Digital transformation is one of the most
important topics in business today. We are speaking with Joe Atkinson. He's the chief digital officer of PwC. Give us some insight into what is PwC and
where is your focus as a company. PwC is a great brand. Hopefully, a lot of people are familiar with
us. Professional services organization that provides
assurance in our capital markets, provides tax advice and compliance services, and professional
consulting and advisory services for companies that you know well. The top 500 companies are all of our client
base and, of course, all around the world as well. We've been in business for 170 years, keep
changing, and I think we're going to be talking a lot about how we've been changing in this
discussion. Joe, give us a sense of the scale of PwC. We are just about 50,000 people in the U.S.
and just over 0.5 million people around the world, actually 275,000 people now around
the world, so just a very, very large footprint in terms of people. Globally, let's call it $45 billion in revenue
climbing toward $50 billion. You think about the scale of us as a private
company, makes for a pretty big organization. When we talk about digital transformation
at scale, that's what we're talking about when we speak of PwC. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about how do we take all of
those people, starting with our colleagues in the U.S., the 50,000 people here in the
U.S. How do we take all of our people and the 225,000
colleagues they have around the world on this journey with us? You're Chief Digital Officer. What does that role involve? This role was really created because we recognized
the technology was driving a pace of change that we all see. Everybody on this webcast sees that pace of
change. But it was also challenging our people, and
it was challenging our people in new ways. We were seeing technology develop in ways
that that pace was overwhelming to some of our folks. It was certainly overwhelming some of our
clients. At the same time, our people were asking us
for much more engagement. They wanted a better tech experience day-to-day. Our clients were asking us for the same things. They wanted more value. They want more quality as our clients have
always expected from us, but they wanted delivery of services in a more tech-enabled way. Of course, they want us to manage our costs
and be thoughtful about the way that our cost of delivery connects with their efforts to
manage their cost and footprint. All of those pressures, our people, the pace
of change, what the expectations were in the marketplace not only among clients, but regulators,
stakeholders, and we saw this opportunity to say we really needed to elevate our game
in the way that we were equipping our people and taking them on that transformation journey. Help us understand what it really means. I sometimes say that it may be the most overused
term in business of our time. We could probably go back 20 years and pick
which ones were that. Digital may be ours. One of the dangers, Michael, to your point
of digital transformation, is it does mean a lot of different things to different people. Sometimes, frankly, those things don't mean
anything at all in the way work gets done or the way clients get served or businesses
are built. For us, it was very much about how do we change
the way work gets done? How do we change the experience for our clients? It wasn't just to make it feel digital. This wasn't about branding, positioning, or
even channels. It was really about can we deliver work in
more innovative ways. Can we deliver work in a more efficient way? How do we unlock the power of an unbelievable
pool of talent in 270,000-plus people around the world so that they can help us do that
in an even more constructive way? For us, it was very much about work that we've
done in some places for a long time and other places new work, but how do we rethink that
work and do it in a different way? That's pretty interesting, the notion of saying
that digital transformation is about doing work in a new way. Is that uniquely true for PwC because you're
a professional services firm or do you think digital transformation, broadly, is about
changing how we work? I'm biased on the question, right? I really do think, at its heart, if digital
transformation isn't about the way we work then, candidly, I'm not sure what it is about
because there is a lot of distraction you can have about emerging technologies and what
those technologies mean. Everybody that's ever run a large-scale organization
knows you can plug a technology into the environment and not get any change in the way people work
and, frankly, disrupt things even more and not get the business outcomes you're after. For us, the better business outcomes have
to be about delivering work in different ways. When we talk to clients, I have the great
privilege to talking to a lot of our clients across the globe. That's their challenge. They're trying to figure out how to convert
digital transformation, their transformation journey from kind of bumper sticker level
or buzzword level into real lasting change in the organization. They're getting that pressure just as we are. They're getting that pressure from their clients
and consumers, they're getting that pressure from the people that are in their house, and
they're getting it from people that want to be part of their organizations. Joe, you mentioned business outcomes. If we try to find a common denominator for
digital transformation, is that the key? I think it has to be. If you look at the trend line from a technology
perspective, there are better visionaries than me out there that could tell us where
we're going to be in 10 or 15 years. The reality for most executives that I've
spoken with is, they're trying to figure out how to get from where they are today to, frankly,
navigate the next three to five years. Everybody has their favorite phraseology and
pundit's view about how quick technology is driving change. But if you believe what's been said that the
change in technology and the way that we work has been more in the last 20 years than the
200 combined prior, then executives today are facing, actually, one of the most incredible
challenges that any executive has ever faced in history. They've got to figure out how to keep their
people relevant, their service and products relevant, and they've got to do that while
they still have to deliver results to whomever their stakeholders are, whether they're a
private company or public one. If you're having a conversation about digital
and you're not connecting the dots and saying, "Okay, what are the business outcomes I want? Of course, I want happier people, I want to
retain greater talent, I want to deliver things in more efficient ways, I want happier clients,
and I want more effective costs in my delivery chain," if that's not part of the conversation,
my counsel to clients would be, "Step back and really think about you're after and why. How is this different if we use the generic
term "business transformation," because you're talking about business outcomes, different
ways of doing work and what you're not talking about is, well, let's buy new software with
different features. I think business transformation and digital
transformation, the way we've talked about that over the last 20 years, I think they
are intertwined. It's not to say that you should not be buying
software and implementing new solutions and capabilities. Obviously, there are places where that pace
of technology brings incredible benefit in terms of new cloud-based technologies. If you look at the pace with which we can
change enterprise resource planning systems, large-scale financial systems, and operating
systems, the cloud unlocks speed in the deployment of these technologies that is very different
than what we've dealt with in the 20 years prior, so they go hand-in-hand. To me, the challenge is, if you're having
a conversation about digital because you want to talk about how that's positioned or you
want to talk about how that looks to the market, that's a marketing conversation. It's an important one, but it's a marketing
conversation. If you're really talking about, "How do I
deliver this product and delight a customer in a very different way? How do I take the grinding of the gears out
of my client experience, my customer experience, or my people experience and drive a different
business outcome because I unlocked their time and capacity?" that to me is today's
business transformation that we're all talking about as digital transformation. Can you elaborate on that distinction? On the one hand, you're talking about impact
on operations, impact on processes, changing how we do business. Then you made the distinction between the
marketing discussion of digital transformation. Michael, I know you've had great marketing
execs on, so I don't want to steal any great marketing execs' lines. They know this space much better than I do. If you look at the way that we try to have
an engaged consumer discussion, for us it's a B2B discussion. In the B2B space, clients want to know that
you have your front foot from a technology perspective, and that is a really important
marketing discussion. It's a really important dialog with your customers,
but you have to back it up. If I make a promise from a technology experience
perspective and I tell a client, "We're going to give you a much more data-rich, insightful
experience because we're applying technology in new ways," and then I don't deliver that,
I've done the worst of all worlds. I've put a promise out into the marketplace
that I haven't delivered against. I think it's really important to understand
how they fit together. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. They actually fit together in a really powerful
way. Our counsel would be, make sure you have the
business process and the outcomes running right and you're making really good progress. Then engage that dialog with your consumer. Is it fair to say that operations? We're kind of wading through a bunch of different
areas. Is changing operations the foundation or the
essence of this? I always talk about it in the context of people
and technology. Maybe an example will help. We were talking with a team the other day
that was talking with a client that is in the financial services space. They've got to do assessments of damage after
fires. It turns out that's actually a very dangerous
exercise because you have people that have to go in and look. The building might still be damaged or what
have you. The team is now applying drone technology,
so they can do those initial assessments. After that idea hits the table you'd say,
"Well, of course, that makes perfect sense," but somebody has got to be the team that says,
"Hey, wait a minute. There's a different way to assess this damage
with the technology and can we use the drone technology?" There may be different technologies in the
future and there will definitely be different technologies in the future. For us, we often talk about that. How do I create the acumen, the mindset that
causes somebody to think, "I've done this thing the same way, or I might apply the way
I've done something a long time to this new thing, but what I really need to do is apply
a new technology to this thing to do it in a different way." That requires a few things. If I didn't know a drone existed or if I didn't
know that drones were being commercially deployed at scale, then I might never consider how
they could help me in that situation. Of course, we have large enterprise customers
deploying drones in amazing ways. If I didn't know what blockchain could do
to help solve the trust in my system, I might never consider it to help apply to a particular
problem. For me, our effort across all of our people
is, how do I open up their mindset? How do I give them enough education and perspective
on those technologies so that they can start to think about how they apply to solve a problem? I don't need them to be; we certainly have
some, but I don't need them to be the drone expert of the firm or the Ph.D. in analytics,
but I do need them to say, "You know what? There's a better way to get at this and there's
a better technology to help me go after it." We have a comment from Twitter from Arsalan
Khan who says, "A myth that we hear is digital transformation does not affect culture and
are there other myths?" Let's talk about culture and then I'll ask
you about other digital transformation myths that might be out there. The best part about having conversations like
this is, I suspect, if you line five or ten of us chief digital officer types up, Michael,
you might get five or ten different answers because this area is so dynamic. My view is, digital is all about culture. It's at the heart of what we're talking about
because, if I can't connect it to the way people solve problems and work in teams, if
I can't connect it to the way that they're willing to take a risk in solving a problem
differently, if I can't empower them to apply a technology in a way that they're not even
sure it's going to work and that their supervisor has to accept or their manager, director,
partner, whoever may be supervising them has to accept, that risk-taking acceptance of,
I'm going to apply technology in a new way, any one of us have managed large scale teams
knows that that doesn't come because you tell everybody to take risks. That comes because, at the heart of the team,
there's a culture of trust, integrity, going to do the right thing, and going after the
right answer that allows the team to take those kinds of risks. I think, if that's a myth out there, one vote
from my seat. It's all about culture. I think the other myth is, it's all about
technology. That clearly goes right back to the culture
point. Our people, one of the things we are really
proud of is, we made the decision early that we were not going to selectively upskill our
people. We weren't going to make these capabilities,
skills, and knowledge available just to people that we thought were definitely going to need
them. We wanted to make this capability and skill
available to all of our people so that they could work on a journey to take them wherever
their career was going to take them, whether it's with us or anywhere, working with our
clients, working in the community, working in a nonprofit, doing a startup. That commitment, to me, is all about recognizing
that digital transformation, at its heart, is about people. The technology is changing. We know the technology is going to change. The greatest technology any one of us can
apply to a problem today is going to be different in five years. If you bet everything on what the tech is
without helping people adapt to that pace of change in the tech, then we think we're
really missing something and that's why we started with all of our people. We begin with this technology discussion and
we end up with, how do we get people to take risks and have integrity? What's the connection? Why does digital transformation rest on these
culture and people pieces as opposed to, we need different technology? If you think about this idea of, I'm going
to upskill everybody and help them have a wider lens on the application of technology,
first, I have to help them understand what the technologies are. Second, I have to make the investment in training
them in the application of those technologies. I can't just say, "Hey, here are the tech. You should know them." That's acumen and awareness. It's important, but I have to immerse them
in the technology. For us, that was all about data because much
of our work, when we're working with clients, we're exchanging large amounts of data. We're conducting analysis on financial transactions. We're conducting analysis on capital deployments. We're conducting analysis on operational performance,
supply chains, and customers. We're dealing with massive amounts of data
from massive global companies. We knew we needed people to be better with
data, so we invested a lot of time, effort, and money in skilling our people in the use
of data skills. But we also said, these are the data skills
that we're looking for, so we gave them a frame around what we were asking so that they
could direct their energies in the right place. Then we applied what I affectionately call
our accelerators, our kind of catalyst to the mix. We took 2,000 of our people. By the end of this year, it'll be 2,000 of
our people. We asked them to deeply immerse themselves
in the tech to really go after it. We put them on essentially two-year tours,
we protected some of their time so they have learning, and we charge them with going out,
engage with the teams, help them apply the new skills that they have, and help them be
the catalyst that everybody wants to be to change the way work gets done. Here's the example. In that environment, I didn't, frankly, know
exactly what our people would do. We call it Citizen Led Development. It's this innovation that our teams innovate
around. One of the most successful innovations that
we started with, we've had a ton since, but one of the ones that got a lot of attention
early on is, we had a senior associate who was a few years into his or her career, a
senior associate that actually went into our time reporting system. We're a time managed system. We do time reporting to make sure we're being
transparent and accountable with clients and with our own time. None of our people like that process. It's not a fun process. Nobody gets excited about doing that and so
they built a bot, a desktop bot that helped them scrape information from the systems that
the team was using at that particular account and automatically populate the time reporting
system of the firm. There's no rocket science there, but it was
a pain point for our team that, with new tools, they were able to look at and say, "I'm going
to go after that. I'm going to fix it." We think that, on average, that's probably
saving each of our people 10 or 15 minutes a week, 50,000 people at scale. The more important lesson from my perspective
as an executive was, if the team had sent me a note or put a sourcing request in for
funding to say, "I want to streamline the time reporting system," I would have said,
"We've had the same time reporting system forever. It works fine. That's not where I'm going to deploy limited
capital to go change a system." Instead, they deployed their intellectual
capital. They took the tools that we had put in their
hands. They applied it to the problem. Now we have a more efficient process. We have no need to reconcile. The client is seeing the exact information
they should and the team is a little less frustrated with something that they don't
enjoy that doesn't allow them to actually serve the clients in a meaningful way. Those are the types of things we're really
after is, how do I connect that kind of problem-solving so that our people feel ownership for those
pain points in the process, whether they're ours or our clients? They go after them with the technology tools
we're putting in their hands. What's the difference then between the two
scenarios, on the one hand this citizen-led approach versus somebody coming to you and
saying, "Hey, we need to change the time system," and obviously there's no reason to do that
because it works? We often talk about the transformation in
two columns. If you think of citizen-led as, how do I empower
for us, ultimately, 270,000-plus people, there is also an element of business-led transformation? I would say business-led transformation, for
those of us that have been in this space for years, I'll characterize that as the traditional,
large-scale transformation. What we know about that and we've all experienced
it is the top-down, large-scale enterprise transformation, including deployment of large
tech, that those deployments eventually landed a spot where the change stops and it may stall. Stall, stop, struggle: pick your word. You can describe that any way you like. I had one client describe it as the permafrost
layer of their organization. I had another client give me a really important
insight. They said, "Joe, we always say broadly that
people are resistant to change. They're not really resistant to change. They just have to understand the net benefit
of the change. If you ask them to take the risk to go make
something different, they need to understand that there's upside for them and for their
teams and the people they care about on the ground." Business-led transformation can get you so
far. On the other hand, our citizen-led transformation,
Michael, if I gave everybody tools and I told them to go do whatever they would like to
do on any given day to innovate, I'll get some really interesting business-impacting
things and I'll get a bunch of things that are probably really interesting but may not
be business impacting. For us, that combination of business-led plus
citizen-led has put this wonderful saturation of the strategy across the firm so that I
actually do get change throughout all of the levels. We talk a lot about transformation at massive
scale. I firmly believe if we had not attacked it
from the two angles that we probably would have made some progress, some good progress,
but I don't think would have made the progress we've made. You've been alluding to your broader digital
transformation strategy. Can you be a little bit now more explicit? What was the problem you set out to solve
and the plan that you put into place? I'll start with the client pressures because
that was the problem we started out to solve. What were our clients telling us about what
they expected from us? I always joke; they expect more value and
higher quality. I've been searching my whole career for the
client that says, "Just bring it down a notch. You killed it last year and we want a less
from you next year." I've never found that client and, frankly,
I kind of hope I never do. They're always asking us to raise the bar. Then they're saying, "I don't want to be served
the way that I've always been served. Stop with the large stacks of materials. Stop with the heavy reports that, frankly,
half the teams don't read. Stop with the data analysis that I can't make
sense of. Give me a much more tech-enabled experience." By the way, team, if you're in our interest,
you have to manage your costs. How do you do that? That was the business problem we were trying
to solve. For us, relevance is about efficiency. It's about taking nonvalue hours out of that
equation so that people can deliver that insight in a more value, more rapid way. It's also about how do we tell stories. I'll come back to the idea that so much of
what we do is data-centric, so we needed to equip people with not just the tools to ingest,
wrangle, and cleanse that data in a rapid fashion, but we needed to give them the tools
so that they could help visualize that data at scale, so we gave visualization technology
to every single one of our people in the U.S. Everybody has it. They can share the visualizations direct with
clients. They can share dynamic visualizations with
those clients. They can collaborate with the clients on how
those things work. That's a very different experience for our
clients and that again reflects those pressures that our clients told us. They said they wanted a different experience. My view, and our leadership team's view, is
if we don't continue to change at pace then we risk our own relevance. We risk our relevance to our clients and that's
the client-side. Michael, the other responsibility that I feel
every day I wake up and every night I put my head down on the pillow is we have, in
the U.S., 50,000 people that are counting on us to get this right; globally, 270,000-plus. Those 270,000 people are looking to us to
help them navigate through this. That's about skills, right? That was the other problem that we were looking
to solve. Our profession for a long time had been pretty
comfortable bringing people in and asking them to work until midnight, crank through
data on the spreadsheets, and just work, work, work, work, work. When you asked our people how much of that
work stack was really valuable to them, that they were learning, they were growing, they
were delivering value, it wasn't as much of the stack as we'd like. That's also about, obviously, value to clients. My goal is, I want people's work/life. We talk a lot about the work/life balance
and we all know it's work/life integration now, but I want to get them out of the office. I want to get them unlocking that time. Whether they direct that time to their personal
pursuits or they direct that time to different value to clients, as long as we're driving
those outcomes with clients, that's what our clients expect from us. They don't count our value in hours. They count our value in business outcomes,
and so this is all about focusing our people's attention and energy on those business outcomes. You mentioned something that I'd like to drill
into, which is, you had started to say the word "storytelling." You were talking about data and visualization
tools. What is the role and the importance of telling
stories and communication in this whole process? We're all living in a world where there's
too much data. There's not enough insight. We know the buzzwords around that. What I would offer is that because there's
so much data and it's so accessible, part of the challenge is, you can tell any story
you like with data. I think we all recognize if you give me enough
data, I'm going to shape it. What we saw in the past is that clients and
sometimes ourselves, we were making data confirmed decisions. Meaning, we trust our gut and our intuition
because that's how we came to be wherever we are, so I'm going to make a decision. By the way, I want to make it on the data,
so here's the decision. Could you go pull me a whole bunch of data
that make sure I'm right? We're challenging people to flip that completely
and really allow the data to tell the story, to inform the decision. There's a role for intuition and gut in there,
no question, but it's about responsible storytelling with data and crafting a story that people
can understand. I can put a thousand lines of spreadsheet
up on the video screen of a conference room and I promise you nobody is going to make
an intelligent decision based on a thousand lines of a spreadsheet in a conference room. But if I can help people understand, for example,
what their customers are seeing in certain zip codes, in certain stores, if I can visualize
that in a way that the mind thinks and gets around it more rapidly, then I can equip people
to get more comfortable moving that decision tree up into the data analysis level as opposed
to just having the data analysis conduct the validation in the back-end. For us, there's a huge element of trust and
integrity there, right? I keep coming back to these. They're so powerful in our brands. In our brand, that trust and integrity are
paramount, so I really want to make sure that all of our people are thinking about the implications
of how I gather and tell a story with data because it's just so important in today's
society. We have another comment from Twitter from
Arsalan Khan who has picked up on a comment that you made earlier about data and bots. He is asking a question about your internal
processes. We'll see how much of this you're comfortable
answering. He says, "How do you capture or do you capture
lessons learned from client engagements and turn that information into bots so they can
be helpful for your next engagement?" He's wondering about your internal processes. I mentioned that we gave everybody visualization
tools. We also have trained over 30,000 of our people
in the U.S. and now taking that across the globe. Thirty thousand of our people in the U.S.
have been trained on bot building. For those of you that are deep in the tech,
I'm going to characterize this as desktop bots or task bots versus enterprise bots,
so call it desktop bots where I've got tasks that are on my desktop that I want to automate
in a more meaningful way. What we've done is we've created a sharing
platform where we are able to take those bots. If a team in Philadelphia develops a great
way to approach a client or firm problem with a bot, we have a sharing platform that's essentially
an internal marketplace where they can submit that bot. They can submit the documentation; this is
what it does and this is why it works. We have a curation process behind that. Then that bot can be blasted out to 50,000-plus
people in the U.S. We've just deployed this capability in the
U.K. It's coming to other territories soon. That capability allows us to scale those small
bits of IP in ways that, frankly, were never possible before. You have this ability to take automations
and scale them. By the way, we do the same thing with data
models. We do the same thing with visualizations and
the other digital assets that people are building. From a lessons learned and how we take that
IP perspective, the trend that we're seeing is much more online, collaborative communication. That's not a new trend, obviously. The way that our people are working together,
the comfort level they have creating chatrooms to serve particular clients, creating chatrooms
that share ideas around certain industries, respecting everybody's data protection and
all those good things, but the way that our teams are able to collaborate now is dramatically
different than it was even five years ago. Deploying those tools at scale, along with
the ability to do the sharing at scale, that combination has been very, very powerful for
us. Knowledge capture and collaboration are as,
if not more, important today than it was historically. I know, historically, it's always been very
important. If you think about where we're at in terms
of what our people expect when they come to us, we hire people at all stages of their
career. Everybody thinks of us as a place you can
start your career and we're a great place to start your career. We're hiring people that are at all stages
of their careers that have done amazing things. When we bring that talent in, part of the
idea is, how do we share that talent? How do we share that IP with everybody? It doesn't make everybody an expert, but the
accessibility of that IP is, frankly, what our clients expect from us. If you go to that person who says, "I used
to spend some portion of my time doing something that was repetitive, so repetitive in fact
that I could build a desktop bot to solve the problem," for us that opens up intellectual
capacity. It opens up value capacity that we can now
redirect to clients to, frankly, go solve the thing that they hired us for in the first
place. Then the talent that we're bringing in looks
at that and says, "Well, you're actually tapping into why I came here in the first place because
I didn't come here to do that repetitive thing that I can automate on a bot." The difference that I think has been so powerful
for us is before people would come in. We're in the client service business. If a client asks us to get it done, we're
going to get it done. Not everybody had the skills, the tools, the
capability figure out, how can I take some of that out so I can get to the things that
are really valuable to the client, to the team, and to my team behind me? Now, we've blasted those skills across and
we're doing the collaboration across so people can take advantage of that. The nature of the kind of consulting that
you're doing is also being affected and, ideally, improved by this type of transformation and
collaboration as well. It absolutely is. One of the most fun privileged parts of my
job is, I often get asked to spend time with our clients' C-suite, boards, and executive
teams on how we're thinking about transformation. I've been in consulting my whole career, or
at least 26 of my 27 years, often going to a client and trying to figure out how to solve
the problem they have on the plate. In this case, all of us share the same problem. We're all trying to figure out how to adapt
and drive this technology and innovation at scale, so we've been sharing the story with
clients all across the country. What's been really fun about that is that
that is shaping the way that we're thinking about the commercial opportunities in those
markets, the way we're thinking about how we can help clients with the right technology
and tools and, in some cases, how we could take technology and tools that were originally
built for us and commercialize those in the marketplace to help our clients do the same
thing we've done to ourselves. Let's talk about measurements and metrics. Okay, you're doing all of these things. How do you know when you're successful and
do you ever reach a point where you say, "We're done"? There are days I wake up in the morning that
I'm looking for that point that we're done. I haven't found it yet. I know our chair has not found it yet, as
we keep working on the agenda. That part I actually love a lot. Let's talk about how we measure because I
think there are a couple of dimensions. I want to start with people because, if we
believe what we say that people are the heart of our transformation, then the question becomes,
are our people seeing what we would expect to see? I would share two things. I mentioned this force of 2,000 digital accelerators. One of the things that's been amazing is,
among that population of people, our retention of that talent is actually roughly 2x their
peer group that are not in that program. If you thought about that intellectually,
and we spent a lot of time worrying about it, there is a part of you that says, "If
I train people up in those skills, these skills are hot in the market, I'm going to give them
all these skills, they're going to go." What we've found is that the mission and purpose
that we've given them help us change the firm, be an advocate for change, be an advocate
with your peers to help them change. That is resonating. Again, these are people at all stages of their
career. That's resonating with that population of
people and they're sticking with us because they're enjoying the ride. That's one really, really important measure. The other important measure, now I'll flip
to, are our people at scale comfortable that they have tools and capability to innovate? Like a lot of organizations, we poll our people
every year. We've been privileged to be part of the Great
Place to Work studies and we've had great external recognition on that, but we look
at that data and we look at that data very hard every year to figure out where we can
improve and continue to drive the experience. This year, when we asked our people whether
they had the ability to innovate on the job as we've taken this journey, that measure
moved by almost 19 points, which is one of the largest movements we've ever seen at any
point on the study. These are people telling us, "We don't have
everything right yet, but we're feeling the power of what you're doing and you're giving
us new tools and skills." From a people perspective, we feel really
good about that. Now let's talk about, we are a business. We're a private partnership. We're a business. We need to drive growth an innovation just
like everybody else does, and profitability. What we're seeing is that, because we're automating
so much of the activity that doesn't have the higher value in the marketplace, our profitability
is actually seeing the impact of that. That is the value of an individual in terms
of the revenue per professional and some of the measures that a professional services
firm would be really familiar with. We're watching those very, very carefully
because we want to make sure that we're converting this activity into the business outcomes that
we'd expect to see in the marketplace. So far, and again to your point, I don't think
I will ever declare victory, maybe at my retirement party, but so far we're seeing movement on
those measures that really encourage us that this is going to drive the ROI that we would
hope for. Profitability is driven by so many different
factors. How can you isolate? We definitely can't isolate. I wouldn't want to suggest to anybody you
can isolate; you know that this factor hits this thing. In fact, one of the most challenging but really
energizing parts of our transformation journey is, we do look at this as a portfolio. I often tell our partners and our leadership
team; I would like to tell you and pick the number of assets that we have. We have all kinds of learning assets, technology
tools, and software products that we've taken from the outside to help drive this. We have all kinds of assets that we've purchased
and built, et cetera to help drive this. I would love to tell you I could figure out
exactly what the percentage point allocation is on movement on anything in that, but I
can't. What I do know and I'm very confident about
is the portfolio of that impact is driving the outcomes we want. I really encourage clients to think about
the portfolio of impact. Every once in a while, you can isolate based
on engagement or utility of a particular asset and say that's not actually driving, but we
spend a lot more time thinking about engagement, application of skills, engagement with the
assets, the use of the assets than we do, does this asset drive this particular outcome? When we see the engagement, we're confident
it's contributing to that portfolio effect. I'll also come back to something we started
the conversation on, Michael, which is, if you're not thinking about that portfolio of
assets in the context of business outcomes, then, frankly, you run the real risk of just
being a really interesting side project to somebody and not actually something that's
core and strategic to the business. One of the things our chair and our board
did from the beginning, which was really impactful, was, they laid out a strategy that included,
as a pillar, our digital transformation. It's not something that we're doing to help
enable the strategy. It's not something that's an add-on to the
strategy. It's not coming from the left side or the
fifth floor to the strategy. It's in the strategy. It is the strategy. I say a lot to our digital accelerators, "If
you're trying to understand the firm's strategy, look to your left, look to your right because
you are the power of our strategy." It's that enablement and, frankly, enabling,
empowering our people and letting them do what we hired them for and get out of their
way when we need to get out of their way. What kind of changes did PwC need to make
in order to undertake the digital transformation of its own business? There were a few things. One is, we had to really take a hard look
at our technology. Did we have the right technology? Had we standardized on the right platforms? Were we driving them at the right scale? We had to look at all of our training and
development programs. Did we really have the right training and
development? We had to reposition it. I often say training and development moved
from an enabler to the front of the train because now it's everything. That enablement, the technology environment,
and culture, how our partners looked at our teams from a problem-solving perspective,
they were all part of the pieces that we looked at. Let's talk about the challenges or the obstacles
that organizations typically run into when they want to undertake this type of program
of transformation that you've been describing. I do think there is this question of adversity
to change. I think once you understand why people resist
certain changes, it helps. Help them understand what you're after and,
generally, people are going to go with you. Having said that, I also think there are some
people that just aren't ready to change for whatever reason. Often, people want to go focus and go figure
out why those 10 people out of the 100 didn't move with the change. I would counsel all day long, "Focus on the
90 that are taking you where you're going and either the 10 come along or they don't." Then the other thing I would say is, don't
let the tech get in the way. Technology is complicated. It's difficult. It's expensive. It's a really important part, obviously, of
digital transformation, but it's a part, and getting that strategy right and standardizing
where you can. I often say to our leadership team, "Make
what can be the same the same. Customize and go bespoke when you need to
in order to deliver that distinctive value to a client or a customer." Do you think that, in business, just generally,
there is confusion around the role of technology in digital transformation? I do. I do. I think that people struggle because they
equate them. People struggle because they want to believe
that you've made a massive investment in technology that's going to bring you change. Often, it can, but it has to be done in the
right way. You've got to be thinking about that user
experience. How does it land? What's their day-to-day like? That's why so much of what we're doing on
human-centered design and some of these other things that we're really training people on
is so important now because, to me, that's how you tap into the value of technology investments. Let me finish up by asking you for advice
that you can share to folks in companies that are listening and are involved with digital
transformation in one way or another. It's a tough road sometimes, so what advice
can you share? It is a tough road sometimes. Again, I hope nobody took away that we thought
we have every answer to any of this because we're working through it just as every other
organization does. Having said that, when you look at this question,
you're going to see a million blockades. You're going to see a million problems. It's really no different than any other problem
executives have solved before, which is, you knock them out one at a time. You send the teams after them and you go after
them. That might obviously be in parallel in large,
complex organizations, but you've got to go after the problems and the blocks. The other thing is, there's that great saying
we've all shared that perfect is the enemy of good enough. If you're really going to drive scaled change,
you have to accept that it's going to be rocky along the way. If you're really going to drive technology
innovation that's going to change people's experience, you have to accept that the first
iteration of that classic agile methodology kind of thinking, that first iteration might
be your minimum viable product and you've got to move from there. That requires helping your people understand
what's about to happen because, otherwise, they'll be contrasting what's happening to
what their expectations were in the old model. It's not about Ping-Pong tables. No. [Laughter] Who doesn't love a good Ping-Pong
table, but it's a great point. The workspace and the environment really matters
and you can engage people in creativity and all of that, but people want to do good work. They want to do interesting work. They want to apply their skills to solve important
problems. If you can unlock that, my experience and
we're blessed with phenomenal people across the PwC world, my experience is they're going
to go along for the ride with you. Is that the ultimate key is finding those
people who have an interest and a propensity who are willing and capable of going along
for the ride, identifying them at the outside and early stages and then expanding from there? I think that's huge. The talent has always mattered. The talent still matters and it will matter
even more in the future. That understanding of who is really going
to take me there, who is leaning in, who is taking the risk, who is taking others along
with them, who feels that natural desire to coach and develop the people around them? This is not about fear. Everybody talks about the technology disruption,
replacing jobs. This is about doing our jobs differently in
the face of all that disruption. I firmly believe, if we do that, we're going
to tap into this technology and make things easier for people. That's a good thing. We're going to make things more impactful
for our customers, our clients, and our fellow colleagues. That's a great thing. We're going to actually add security to the
people that operate and build that kind of capability rather than take it away. I think inspiring our people is where it all
comes down to. Well, such an interesting discussion and,
unfortunately, we are out of time. I want to say a huge thank you to Joe Atkinson,
the chief digital officer of PwC, for taking time and sharing his insight and experience
with us. Joe, thank you very, very much. Michael, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Everybody, thank you for watching. Before you go, please subscribe on YouTube
and hit the subscribe button at the top of our website so you can subscribe to our newsletter. I hope you have a great day. Check out CXOTalk.com. We have excellent shows coming up. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.
