Biography|Christophe De Vusser — The Blue Tower on Avenue Louise Where He Joined Bain

Avenue Louise 326 is the Blue Tower, Henri Montois's 88-metre office slab opened in 1976 and reclad in the mid-1990s.

Bain and Company Belgium has used the 22nd floor of this building as its Brussels address for years. The Belgian branch itself dates to 1990.

Christophe De Vusser walked into that partnership in 2000. He was 28, four years out of Procter and Gamble's chemicals desk, and not yet a name anyone outside the firm would know.

The published record is thin on the first day and thick on what the office later became under him. That is normal. Consulting firms date careers by class year, not by a ribbon-cutting.

What 2000 did decide was the country he would work from for the next two decades. Brussels, not Boston, was the room. Clients were Belgian and European companies, then private-equity funds that needed someone who could read both a plant and a term sheet.

In 2005 the firm gave him its Bright-Dix Award, an internal prize for developing people rather than for a single deal. The date sits five years after the join and twelve years before he took the office as managing partner.

From the pavement the tower is easy to misread as just another Louise high-rise. The ITT Tower and the Louise Tower went up in the same decade, when the avenue was allowed to grow tall.

The pin is the join, not the later titles. Those belong to other memories in this collection. This one is the year a Ghent civil engineer stopped buying detergent chemicals and started writing strategy slides on the 22nd floor.

Photo: EmDee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons