Professional Firms
Accountancy / PwC

They Said It Couldn’t be Done: When Creatives and a Big 4 Collide

Burgess COMMENTARY
At one level I am really impressed by the success described in this article, but in some other ways I am very disappointed. I trained with Cooper Brothers & Co in London in the early 1960s when accountancy was still a profession and the accounting firms were not dominated by consultancy. The role of audit (assurance) was very important, giving corporate advice much less so. So fast forward 50 years and the world has very very serious socio-enviro-economic dysfunction and things like inequality at all time highs, and environmental degradation and climate risks reaching existential levels, and corruption rampant and far worse than a few decades back, and refugee and migrant flows around the world at record levels, and banks and corporate treasuries awash in surplus money and governments almost everywhere pretty much insolvent ... so yes, this was a great little article, but in the bigger scheme of things the big 8 (OOPS big 4) accounting firms have really opted out of doing what they really need to be doing professionally to help make the world a better place! Peter Burgess ... http://truevaluemetrics.org
Peter Burgess

They Said It Couldn’t be Done: When Creatives and a Big 4 Collide

When we were presented with an opportunity to change a 150+ year old business model and create a new kind of digital model, the risk that it might not succeed was part of the excitement. The more the skeptics from the agency and consulting worlds said it wouldn’t work, the more we were driven to make it a reality. Could a Big 4 attract and retain top creative talent into a global consultancy? Some insisted that bringing the resources of a Fortune 100 to cutting edge digital creative talent was impossible. And they were certain that whatever we built, it would never survive let alone become greater than its parts.

The journey was complicated and riddled with potholes. Just as we do for our clients, we were creating something that didn’t exist yet, and although we knew we were moving forward, it was hard to visualize where the path would take us.

We set the bar high, nothing was sacred and we broke everything to rebuild it. We dissolved discipline silos, evolved career paths, changed processes and tools, built new environments, infused emerging tech and innovation sprints, re-imagined our talent experience and rethought our engagement methodology. The more we embraced change as our new normal, the more we realized we had a lot more to do. But we believed there was a better way of working and we had the stamina to make it a reality.

A big part of that is bringing people with wildly different roles and backgrounds together in our Experience Centers—business executives, backend systems managers, UX designers, end users, compliance officers—and strip away the titles and hierarchies that get in the way of inspiration. That’s the first step in taking people to the future and helping them design their way back.

Everyday, I see first-hand how excited the team is as we transform businesses and make a difference by creating new experiences for our clients’ customers and employees. We love the challenge.

Throughout the journey our team has made a difference for a variety of organizations, ranging from United Airlines and Make a Wish, to Pernod. We delivered digital in new ways, including transforming legacy systems into new digital platforms. I’m proud to share that we’ve led the industry in awards over the last few years with Salesforce; this year we were recognized with two Consulting Partner Innovation Awards, one in retail and the other in travel & transportation.

These awards are a testament to the quality of our people and what’s possible. We’ve invested heavily in creating a culture that drives innovation. Where diverse people—MBAs and MFAs, graffiti artists and PhDs, UX designers and data scientists— are inspired to work differently. It’s a culture where everyone knows they make a difference and can see the results on a daily basis.

We give people the energy and the permission to solve problems together rapidly, and empower them to take the journey that will work for them. This collaborative, immersive approach enables us to explore opportunities, create solutions and test them rapidly, and deliver faster than clients thought possible. Clients experience the difference as we compress what could have been months of work into days.

For me, the biggest win is when we see that thinking permeate in our Experience Centers--a no-idea-is-crazy-enough environment--empowering our clients to understand how to be nimble, collaborative, and move swiftly with impact by tapping into the backbone of their enterprise to take advantage of their own scale.

Every day we create something that doesn’t exist. We surprise ourselves, challenge the norm, and empower one another to step outside our comfort zone--all in an effort to make what’s next.

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