The Loss of a Partner

I am sad to hear of the death of my former A.T. Kearney partner, Jim Morehouse. We often joked when he was working for me on a project in Korea that he had literally been with the firm longer than I was alive.     

I was just sharing a story about him with some people at the firm last week, when he took the entire A.T. Kearney team to the only French restaurant in Korea and handed me the $10K tab since it was my project.

I still remember flying with him overseas and watching him go through a foot high stack of emails that his assistant had printed out for him and watching him write responses for her to send when he got back to Chicago.

I remember explaining to him how a semiconductor was actually made while we were starting a supply chain project for Texas Instruments and two days later him delivering an on point insight about where to hold inventory at the test and assembly stage.

Jim was an amazing advisor internally and with clients.  He was focused on "what is the real question, here" and more importantly the client and our teams.

"I wanted to introduce Ben Smith to you... He is one of our young partners who has just accepted a spot supporting the White house... I thought you might give him some advice on dealing with the Federal Bureaucracy..."

One of my last emails from Jim was this above email  when I had just start working for the government after 9-11 and he reached out unsolicited and introduced me to 4 retired senior officials to give me advice and within days people like the former Deputy Undersecretary for Logistics calling me on my cell phone because "Jim said we should talk" 

I was fortunate enough to see him a couple of times over the past few years and he was as interested as ever in what clients were doing and as important to him, what I was doing. Jim was the definition of the firm to me and can't believe he is gone.