The mystique starts with her name. Orit Gadiesh. How do you pronounce it anyway? Is she Arab? Israeli, then. Almost six feet tall in four-inch heels. Rumored to have been a tank commander in the Israeli Army. And her hair? It’s purple. Really. This straight-talking woman with short black skirts and chunky jewelry has made it to the top of the male-dominated, monogrammed field of management consulting. For 20 years, she has advised CEOs of huge international corporations how to keep ahead of their competition. And now she’s chairman (don’t call her chairperson) of the board of one of the world’s most influential consulting companies.

The more you learn about Orit Gadiesh, the more you want to know — and the more elusive she becomes.

Gadiesh is probably the most prominent woman in consulting today and clearly the most colorful. She is Chairman of Bain & Company, which is based in Boston, with 25 offices and 1,800 employees worldwide. One of the premiere corporate strategy shops, Bain has advised more than 1,500 major businesses, including Chrysler, Raytheon, Microsoft and Digital Equipment Corp. Gadiesh herself has worked with hundreds.

It’s not only world business leaders who seek Gadiesh for counsel. Former Gov. William Weld asked her to lead a trade mission to Israel. She helps steer strategy for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and serves as treasurer of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable. She even showed up in a political ad for friend and former colleague Mitt Romney during his 1994 U.S. Senate race against Edward M. Kennedy.

But while stories about Orit Gadiesh (pronounced “Oh-reet Guh-deesh“) abound inside Bain and the consulting industry, she is hardly a household name in Massachusetts. In fact, she may be better known in the global business centers of London, Paris and Tokyo than in Boston’s financial district. Not too surprising when you consider she spends more time in hotels abroad than at home in Brookline.

And there are other reasons for the “Orit mystique.” Bain & Co. has long been considered the most secretive of consulting firms. While Bain executives may dispute that description, they don’t go out of their way to correct the impression. Gadiesh does not like publicity, and her public relations people warn me not to ask anything too personal. She won’t tell her age, which Brookline town records show to be 47 as of Jan. 31. She won’t disclose her salary, which an industry newsletter estimates to be at least a couple million dollars a year. She won’t name any clients. She won’t give details about her work. And she doesn’t want to talk about Massachusetts business, politics, or public policy because she feels there are many people more qualified than her. Yet I get two hours for an interview, and she’ll (grudgingly) let a photographer take pictures.

It’s About the Client

The Boston offices of Bain & Co. are located in the heart of the Back Bay, yet out of the way, on the top floors of Copley Place. It takes a while to walk there – up two escalators, two elevators and down several hallways. Boston is the company’s largest office and its headquarters, with 400 employees, including more than 250 consultants. Visitors report to the seventh floor of Tower #2. Bain & Co. is down a short hallway to the left. Bain Capital, the venture capital firm headed by Belmont millionaire and former U.S. Senate candidate Mitt Romney is to the right.

I am told that her office is typical, with a desk, filing cabinets, bookcases and a view of the city. But I can’t see for myself. Gadiesh is working on a client project and has confidential papers out. I wait in a conference room off the main reception area.

Yes, her hair is purple. Not grape really. More of a violet, especially when she’s in direct light. Today it’s pulled back and tied with a fluffy black bow. In fact, she’s wearing black from head to toe – a stylish black jacket, black skirt, sheer black stockings and black high-heeled shoes (maybe two or three inches high, definitely not four). The only other colors are silver, gold and jewel-tones on her earrings, bracelets and brooch.

She’s not in a great mood. She broke a tooth earlier, and apparently had a hectic morning with clients. She chooses a few squares of cheese from a generously-piled platter on the sideboard, takes a couple of crackers, pours a cup of coffee, then sits at one end of the conference table. I get the feeling she’s not thrilled to be here, but is determined to keep her promise.

We talk about Bain and the consulting industry for a while. That Bain is one of three top firms doing strategy consulting, along with McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group….That other big consultancies like Andersen, Price Waterhouse and Deloitte & Touche, specialize in other areas, such as technology or operations….That “re-engineering” doesn’t have to mean layoffs, but it has been interpreted that way….That Bain doesn’t believe in fads….That any good consulting relationship is a dialogue; you never know the answer the day you arrive…. And frankly, Gadiesh doesn’t seem too engaged. Maybe even bored.

Then, while describing her daily schedule, she explains that she may be in Boston, she may be abroad…. And thinking she said she “may be robbed,” I tell her I read she was mugged once in London. Suddenly her face lights up and she laughs, quite loudly. “Oh yeah, it was a long time ago. Where did you read that?” she says in the slightest Israeli accent. “God, I forgot about that. When was that?”

Gadiesh apologizes for not speaking clearly, but her tooth hurts, and then she tells the story: One night during the late 1980s or early ’90s, she was walking through London on her way to dinner with a client — the head of European operations for an American company — when somebody knocked her down and stole her bag. Many people would have been so ruffled by the experience they would try to get out of the meeting, or be so distracted it would be a disaster. Not Gadiesh. A few minutes later she showed up at the restaurant — in her sneakers. Her dress shoes were inside the stolen bag. “I just got up, did what I needed to do, and walked into dinner with the client,” she says, throwing her head back and laughing again.

It wasn’t particularly pleasant, Gadiesh says. She was slightly injured. But it didn’t phase her. She says she rarely feels uncomfortable, even in circumstances that would be awkward for others. “This is not about me, ever,” she says. “It’s not about proving that you’re smart or you’re this or you’re that. It’s about focusing on the client and what they need. So if somebody stole your shoes and you look silly when you walk into a restaurant, you just explain what happened and you move on. And frankly, you’re more comfortable when you walk home.”

Brains and Chemistry

Mitt Romney calls it “brains and chemistry.” That’s always been the secret of her success, he says.

He’s leaning back in a comfortable chair in his well-appointed office at Bain Capital, trying to recall his first impressions of Orit Gadiesh 20 years ago. We’re sitting at a large glass table near a window overlooking Boston. Large framed photographs of his wife and sons fill the wall next to his desk. An orange-and-blue Oriental rug covers the floor.

Romney joined Bain & Co. in 1977, after leaving the rival Boston Consulting Group, and he served on the recruiting committee that interviewed Gadiesh for a job. She was 26 years old, fresh out of Harvard Business School, where she graduated in the top 5 percent of her class. She was one of the first three female consultants the firm hired. Today Romney remembers thinking she was “exceptionally bright and very confident, with a clear sense of where she wanted to go.” But he adds, chuckling, he never would have guessed she’d become “one of the most successful consultants in American industry.”

For someone so focused on her work, it’s surprising how serendipitous her path to Bain had been. Gadiesh grew up in the port city of Haifa, the daughter of a prominent businessman who headed Monsanto’s Israeli subsidiary. But she had no interest in business. Going to high school in Tel Aviv, she hoped to be an urban planner, a career that sounded exciting in the still young state of Israel. But she had a problem — she did not want to study architecture, sociology, anthropology or any of the other usual subjects required for a planning degree. Psychology was the closest thing. So she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Hebrew University, and figured she would get a doctorate and teach.

But first she wanted to see the U.S., and got what she remembers as a “really uninteresting job” at the Israeli consulate in New York. Gadiesh, who insists “this is a true story,” says she never even considered studying business until she started dating a Harvard Business School graduate. One day they were joking about how smart she was and she said, “Gee, well I think I could have gone to Harvard Business School.” And he said, “Yeah, you’re a smartie, you could.” So she did. Not yet fluent in English, she wrote her application in Hebrew, then translated it with help from friends.

“So you can see I came across things I ended up doing in a bizarre way,” she says, without a hint of embarrassment or apology. “Obviously it wasn’t very informed thinking.”

Three years after her arrival at Bain, Gadiesh was promoted to project team manager and started working directly with clients. Colleagues say she quickly developed an uncanny — and unparalleled — rapport with senior executives of major American companies. Romney says that was unusual for a woman, and for a foreigner. Soon they were asking for Orit Gadiesh by name. Some even invited her to private dinner meetings where they would seek career advice.

The Chairman’s Secretary

Gadiesh says she has never spent much time thinking about being a woman in a male-dominated field. But that’s not to say no one else has had a problem with it. Many clients at first would not take her seriously. Even today she is mistaken “quite a bit” for the chairman’s secretary. But she never gets upset. “I just very quickly in five minutes let people know what I’m there to do,” she says. “And I think people very quickly forget, even people who might be thinking, ‘Oh, my God, can we really have a woman consulting us?’ …If you’re good at what you’re doing, people start focusing on what you say.” The burden is on you to make others feel comfortable, she says.

Once, early in her career, she shocked an auto company executive who assumed Orit Gadiesh was a man. They met two days before a project kickoff meeting and he could not contain himself, Gadiesh recalled. “He went on and on….’Gee, this is going to be really fun….It’s going to be really interesting to see how people react.’ ” Finally she asked if he was uncomfortable with her, and he said no, but he was worried about everyone else who was supposed to attend. The next day, she had someone from the company’s office call all 12 people to make it clear she was a woman. “I let them all know ahead of time, so nobody had to look embarrassed. Whatever they thought they kept to themselves,” she said. “And I worked there for five years.”

But Gadiesh says her best weapon against sexist attitudes has always been a sense of humor. In one legendary exchange at a steel company, the chief financial officer was talking about arranging visits to other companies, because people in the industry frequently share information. Then he looked up and realized Gadiesh was one of three Bain consultants in the room. “He said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know about Orit.’ Everybody looked at him, and he said, ‘Well, women are considered bad luck in our industry,’ ” Gadiesh recalled. “There was stunned silence…Nobody knew what to say.” She responded from the gut: “Well, if that’s the way it is, you should make sure I go to every one of your competitors.” Everybody cracked up. And she went on the tours.

The Hair

It was around this time that Gadiesh adopted her trademark hair color. Legend has it that, like her decision to go to business school, it was not carefully calculated. The way Mitt Romney remembers it, it was an accident. He says Gadiesh once told him she had just planned to have her hair treated to bring out the highlights and something went wrong. But there was no time to do anything about it because she was on her way to a client meeting. So she showed up with purple hair, offering no explanation for the unusual look. After the meeting, the word went out about this “very aggressive, powerful consultant with the purple hair,” Romney said. The story circulated around the company, and the color stuck. Gadiesh laughs. She has heard this story before, along with several other versions that have made the rounds for years. But it’s not true. Gadiesh says she can’t remember exactly when or why she started “highlighting” (her word for it) her hair the way she does now, but it was some time in the 1980s. “I don’t even think people said much to me about it for a long time,” she says, “and I didn’t particularly pay much attention to it, frankly.” She says she continues to do it simply because she likes the look.

Leadership

Meanwhile, back in Boston, things were not going well for Bain & Co. Bill Bain founded the firm in 1973, after leaving the Boston Consulting Group with two former clients and six former colleagues. He distinguished the company by recommending not only how businesses could solve their problems, but by helping them implement the recommendations. He wanted his consultants to work directly with CEOs so real changes could be made. And he promised he wouldn’t help any of his clients’ competitors — a policy that contributed to the company’s mystique. Revenues skyrocketed in the beginning.

By the mid-1980s, Bain and his founding partners decided to cash out. They sold 30 percent of the company to create an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, and received about $200 million in return. But the firm had to borrow the money, leaving it with $25 million in annual interest payments. The debt swamped the company. In 1988, Bain laid off 10 percent of its employees, and more layoffs followed in 1990.

In 1991, Bain nearly went bankrupt. A headline in The Boston Globe asked: “Did Greed Cripple Bain & Co.?” Bill Bain stepped down, and Mitt Romney stepped in. Romney, who kept his position at Bain Capital, says the firm’s finances were in such bad shape that it was not going to be able to make payroll in two weeks. He renegotiated the debt, and convinced the founders to return $100 million.

Gadiesh played a crucial part in holding the company together during this crisis, according to Romney and other colleagues. Several partners left, and she certainly could have found another high-paying job. But along with nine other top partners asked to serve on a policy committee, Gadiesh signed an agreement to stay for at least a year. She also landed several big clients, which was key in helping the company to start rebuilding revenues.

Bain & Co. has been back in the black ever since, according to Romney. Gadiesh says revenues are growing at almost 20 percent a year. Being privately held, the company does not have to release figures and chooses not to. Consultants News, the industry newsletter, estimates Bain brought in $450 million in 1996, making it the 20th largest consulting firm in the country.

Today many consider Gadiesh the spiritual backbone of Bain & Co., and trace her emergence as a leader to an emotional speech at the company’s 1992 annual meeting — the words of which are emblazoned on a plaque in the lobby of the Boston headquarters and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. Although the company had accomplished a financial turnaround, it seemed to her that it still needed a “pride turnaround.” She felt the consultants had lost the sense of shared passion and confidence that made the company strong. Using examples to illustrate their accomplishments, Gadiesh urged her colleagues to once again feel good about what they were doing. It was touchy-feely stuff for a group used to hard data. But they responded. Gadiesh got a standing ovation, and several people thanked her. “She did an incredible job articulating what it meant to be a part of Bain,” recalled David Harding, a director, who joined the company in 1983. “That was a visible manifestation of what leadership is all about.”

When Romney left in 1993, he recommended that Gadiesh take over as chairman. The vote of the partners was “overwhelmingly supportive,” says Barry Harrington, managing director of the Boston office who served on the nominating committee at the time. He won’t say whether the vote was unanimous; only the nominating committee knows. But she was re-elected to a second three-year term in 1996. Harrington says she was the obvious choice to represent the company, because she “embodies the best of Bain & Co.” — the ability to make a difference with clients.

That’s why Gadiesh still spends 70 percent of her time working with clients, and doesn’t really want to talk about being Chairman, a role which consists primarily of developing new client relationships, visiting Bain offices and helping to make policy decisions. She typically works more than 70 hours a week, and is known to stay until midnight with the rest of a case team before a big presentation. Gadiesh explains: “After the late 1980s, one of the things we learned…is the reason the founders probably did what they did is because they got so removed from what the rest of us did. They really weren’t working with clients.”

Whatever It Takes

Clients seem to appreciate her intensity. Vincent J. Mullarkey, chief financial officer of Maynard-based Digital Equipment Corp., says Gadiesh was one of the reasons the company chose Bain over other consulting firms for a major strategic change project several years ago. He calls her “brilliant,” with an “incredible business mind and strategic mind.” Gadiesh was extensively involved, working directly with CEO Robert Palmer and other top executives. Mullarkey said all were impressed with her tenacity, doing “whatever it takes, staying with it, getting the issue resolved.” She attended most of the key project meetings, often working through weekends and evenings to meet the company’s needs. Digital executives also appreciated that she “calls it as she sees it,” Mullarkey said, rather than being preoccupied with how to package her message. “So there’s a lot of direct and candid engagement,” he said, though he would not give details.

Gadiesh’s colleagues at Bain have plenty of their own examples. Bain director Harding tells the story of a tough meeting with the CEO of an industrial products company in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s when Gadiesh stated what many were thinking, but no one else dared to say. The CEO was going on and on criticizing the Bain team’s work, saying, “You have a problem with this, and you have a problem with that.” Exasperated, Gadiesh interrupted and said, “No, you have a problem with this.” The room fell silent. She went on to explain the rationale behind the recommendations — that the company was a satisfied underperformer and that the root of the problem was the chief executive officer. The CEO took a deep breath, said she was right, and called her out of the room. They talked for half an hour, and when they returned, the change was remarkable, Harding says. The group went on to have a productive meeting.

Gadiesh says she learned not to be intimidated by important people when she served in the Israeli Army, a requirement for all Israeli teens. Though rumored to have been a tank commander, she actually was assigned as an aide to the deputy chief of staff, Ezer Weizmann, today the President of Israel. At age 17, she was in the war room, helping Army brass figure out what to do during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period known as the War of Attrition, when the country was attacked regularly on all borders. “You learn very quickly they are people too and you respect them,” she says. “There’s a difference between respect and intimidation. That’s what I learned.”

As inspirational as her straight-talking style can be, some say it can be a little jolting, especially when she swears in the middle of important meetings. “If she thinks something is out of line, she’s not demure about it. I’ve seen that shock some people because they don’t expect a woman to be so in-your-face,” says director Barry Harrington.

In fact, Gadiesh’s style has not always gone over so well. Dan Quinn, a former Bain consultant who is now Chairman and CEO of Rath & Strong, one of the Boston area’s oldest consulting firms, says that Gadiesh’s “brutal honesty” played well in the auto and steel industries. But at least once, at a pharmaceutical company on Park Avenue in Manhattan, “they could not get beyond the façade.” Quinn, who was part of the Bain case team, said Gadiesh was trying to explain to the company chairman that he would have to take over another company, or be taken over himself. “She was in the right position to do it, she was his counselor, we were the consultant of choice in that organization…but he didn’t think she was reading the industry right; she could not convince his board,” Quinn says. It turned out the company was taken over and no longer exists. “She was right, but so what? They’re gone, and her style didn’t play,” Quinn said. “Not everybody wants that.”

No Time to Waste

Time for a few photographs. Gadiesh has a great walk — tall, straight, head up, looking forward, very fluid, she almost glides. She exudes confidence, determination. Maybe a little arrogance. No time to waste.

We try to pose her in the board room, sitting on one of the polished wood tables, but she’s clearly uncomfortable. She thinks she would look ridiculous. “I would never do that,” she says. The photographer tries to break the ice by joking about Annie Leibowitz shooting Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub full of milk. It’s not going anywhere. “You should have tried me in a tub of milk,” she says, joking, as she walks out the door.

A Lot of Fun

Friends and colleagues say Gadiesh is a lot of fun. Dan Quinn says she’s someone you’d definitely want to have at a dinner party. In high school, she played Eliza Dolittle in “My Fair Lady,” and she obligingly recites a line, laughing, when asked to say “Just you wait, Henry Higgins” in Hebrew. She once dressed up in a red sequins jacket to sing a parody of “New York, New York” with the Bain Band, complete with kick line, during an annual meeting. And David Harding says she’s been seen playing the drinking game “Quarters” with young consultants at 2 a.m.

But Gadiesh says she most enjoys spending time with her husband, Grenville Byford, a one-time Bainie and native Englishman who owns the chain of John Harvard’s Brew Houses. (They don’t have children.) She likes to sip wine in the kitchen while he cooks gourmet Indian, Italian, and French meals, and to take walks with their sheepdog, Yoffee (the name means “beauty” in Hebrew), around the neighborhood of their million-dollar, vine-covered home on a quiet street near The Country Club in Brookline. She’s also a voracious reader, and once counted that she had read 100 books in a year. And not Danielle Steele. In November, she was reading a philosophy book on Hegel and Nietzsche and their approach to anti-Semitism, and another about math and physics. She also devours military history and fiction from around the world.

Friends call her fiercely loyal. Sheryl Marshall, a prominent Boston stockbroker with the firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, says Gadiesh is one of the most thoughtful people she knows. Although she travels so much that she practically lives in “a different stratosphere than most of us,” Marshall says she still calls from the road every week just to touch base.

That sense of loyalty is probably why she was willing to make a brief foray into politics for Mitt Romney during his 1994 Senate campaign. While admirers say she’s an astute observer of the state political scene, she doesn’t claim to be politically up on Massachusetts. She registers to vote under the state’s no-party designation of “unenrolled” (though her husband registers as a Democrat). Gadiesh says she was happy to speak on videotape about Romney’s role saving the firm from bankruptcy, even though she did not know the segment would be used for a TV ad in the Senate race. Then Kennedy’s people took the video clip, distorted it, and used it to attack Romney’s record on hiring and promoting women at Bain Capital. Gadiesh says she “didn’t feel great” about being catapulted into the spotlight. “It wasn’t particularly fun…[But] there was nothing I could do about it,” she adds. “So I went on with life.”

Gadiesh remains close with her parents and sister in Israel, and her place of birth, even maintaining dual citizenship. She also is committed to the new global peace institute set up by former Prime Minister Shimon Peres; she serves on the board of directors.

We’re in the middle of talking about how Shimon Peres sends her books from Israel, and Gadiesh is trying to remember how to spell the last name of author A.B. Yehoshua. “I think that’s with a Y,” she says, when she suddenly looks at her watch, and with only the slightest pause, as if she’s continuing the same sentence, adds: “And I’ve got to run.” We shake hands, she gives a little squeeze, and she’s out the door. No mention of where she’s going.