Doug
Principal, Evanston Office
Education
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Graduate School of Business
M.B.A. in Marketing and Production Management, 1987
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
B.A. in Government, 1982
ZS Career Path
Consultant, 1987
Manager, 1989
Principal, 1993
On the work
“My favorite kinds of projects are commercial effectiveness improvement projects in which we help change an organization and increase its capabilities to sell. It’s rewarding to create a high performance organization working along side its people and processes. It’s not a simple answer or report we are producing. We help affect change within the organization, and we help the client create new capabilities, things that they could not do before working with ZS.”
On ZS values
Do the Right Thing: “While working as a manager, I developed a great professional relationship with one of our clients. Even as he changed companies, we maintained this relationship. One Saturday morning at 4:00 am I got a call from him. Now a global regional manager, he needed me in Beijing the next Tuesday to help him solve an organizational issue there. The point to this story revolves around the trust, loyalty and long-term relationship we developed by sticking with each other over the years and throughout our professional development, trust enough to call me at 4:00 am on a Saturday morning. By the way, that wake-up call turned into a three-year project for ZS, and this client is now global vice chairman of his company.”
On life outside work
“My two daughters take up most of my time outside of work. In the summer they are involved in soccer and swimming, but in the winter we do woodworking. I have my workbench and they have their mini benches, and we build stuff together. I also enjoy grilling in the backyard for friends and family. I basically grill everything. My tenet is ‘If it can be grilled, I will grill it.’”
On the Evanston office
“Evanston has great schools and is a good place to raise a family. It’s safe to wander around and the city is very accessible. We’re close enough to downtown Chicago to enjoy the great things about a big city, but we are not too close. So we are still able to live in a quiet neighborhood and not in a high rise. The people that live here are friendly and diverse. In fact, on my block of thirty homes, there are probably ten different nationalities and 40 different professions.”