Deloitte’s Cindy Hook recharging the accounting firm

Cindy Hook is finding new tools to recharge the big accounting firm as it expands its offerings.

DEAL-20150918 embargo for DEAL 18 Sep 2015 no reuse without permission Cindy Hook of Deloittes Pic : Nick Cubbin

When new Deloitte Australia chief executive Cindy Hook made her first state-of-the-nation address to the firm’s 6000-strong workforce earlier this year, she broke with tradition by playing staffers a short video. It featured an athletic-looking Hook and her top executives in running gear on a bright summer’s morning at Killcare Beach on the NSW Central Coast during their first off-site retreat.

“I did this video of the new executive team. It was us running and playing a silly beach game,’’ she tells The Deal. “I said to the staff, ‘These are the 13 busiest people in the firm. If they can find a way to work this into their lives, you can and should too’.’’

It sent a powerful message: that Deloitte under Hook, the first woman to a head a Big Four accounting firm in Australia, would be different to the one run by long-time CEO Giam Swiegers, who retired at the end of last year. Meetings at Deloitte now start no earlier than 9am to give staff the opportunity to exercise before work. Hook herself does programmed exercise six days a week. But what she calls her “health and wellbeing’’ push is about more than simply working out.

“I have been bowled over by how this is resonating with our people,’’ Hook says. “In order to perform at your highest levels you need to ensure that at an individual level we are creating an environment where individuals are healthy and well. You need to be physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually strong. This sounds like it is a soft thing but it is actually rooted deeply in trying to drive performance at the highest level.’’

During the recent reporting season for listed companies, the Deloitte audit team began its own internal wellbeing contest, complete with grading system and league table. If you sleep more than six hours a night you get a point. If you exercise for 20 minutes or more a day you get a point.

“They are encouraging everyone to take care of themselves,’’ Hook says with glee, adding that staff are now also sharing some of their personal stories — one even talked about his mushroom collection — on the company’s intranet. “I thought it would be good but it has gone crazy,’’ she says.

And jeans are also a more common sight in Deloitte’s corridors and meeting rooms as the best and brightest in the technology world increasingly fuel the growth ambitions of the Big Four accounting firms, which are moving into territory previously occupied by technology houses and management consultants. Earlier this year Deloitte acquired brand and spatial design start-up MashUp, a firm that focuses on connecting online, mobile, and in-store touchpoints seamlessly and using spatial design to enhance brand engagement.

It is one of eight acquisitions made by the firm over the past 18 months, including two Silicon Valley-based start-ups. One, Kaggle, uses the internet and social media to operate online data analysis competitions for scientists. Another, Guavus, is a leading provider of big data analytics solutions for operational intelligence. The firm is not alone in the tech-race. PwC has struck a global agreement with Google and KPMG has an alliance with Artesian Venture Partners, an Australian fund of funds that provides investors with tax-free exposure to early stage ventures. And now Hook and her rivals are also using the expertise garnered from the tech world to disrupt the way they run their own businesses.

“Today just over 50 per cent of our people are chartered accountants. But I think they (the new and the old world) are complementary — the strong accounting, tax heritage that we have and bringing new capability in. We are being very strategic in our acquisitions. Let’s find capabilities that are adjacent to what we are already doing,’’ Hook says. “We value that we are growing and expanding and giving new capability. Part of our digital team is helping auditing and tax people digitise compliance work. Our chief digital officer is responsible for digitising our firm.’’

The new way of thinking was pioneered at Deloitte by Swiegers almost five years ago when Hook was head of audit. It emanated in part from what came to be known within the firm as the notorious “audit cave video’’.

“At the office of a big audit client we mounted a camera in the corner. For the five weeks of the audit, every five minutes we took a picture. Then we put it into a video. And honest to goodness, no-one came in, no one got up, the auditors sat there on computers for five weeks!’’ Hook says. “We asked, ‘Is that the experience we want to give our clients? No! We want to be out talking to them, interacting with them.’ So we went about a program to change that experience.’’

All Deloitte staff were subsequently put through design thinking education to “open their minds’’. Hook says it was a revelation.

“I became an auditor for a reason — I am not particularly artistic or creative,” she says. “Then you go to study design thinking and you think, ‘Wait, maybe if I open my mind — this idea of diverging and thinking broadly, then bringing it back to solutions’?’’

But is she worried the influx of the so-called “non-accountants’’ into the firm could now lead to a clash of cultures? So far so good. And Hook is passionate about creating an inclusive environment for a diverse workforce.

“You know, we don’t say, ‘You can’t wear your blue jeans to the office.’ Yes you walk into the office and know who is on the digital team. They are always dressed really cool — the jeans, T-shirt and a jacket — they look great. But we allow people to be who they are. It is really about dressing in what you client expects and who you are interacting with.’’

The move of the Big Four into new industries and new ways of working prompted KPMG Australia chairman Peter Nash to quip last month: “We need to move on from referring to us as an accounting firm.’’

So does Hook feel the same about Deloitte? “No,’’ she says, shaking her head. “I feel entirely different. We are still an accounting firm and we continue to invest in our core heritage services. If we can take the broader capability into those heritage services we are going to improve the experience for our clients and very importantly the quality of audits. There is no move away from the heritage services in this firm. They will show more steady growth and in times of disruption our advisory services will grow much quicker. But there will be times when that is reversed.’’

Hook’s personal story is unusual: next year she will celebrate 30 years with Deloitte after joining the firm as an auditor in 1986. She was made a partner in 1998 before moving to Australia in 2009 as head of Deloitte’s NSW assurance and advisory team. Yet Hook says she rated herself only a 25 per cent chance to get the top job when she put her hand up late last year.

“I know some of the other leaders who are on my team now would be very credible candidates as well,’’ she says.

Since she took up the role in February, none of those in the executive team who went for the top job have resigned.

“Often in a transition, there can be fallout. I am proud the others who were around me are working for me effectively,’’ she says. “Giam stepped down with the first three at the firm at the same time. That created space. I didn’t have to clear people out. But I am also not a particularly controlling person and that has worked well because these guys are great executives and I am giving them a lot of rein. I ask them, ‘What do you want to be known for? How do I get you playing to your strengths?’ I am good at looking what they bring to the table. We don’t need to compete for roles. There is so much to do.’’

That doesn’t mean Hook lacks challenges. The culture at Deloitte bred by Swiegers was deeply competitive. Partners were under constant pressure to bring in fresh revenue and were incentivised to do so. Some rivals have suggested he fostered a ‘’hire and fire’’ mentality where there was little patience for those who didn’t deliver. As one joked: ‘’Since Cindy got the job, the partners are relieved that they no longer run around with a target on their backs.’’ But the firm is still losing staff to rivals.

Hook describes her greatest strengths as “team-building’’ and her “high energy’’ nature. These will be called upon to consolidate the firm in the post-Swiegers era, and to develop a growth strategy that is and less reliant on acquisitions.

Hook is also a straight-talker. “I am an American, we are all straight talkers,’’ she says with a wide smile. “You usually know where you stand with me.’’

One area of personal weakness she has worked hard to improve has been to become a better listener. “Sometimes when you are type A and you run really fast people wonder whether you are listening,” she says. “So it is that consciousness of it.’’

She claims she can’t cook to save herself but is working on it. She recently brought a selection of home-baked pastries into the Deloitte Sydney office, a product of a Sunday afternoon cooking session with her two teenage sons. Her staff were impressed.

“I have an amazing husband (Chris). Whether you are a man or woman, your success to a large degree is dependent on who your spouse is,’’ she says.

Hook is also conscious of spending quality time with her boys and making time for them in her busy schedule — which she stresses does not include fitting them in between events and appointments. “That is not quality time,’’ she says. “The time I have with my kids I am pretty good at making the most of it.’’

She has certainly started as CEO on the front foot. Less than six months into her tenure she reported a 15 per cent jump in revenue to $1.34bn for 2015, cementing Deloitte’s hard-won No 2 ranking behind PwC that was a highlight of Swiegers’ reign. She says the most important thing she learnt from her predecessor was to be open-minded.

“It is about opening yourself up to a variety of possible ideas and solutions but being able to distil that down and converge to something that makes sense,’’ she says.

But she is determined to make the Hook-led Deloitte a very different beast. “This is nothing against Giam, who I have the ultimate respect for, but there is freshness here. If you look at my team, it looks different, it is younger and more diverse. There is a freshness and a newness to this whole thing,’’ she says. “A lot of things done one way in the past are now open for people to try differently. The energy in the firm right now is infectious.’’

Cindy and the suits

When Cindy Hook took over as chief executive of Deloitte she was prepared for the professional challenges but she wasn’t prepared for the barrage of questions about being in the still rare position of a female chief executive of a significant national organisation.

“You come in as a female chief executive and people want to talk about gender straight away,” she says. “I am not just a woman — I am a good executive. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and consulting with other prominent women chief executives and asked them if this happened to them when they took on the job.”

They all agreed they faced the same questions.

After talking to the others she made a conscious decision “not to distance myself from it”. If she didn’t decide to speak about the issue, she realised, she would “lose an opportunity for myself, for my company and women in general”.

Taking over as chief executive Hook has also found herself in another unusual situation. Her predecessor, Giam Swiegers, was a member of the Male Champions of Change — a group of some of the country’s top chief executives founded by Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick in 2010. It is committed to boosting the role of women in corporate Australia.

By definition the group, which includes corporate leaders such as ANZ Bank CEO Mike Smith, Commonwealth Bank CEO Ian Narev, and Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, has been all male. After some consultation, Broderick, who stepped down from job this month, decided to invite Hook to be a “special adviser” to the group.

Hook defends the idea of having a “men only” group — a group of which she is now the only honorary female member.

“There are a lot of female business groups. I am an active member of Chief Executive Women. But the unique thing about this was men stepping up beside women. Liz set it up in absolutely the right way for the objective she was trying to achieve,”

she says. “There were a lot of women talking

about gender.”

Hook says women can keep talking, and they are making ground, but “if we really want to move this ahead we need senior men — the ones who are in power — talking about the issues.”

She says that in her role as special adviser she is carrying on the work of her predecessor. She describes the members of Male Champions of Change as being “pretty courageous”.

“When you put your head up for something like this, there is more chance of being criticised than complimented. The fact is that they were each willing to put their names and their reputations on the line — it is a call you have to make as a leader.”

She believes the group is having an impact in helping the move towards gender equity in the workplace. But she also admits that being the only female member of such a high-powered group has had its advantages, giving her both credibility and high-level connections.

“I have a voice at the table,” she says. Hook believes there are broader social issues to be tackled in the battle to give women more equality in corporate Australia.

“When will we value care giving and bread winning the same? When will we give men a choice to be breadwinners or care givers?

If you ask most men, they feel they have to be the breadwinners,” Hook says. “Corporate leaders can do a lot, and we can never back off, but there are other issues that have to be dealt with more broadly.”

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