One on One with Slalom's John Tobin

What type of business model survives a recession? "Focused, nimble and flexible, [with] great talent" is how John Tobin, national general manager of Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based project leadership and information technology consultancy, describes what works. Tobin, a former Ernst & Young consultant who started Slalom in 2001 as a consulting arm of accounting and financial staffing firm Two Degrees, recently offered some insight into Slalom's model.

Consulting: In your role as director of architecture at AT&T Wireless, you were in charge of hiring consulting firms. How did that shape your philosophy at Slalom?

Tobin: A lot of times when you're with a larger consulting company, you can't help but think, just based on the way the model works, that if you're just an individual on a project that it's not that valuable and it's not that great for the firm overall. But what I saw was that the people I wanted to work with as a client cared about my project. They cared about me. They didn't care as much about their firm, and I know it's a fine line there, but you can see it in how the consultants worked with you. Were they doing the right things for me or AT&T Wireless at the time, or were they doing things that were going to set up for projects two or three years down the road for them? And [they] really pushed me on making decisions that were ultimately going to help their company.