In order to produce quick results, Jean-Pierre tapped the same resource he relied upon to build Egencia—Bain's alumni network. Jean-Pierre recruited Bainies for key spots throughout his management team. "They are extremely results oriented," says the PagesJaunes CEO. "They know how to drive change. It was key at both companies." Having a common business language has accelerated problem solving and innovation, which is critical as new game-changers, like increasingly sophisticated smartphones and social media commerce, keep redefining the marketplace.

To spot trends and innovate ahead of competitors, Jean-Pierre relies on an advance warning system that includes PagesJaunes' small army of 500 Internet engineers, charged with spotting the next big thing and creating solutions. He also taps into a worldwide eco network of start-ups that helps speed innovations to market with leading edge technology and business models. Jean-Pierre's focus on innovation and the Internet is paying off. The company's Internet audience is steadily increasing, with especially strong growth in the company's mobile phone audience, which surged 117 percent over the first quarter of 2010 and now accounts for twelve percent of its total Internet audience.

Bain alum and a key member of PagesJaunes' management team Julien Ampollini is confident in Jean-Pierre's leadership and ability to turn "this traditional directory business into a leading online local advertising player." After also working with Jean-Pierre at Egencia, Julien observes, "What is very impressive about Jean-Pierre is his ability to combine clear and powerful strategic vision with pragmatic and efficient management of the operations. In a context of drastic change, this balance is a key to success." With ambitious goals set for 2012, and Bain hired to supplement his team in implementing organizational change, Jean-Pierre will have to maintain this balance as he faces the ever-changing, competitive ecommerce landscape.

By the time Zients entered Duke University in 1984, he owned a collection valued at almost $30,000. By 2002, the same entrepreneurial instincts landed him on Fortune magazine's exclusive list of richest Americans under 40. Although he'd never taken a business public, Zients patiently nurtured two companies with a low-key leadership style that delivered IPO smash hits for The Advisory Board, a health-care consultancy, and its corporate spin-off, the Corporate Executive Board. After stepping down as chairman of The Advisory Board in 2004, Zients scored another first. At 37, the avid baseball fan championed the successful campaign to bring a major league baseball team back to the nation's capital after an absence of over thirty years.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, the new president was looking for someone to fill a new—and daunting—post: the first-ever chief performance officer, housed in OMB. Zients had a reputation in Washington circles as a veteran business executive who produced results. He landed the job even though he had no government experience. "In many ways, the content of the job is similar to what I did at Bain and in the private sector," recalls Zients. Before saying yes, the father of four paused only long enough to check with his family about a position with 24/7 demands. His wife gave thumbs-up to a job that some refer to as the president's weed-whacker.

From his marriage, to his White House appointment, Zients' career path is populated with Bainies. He met his wife, Mary, at the Boston office, and a Bain recommendation led to his hiring at The Advisory Board. Its founder, David Bradley, wasn't a Bain alum, but he was connected: Bradley went to the Harvard Business School with a group of future Bain Partners, including Bain Chairman Orit Gadiesh. Zients' path crossed with Gadiesh while he was an AC. She was on a Bain team that gave Zients a crash course in delivering results. Two decades later, the results-oriented approach Zients learned as a consultant is guiding his strategy to weed out waste and make government more productive and efficient.

The task is remarkably similar to one of his initial Bain assignments. Back in 1988, 21-year-old Zients was dispatched to Detroit to work with a Big Three automaker on a well-known case: figuring out the cost of complexity for the car manufacturer. The outcome showed that by reducing complexity, the client could increase both quality and profits. Zients was charged with mapping out all the possible options on a car model that customers could select. "The ultimate answer was that every buyer in the US could have some variation of the car," says Zients. His team included Orit Gadiesh, David Harding and Jon Mark. They schooled the young AC in Bain fundamentals—figuring out what matters most to the client and delivering results. After cutting his teeth on one of the Detroit Big Three, Zients now is applying those lessons as he faces the behemoth of complexity—a $3.55 trillion federal budget. He calls the Bain approach "central" to his efforts to tame government complexity. "[They] taught me to be rigorous analytically and then how to take the insights and present them in a simple fashion so that the client could understand and implement them," says Zients. "It's served me well."

To help him navigate through the federal budget thicket, Zients brought in Michael D'Amato, a former Bain Senior Partner and colleague at The Advisory Board and Corporate Executive Board. D'Amato describes the chief performance officer's job as "a Bain consultant's dream." As Zients' right-hand man, D'Amato and his boss spent the first three months mapping the government, and then setting priorities that could generate quick wins. "We ended up with six areas, chosen because they all affect structural aspects of government, and therefore are changes which will have the longest-term impact on government performance," explains D'Amato.

The job grew even more complicated last summer when Zients took on the added responsibility as acting OMB head after the director stepped down and the nominee, Jack Lew, faced protracted Senate confirmation hearings. Despite the double load, Zients' budgetary weed-whacking is starting to pay off. Quick wins include the launch of the website Performance.gov, aimed at making government more transparent and accountable; identifying $40 billion in potential savings in contracts; buying in bulk; and transforming the way government deploys expensive, large-scale information technology projects. Instead of improving productivity and efficiency, the unwieldy IT systems often add more layers and problems. To find solutions, Zients' team looked for agencies and private sector organizations with high success rates and discovered that successful projects are implemented in chunks, with functionality delivered every six months, rather than through monolithic, multi-year approaches. This practice allows organizations to troubleshoot along the way, making mid-course corrections as necessary, up to and including terminating projects when it becomes clear they aren't going to be successful. Says Zients: "We're rolling this approach out for use across government, which will greatly improve the performance of Federal IT."

The demands of streamlining government have put other passions on hold. Ask the diehard baseball fan if he's surprised that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, and he answers apologetically that he was too swamped with work to watch it. And it's his wife who continues working with the Urban Alliance Foundation, a nonprofit that Zients cofounded. The foundation partners with corporations to give economically disadvantaged youths paid internships, mentoring and job training. Does Zients long to return to the business world? "At some point, I may circle back to the private sector. But I love serving in government," he replies emphatically. For now, Zients seems totally hooked on getting the federal government's $3.5 trillion complexity beast under control.

Despite the soaring death rate, there had been no coordinated effort among governments, researchers, businesses and nonprofits to help developing nations. That changed last July, when the World Health Organization (WHO) launched NCDnet, a network of leading organizations and experts, to combat noncommunicable diseases. WHO recruited Voûte, former CEO of the World Heart Federation, to orchestrate the partnerships needed to turn NCDnet into an effective weapon in the fight to prevent and curb these lethal diseases.

To develop critical alliances for NCDnet, Voûte relies on many of the skills she honed during ten years at Bain, beginning in 1989 when she joined the Paris office and was quickly promoted to manager. Soon after helping to open the Geneva office, she was made partner in recognition of her contributions to the office’s growth. Voûte's path seemed set until 1999, when she found herself at a crossroads. Bain was moving the Geneva office to Zürich but Voûte, married with three daughters, didn't want to uproot her family. And her last assignment—a supply chain analysis—had resulted in the closing of 32 warehouses across Europe. "That's when I decided I wanted to give back," she recalls in the rapid-fire manner of a New Jersey native, laced with a hint of Jersey accent.

Voûte's career—and lifestyle—took an unexpected twist when she spotted an ad in The Economist: The World Heart Federation (WHF) needed a new CEO. During her eight-year tenure at the WHF, the organization developed into a global leader in the fight against heart disease. While there, she tapped her Bain network, contacting former colleague Josef Ming, who put her in touch with a Bain team in Germany. They provided pro-bono strategy work for expanding a major American Heart Association initiative, "Go Red for Women," globally to raise awareness about heart disease and stroke. The Bain team also helped with every aspect of the campaign design and roll-out. "Bain's results orientation and pragmatic, analytical approach had a strong impact on WHF," says Axel Seeman, a partner in the Frankfurt office.

The more Voûte learned at the WHF, the more she realized that she was at serious risk herself. Many of her family members had died from heart disease and stroke, and Voûte had overlooked her own health. "I used to define exercise as running across the Frankfurt airport with a briefcase," she says, laughing at the memory. Today she has a personal trainer and her family members all are healthy lifestyle converts.

Converting the rest of the world with limited resources requires Voûte to speak two languages—nonprofit and profit. To convince multinationals that investing in health initiatives makes sound business sense, she relies on Bain style results-oriented analysis, strategy and metrics to sell her argument: For every dollar spent on employee wellness programs, companies typically earn a $3 to $4 return through reduced health costs and increased productivity. Voûte tells skeptics, "The metrics are undeniable." She is forming partnerships with industry associations, policy makers and nonprofits in an effort to break the link between NCDs and at-risk, low-income populations by reducing tobacco use as well as salt, sugar and trans fats in people's diets. Together they are working to win over food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies by helping them understand their social responsibility and the value of helping poorer consumers.

Voûte believes that Bain's focus on teamwork and collaboration helped to lay the foundation for the partnerships she is now forging. Early in her career at Bain, when people asked her why she had come to Bain from BCG, Voûte would often answer: "It's because of the power of the team." Two decades later, she's counting on the power of Bain-style teamwork to do the seemingly impossible—reduce disease worldwide through improved healthcare and healthier lifestyles.

There is nothing orthodox about the business marriage between Bad Boy's CEO, who is known for pushing the envelope, and his churchgoing, family-man CFO. The battery of skills Ferguson honed during his five years at Bain's Boston office allowed him to quickly adapt to the often irrational world of music and entertainment. His top survival skill: the ability to rapidly digest complex information and crystallize it into a crisp strategic analysis. For a CFO who is constantly vetting stacks of deals, that skill alone is critical. But Ferguson's boss is a globe-trotting rapper, fashion designer and entrepreneur, with his own recording and production companies, clothing line, restaurants, movies, publishing and nonprofit enterprises.

To keep up, Ferguson has mastered the art of condensing a two-hour PowerPoint presentation into a snappy, five-minute synopsis while Combs is being made up for the Letterman show. "My boss may not talk or rap like other CEOs, but he is very much like the CEOs I worked with at Bain," says Ferguson. In a crunch, he's reached out to Bain for data that he needed quickly to evaluate deals in complex, fast-moving industries. "I knew Bain had it in some form," says Ferguson. Facts and analysis aren't enough. He's learned to follow his CEO's uncanny ability to spot the next hot sound, trend or branding coup even when the numbers are not clear cut. Combs isn't shy about taking full advantage of his celebrity status to negotiate a moneymaking, out-of-the-box opportunity for Bad Boy.

Even though both men are hard-working, successful New York natives, born just five years apart—Combs is 40 and Ferguson is 45—their lives didn't seem destined to collide. Combs grew up in Harlem, where his father was killed, and later moved to Mt. Vernon. Ferguson was raised in a close-knit Bronx community with churchgoing parents who emphasized education. Always a top student, he graduated from Wharton, launched Urban Profile, a magazine targeted at young, professional African-American males, and earned a Harvard MBA. In 1991, Ferguson sold the magazine and joined Bain's Boston office. Meanwhile, his future boss dropped out of Howard University and quickly became a star producer at Uptown Records. After Combs was fired, he struck out on his own, founding Bad Boy Entertainment.

By the mid-1990s, both men were making their mark. Bad Boy had signed hit artists and Combs made his solo debut as Puff Daddy, topping the charts. At Bain, Ferguson made history when he was promoted to manager in the Boston office, one of the first two African Americans to hold the position. He admits that the lack of diversity at Bain was a concern, but he worked to bring in more minorities, founding Blacks at Bain. Today, he still is a Bain recruiter, telling minority candidates, "At Bain there is objectivity. If you crack a case for a client, you will be significantly rewarded."

One of Ferguson's Bain assignments, shadowing a music executive, ultimately led him into the music world. He was the vice president of BMG Entertainment when Diddy came calling. Twelve years later, the two men still sit in offices near each other at the company's midtown headquarters. While their teamwork has grown Bad Boy, Ferguson's partnership with his pastor, also an MBA, has continued expanding ministries that connect companies with the jobless, and film and TV projects to launch talent rapping an alternative message. P. Diddy's financial strategist still is surprised at the irony: how his job at Bad Boy ended up empowering his faith.

Like all investors, Temasek had a tumultuous ride during the global financial meltdown. But the government-owned investment company has quickly rebounded, building up a hefty war chest with market recovery and well timed exits. Temasek's resilience is also due in part to its shrewd bet on Asia's emerging markets, which weathered the financial storm far better than the West.

Just five years ago, Temasek embarked on an active overseas investment strategy and recognized early on Asia's potential. "We were one of the few and first to invest heavily in China, Indonesia, India and Vietnam," says Hamiyeh, who also oversees the firm's initiatives in Africa and the Middle East. "Based on our early experience with the Asian markets, we saw similar trends and lessons that we are now able to apply to other emerging markets." After pulling back during the turbulence, Temasek is now back in deal-making mode and Hamiyeh is on the hunt for selective mining investments, including in Africa and Mongolia, two regions that he believes will become key suppliers of the industrial minerals needed to fuel Asia's rapid growth.

After Hamiyeh joined Temasek in 2005, he recommended his former employer to help analyze the future of a key sector and some portfolio companies. Five years later, that initial work has evolved into an ongoing relationship. "[We] may ask for help in evaluating portfolios and sectors given the size and breadth of Temasek's investments," says the Bain alum. He also tries to instill Bain's "Answer First" approach in colleagues as a way to quickly spot winners. Hamiyeh explains, "Often, you come up with a conclusion before you've waded through all the material. Wading through is more of a confirmation."

Temasek has hired a number of Bain alums in addition to Hamiyeh, to help strengthen an area which focuses on adding value to companies, postinvestment. The company has discovered that Bainies often have the three key traits it's looking for: the ability to put their egos aside and be team players, to think outside the box and work independently.

Those traits helped Hamiyeh, an MIT graduate with a master's in engineering, land his first job with Bain in 1994. His initial stint in Asia left a lasting impression. Hamiyeh was 27 when he spent a year on assignment in the Philippines, living with a large team housed in three apartments. "We all were from different cultures—it was a melting pot, an amazing experience with different ways of thinking," he recalls. In 1997, he left for the investment world. At Credit Suisse First Boston, he served as a vice president of its energy group. Following his experience at Credit Suisse, Asia Pacific Resources Group, an energy trading company, named Hamiyeh its CEO.

When Temasek hired him in 2005, Hamiyeh found their values were similar to Bain's as both emphasized the importance of people and talent. Investments to him are a team decision. "We all vote and never look back and point fingers if something goes wrong," says Hamiyeh. And like Bain, during the recent downturn, Temasek preserved its most important resource—its talent—by avoiding layoffs. Salaries were reduced across the board. "Everyone took a haircut, from the CEO to the most junior associates," he stresses.

Although Singapore is home, Hamiyeh says his roots still are in Lebanon. He has a home there and often visits his extended family with his three young children. After the upheaval of the civil war years, most of his relatives chose to stay close. But Hamiyeh is a globetrotter, traveling the world as he scouts investments. The father of an eight-year-old daughter and two-year-old twin boys notes, "The only time I sleep is on the plane."

The onion-smoothie episode is part of Innocent's colorful lore—how Wright and two college pals from his days at Cambridge University hit on the idea of launching a fresh-fruit smoothie business during a snowboarding trip in 1998, even though they knew nothing about fruit. The following summer, they mashed up €500 of fruit and sold smoothies at a jazz festival. The sign by their stall read, "Should we give up our jobs to make these smoothies?" People proceeded to put their empty bottle in a "Yes" bin or a "No" bin. By the end of the weekend, the "Yes" bin was overflowing and the next day they resigned their blue-chip jobs—Wright from Bain, Richard Reed from advertising and Adam Balon from a marketing job. Wright recalls telling the Bain recruiter in 1995 that he wanted to run his own business in three to four years. "I'm not sure I expected it to happen in that time frame," he admits.

The tale of Innocent's growth from a niche startup into a business with an 80 percent market share is laced with Bainies, who offered support at every phase. In 1998, Wright's manager gave him a leave of absence to focus on Innocent's business plan even as Wright still worked out of the London office. The office manager kept them "sweating the business model" so that the cost structure would generate enough profits to feed the startup's growth. After 20 bank branches rejected the struggling entrepreneurs, the Bain network helped them connect with the business angel who funded Innocent's launch.

As the company grew, Wright recruited Bainies for Innocent's two major expansions—into children's smoothies and healthy Veg Pot meals, billed as high fiber, low salt and providing three of the five recommended daily portions of vegetables. And this spring when Coke made its offer, Wright found himself across the table from another Bain alum, James Quincey, president of Coke's Northwest Europe & Nordics business unit. While they didn't know each other, Wright felt prepared, explaining that, "We knew that we were up against a smart guy set on creating value."

The Coke offer was complicated. While the beverage behemoth had the money and distribution muscle to help Innocent fend off intensifying competition from PepsiCo's Tropicana brand and expand into the European market, the cofounders knew that Innocent would be accused of selling out its ideals to a corporate titan. Again, they turned to Bainies. "We had some good sounding-board sessions with Bain partners. We hadn't seen this kind of deal before," says the 37-year-old Wright, whose estimated worth is about €55 million.

In the end, they crafted a win-win: Innocent gets an infusion of cash but maintains its freedom, while Coke gets between a 10 percent to 20 percent stake in a fast-growing venture that's tapping into consumers' desire for healthier, sustainable food. Wright insists that the partnership is a smart move with "fewer strings attached" than other offers. As proof, he points to Odwalla, the US fresh-fruit smoothie maker. Although it's wholly owned by Coke, Odwalla has maintained its independence. Ironically, Wright credits the Odwalla smoothies he downed during a stint at Bain's San Francisco office with setting the standard as the founders experimented with recipes.

Is there something about Bain that breeds a steady crop of bold startup founders like Wright? He credits a "think like an owner" approach to consulting and a culture filled with entrepreneurial energy—as Wright puts it, "all the chaps. . . at lunchtime talking about their ideas."

The genesis of the business emerged after talking with his good friend and fellow ex-Bainie, José Manuel Villanueva, who had become general manager of the Spanish operations of New Balance, the sportswear and running-shoe company. Villanueva—who joined with Carné to found Privalia—told him how New Balance routinely cleared out its overstock items through a private online sales business in France.

Intrigued, Carné started doing due diligence, beginning in January 2006. His premise was to develop an online shopping club that provided upscale clothing and sporting goods at about 50% off list price—these being overstock or out-of-season items (at first). After six months for the development of a platform, the creation of an office and the establishment of relationships with sellers, the online "store" went live in June 2006.

"Getting the right suppliers is the hardest job we have," Carné says, but it has gotten easier. Initially in Spain, "most brands didn't see the Internet as a distribution channel. Rather they thought of it as a communications channel to their customers. At worst, they thought of the Net as a place for parallel commerce, or a place to sell fake products."

Today, Carné and Villanueva have to turn away suppliers. These makers now understand that e-commerce offers not only incremental sales, but is a valuable channel in its own right. That rising demand means that Privalia has to be diligent in understanding fashion trends. To that end, Carné maintains sourcing teams comprising fashionistas in Spain, Italy and Brazil—who go to trade shows and visit makers—supplemented by a market intelligence team in each office who stay abreast of clothing trends.

Starting with five employees, Privalia today employs more than 200 people in offices in Barcelona, Milan and São Paulo. And realizing the benefit of Bain training, Carné, along with Villanueva, has built his leadership team with additional Bain alums Francisco de la Calle Martinez and Valentina Visconti Prasca.

And how is the alums' business doing? It's booming: In 2008, Privalia did $22 million in revenue, and Carné expects to more than double sales of discounted goods in 2009.

"I had no personal connection to Parkinson's disease before I came here, and I was most interested in speaking with Debi about the transition to the nonprofit world from professional services," Hood says. "My biggest question," Hood recalls of the conversation, "was could I find a nonprofit whose culture and urgency to have impact matched my own? I was afraid of being tied down in either bureaucracy or a slow-moving environment." Brooks assured her that MJFF was anything but slow. "We are not confined by traditional models of philanthropy. Our job is to figure out exactly what it takes to get a cure," Hood recalls Brooks saying. "And we need somebody like you to help us figure that out."

So Hood arrived at MJFF still very much in the startup phase, and she focused on building a smart, efficient process for selecting and administering grants. Soon, though, she and Brooks realized that "best in class" process was not going to be sufficient, and that developing an MJFF viewpoint on the problem was essential.

From its earliest days, MJFF used benchmarking—a Bain-emphasized technique—to speed its learning and hasten its progress. Closely studying the efforts of other like-minded and more established disease research foundations, such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, "gave us new ideas—not only about what we should do but about what we shouldn't. Unintentionally, it also created a culture of continuous improvement which I think has helped us to this day."

Having added neuroscience PhDs as full-time staff, the Foundation initiated a formal "PD landscape assessment, through which we started to map what was going on in the field. It was just like Bain where, when you're put on a case, you learn everything you possibly can about it and identify the unique opportunity that exists for your client… except, this time, we were the client."

Through these efforts came increased awareness of "a giant translational gap" in PD. Under the existing business model, academic researchers were great at early-stage basic research and pharmaceutical companies were good at late-stage preclinical research and clinical trials. But there was no player in the middle focused on shepherding hits from discovery through multiple stages of development and into the clinic. And with countless biotech companies popping up throughout the middle of the pipeline, in some ways the need was even greater, Hood recalls. "We now had information scattered all over the place in hundreds of biotech companies with unstable funding—and no incentives to share."

So just a few years after its founding, MJFF began to focus its activities and funding on the translational gap, soon developing a robust strategy for driving research progress in this space. Hood's own role evolved as she moved from VP of research programs to deputy chief executive officer, then took the reins as CEO in December 2007.

Since 2000, MJFF has funded over $140 million in PD research, and is the largest private funder of Parkinson's research in the world. The Foundation works closely with both academic and industry leaders to accelerate progress toward new therapeutics and, ultimately, a cure for Parkinson's disease. Hood says: "Today we know it's not so much the amount of research we fund, but how we fund it. We are one of a handful of medical research foundations bringing strategy to science, and every day offers new opportunities to bring the skills I learned at Bain to bear."

How about Michael J. Fox? "He's exactly what you think," she says, "optimistic, down to earth, easy to work with—but also a good judge of character—and incredibly smart." She adds: "This has never been about curing him. Rather, he realized that his fame provided him the opportunity to bring scientific, strategic and financial resources to this fight in a way that could speed the path to a cure. And while it's not easy, I have no doubt progress is happening faster with us on the scene."

The move from Bain was easy, in one sense—Bridgespan is located just a few blocks from Bain's Boston office. But in terms of issues, it's been a radical change. "The challenges of making progress in these areas are some of the toughest anywhere," Rosenberg observes. Over the past few months, he's worked with three clients, each with dramatically different needs.

The Bridgespan partner is helping state education chiefs develop consensus around a reform roadmap that employs common standards for student achievement; a major foundation is overhauling its investment strategy to have greater impact on disadvantaged youths; and, a legal services organization wants to figure out how to maximize the effect of its legal services for the poor. Rosenberg arrived at Bridgespan well prepared. A Harvard graduate, with degrees in law and business, he served stints both in politics and government, overseeing assistance programs to the former Soviet Union for the State Department, and coordinating international trade issues for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. In 1984, he managed the US Senate campaign for then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. In the business sector, he was a senior executive at two Massachusetts companies, joining Bain in 1996, where he focused on healthcare issues. At the same time, he headed up the firm's pro bono work with Charleston High School, and served on the boards of two other schools. But even for a veteran business consultant, well schooled in social issues, there's been a learning curve at Bridgespan. For his Bain clients, increasing shareholder value was the undisputed goal. However, agreeing on metrics to define success for nonprofits is more complex, and the audience can be wary. Recalls Rosenberg, "A few times I said, 'In the business world, here's how you’d think about that.' They looked at me like I had three heads and said, 'We don't think like that around here.'" He quickly realized that he had to clearly demonstrate how a business analysis can help promote a group's social mission. Of his Bridgespan partnership, the 54-year-old Rosenberg says the challenges and satisfaction may keep him onboard until retirement.

Bridgespan is small but rapidly growing, with offices in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. The group is recruiting leaders like Rosenberg, who want to use their lifetime of management knowledge to help nonprofits achieve breakthrough results.

While Dunn became caught up in the Web 2.0 buzz sweeping Silicon Valley, Spaly was fixated on pants. It was a project born out of frustration. His athletic body didn't comfortably fit into fashionable trousers designed, in his words, for "anorexic Europeans or New York runway models." Tired of paying for pricey alterations, Spaly did what any self-respecting business grad student would do—borrowed a sewing machine from his girlfriend and started ripping apart seams, then reconfigured them in search of the perfect pattern. "I'd never sewn before, not once," admits Spaly, but he persevered.

When Spaly finally hit on a design that passed the test, the grad student stitched up a sample, financed a modest production run, and started showing off his innovation to friends. The high-quality corduroy pants accommodated muscular thighs, calves, and rears, making them an instant hit. He named his alternative trousers, Bonobos, after a chimpanzee-related breed that makes love, not war.

To help create a website, Spaly asked Dunn to snap a few pictures—and those pictures soon morphed into a business partnership. Dunn helped turned Spaly's low-tech pants into an online retail venture, bonobospants.com. In October, they officially launched Bonobos, Inc., in New York City, with Dunn as CEO and Spaly as designer. The startup aims to be an iconic brand of men's pants, evangelized by loyal customers and sold through the internet, with a noquestions- asked return policy.

Spaly and Dunn credit their time at Bain as instrumental in helping them develop as entrepreneurs, and the Bain network has been invaluable. "The basic business intuition our Bain upbringing provided has guided nearly every important decision we've made," says Spaly. Adds Dunn, "Our strategy sessions are riddled with Bain vernacular, two of our key investors and advisers are favorite managers from our AC days, and we are stacking our management team with 'top bucket' Bain alums."

In December, Bonobos closed an angel financing round led by a couple of Stanford professors and diehard customers, followed by feature stories in Men’s Vogue, Time Out New York and DNR (a weekly magazine about apparel and fashion retailing). Dunn and Spaly know the daunting odds faced by startups and to beat them, the entrepreneurs plan to continue drawing on Bain insights. And it doesn't hurt these days that Spaly no longer has to tinker with a sewing machine to stitch a straight seam.