But there would never be any argument about how perfectly Mitt Romney fit the image of the smooth and supremely confident executive, with never a hair out of place. Privately, his colleagues knew differently.

On his way to the top, Rehnert says, Romney sweat his way through the underarms of so many shirts that his colleagues came up with a term for it: "pitting."

A wanted man

Mitt Romney had long been seen as a hot commodity, even before he entered the job market.

In 1971, he enrolled in a new dual-degree program offered by Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. He had originally planned to earn just his MBA. But his father, George, a former presidential candidate who was then serving as U.S. housing secretary, insisted a law degree would be more valuable. Ever the diplomat, Mitt Romney found a way to please his dad and himself.

The compromise quickly paid off. Consulting firms and investment banks were always on the hunt for future employees among Harvard's best and brightest, and the select group enrolled in the university's competitive dual-degree program seemed an obvious place to start.

Not long after he arrived on the Cambridge campus carrying a beat-up briefcase that bore his father's initials in faded gold, Romney appeared on the radar of the Boston Consulting Group. Charles Faris was assigned the task of wooing Romney for BCG, then one of the hottest companies in the nascent consulting field. Over the course of Romney's four years at Harvard, Faris kept in frequent contact with the clean-cut grad student, treating him to occasional lunches and dinners, and inviting him to company events.

As Romney neared graduation, Faris found plenty of competition in trying to hire him.

"He was an outstanding recruit with exceptional grades, and he was the very charming, smooth, attractive son of a former presidential candidate," Faris says. "So everybody was bending over backward to get their hands on him."

Faris's flattery paid off. Shortly after Romney left Harvard in 1975, having graduated with honors from the law school and in the top 5 percent of his class at the business school, he began work at BCG.

He approached his consultant job with the complementary skills that had been sharpened during his parallel lives at Harvard. His legal training taught him to ask challenging questions, to play the role of devil's advocate, and to use an adversarial process in an effort to get answers. Business school developed his ability to reconcile conflicting data and differing points of view. It also helped shape him as a leader and team-builder.

Companies nationwide were clamoring to hire BCG's consultants, who analyzed mountains of financial data to lower costs, improve production, and gain market share. In his new job, Romney rapidly established a reputation as a rising star.