Hone

Chapter 10Walking the Talk

 

We should start this chapter with a confession: We weren't totally confident we wanted to write it. We debated the idea of writing about Deloitte's journey with honing over the last decade. We (and our colleagues) do not want to present Deloitte as an example of a company that has gotten it perfectly right. We are proud of how we've grown and the success we've had as an organization, no doubt, but there are a lot of things we could have done – and still can do – better. We are not immune to some of the performance‐sapping tendencies that other large organizations succumb to from time to time that we've written about in our three books. On the other hand, we are a large organization that has grown materially over the last decade – doubling our size in the United States – and lead the market in many of the services we choose to compete in. We also are frequently asked by clients (who we hope are also readers of our books) for examples of what Deloitte does. So we'll choose to go there. This story is going to disproportionately focus on the Deloitte US organization, not because of a desire to exclude the other parts of the world but because that's where we have the most detail given Steve's previous role as our chief strategy officer.

THE BACKGROUND

Deloitte's honing journey began with the advent of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX), passed in 2002 in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal. The law established the Public Company Accounting Oversight ...