Barry Salzberg became CEO of Deloitte LLP in June of 2007, after serving for four years as U.S. managing partner, and has steered the Big Four firm toward increased revenues, while launching a number of new initiatives in the firm's practice areas and culture, including its much-heralded plan to build a large learning and development facility in Texas. Accounting Today sat down with Salzberg a little after his first anniversary as CEO to discuss Deloitte University, "green" consulting, mass career customization and more.
What were some of your primary goals going in as CEO?
Salzberg: My primary goals were to focus on our clients, on our people, on profitable growth, and on how we do business. Each of those four things had a series of tactical initiatives that I felt we really needed to drive. That was the platform on which I was elected as CEO, and it was the platform that I executed in the first year.
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A year out, what would you say?
Salzberg: A year out, I'm thrilled with the results. I would be surprised if it was not market-leading growth for the Big Four firms globally. One key focus area was to re-energize our commitment to clients with what we're calling the Deloitte Client Experience.
The year also included a significant decision to invest in our people in a number of different ways, with the most significant being the approval by my board of my recommendation to invest in a learning and development facility, which right now we're calling Deloitte University. And we made a significant investment in the concept of workplace flexibility with our emphasis on mass career customization. We invested in social networking for our people, so we have D Street, which is our equivalent of Facebook. We created a Deloitte Film Festival, which was a way for our people to connect with one another and create a video about "What's Your Deloitte" in a very competitive environment, and a whole variety of other accomplishments in the talent agenda. We had our highest profitable growth ever.
Did you find that growth by executing better in areas you were already in, or did you shift the emphasis to new areas?
Salzberg: I think it's probably a little bit of both. Because of our multidisciplinary portfolio, we are able to generate opportunities that bring value to clients. For example, tax and consulting can team together, and our forensic people can team together with our audit people. There's been a series of opportunities that have been created because of that.
Last year, we created a corporate sustainability service line focusing on serving the market in its efforts to go green and to deal with environmental issues. We purchased a couple of businesses that we were not in before, and that generated new business.
Is the sustainability business the result of an acquisition?
Salzberg: No, we developed that on our own within our consulting business, recognizing a marketplace need and some competencies that we had in a number of our service areas and bringing them together under one umbrella. It essentially dovetailed with our personal commitment as an organization to our own greening efforts. I think right now we're probably about 60 or 70 percent of our way through that office-greening program. That spawned the service line at the firm, and the service line produced a decent revenue for us, but we're looking to triple it in a very short order.
