PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS CEO DESCRIBES THE COMPLEXITIES OF WORLD-CLASS MANAGEMENT AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
BOSTON - At a recent event hosted by the Harvard Business School Leadership and Values Initiative, Samuel A. DiPiazza Jr., CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers, delivered an address on “The Evolving Journey of PricewaterhouseCoopers.” During his talk and the Q&A session with HBS faculty and students that followed, DiPiazza – who has been with the company for 32 years – discussed the increasing complexity and globalization of the decision-making process at the firm over the years and how this complexity will continue to affect businesses everywhere. The Leadership and Values Initiative is led by HBS students in partnership with faculty and staff and integrates ethics and values into the student experience at HBS.
As the world’s largest professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers employees 130,000 workers and provides industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services to clients in 148 countries. As the company has become increasingly global, so has the need to understand a variety of cultures, explained DiPiazza. A wide range of factors must be considered in order to provide accurate counsel to clients, he said, from cross-border regulations and the requirements for responsible leadership to understanding customer expectations in different cultures.
“Just six or seven years ago, decision makers were dealing in a world where conflict was not as common,” said DiPiazza. “CEOs concentrated mostly on quarterly results – on beating the estimates by a cent per share” as well as meeting all the other numerical targets that Wall Street regarded as the measure of a firm’s success.
These days, however, high-level executives are more “focused on issues across their borders,” DiPiazza observed. “They have to deal with those issues in real time, in an ethically-based framework, while recognizing that they also have to show profits.”
Another concern for CEOs, according to DiPiazza, is the impact of world events on their companies – a topic that was on the minds of all the top executives he met at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January. “That was the week that Hamas was elected in Palestine, the violent reaction to the Danish newspaper cartoons gained steam across Europe, and the avian flu made its way into Africa,” he pointed out. All those events had ramifications in the halls of companies as well as governments.
In the Q&A session, DiPiazza described the qualities he looks for in a “great” partner: the ability to identify an issue before anyone else and find a path to an answer and, most important, he concluded, the courage to make a decision.
About Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School (www.hbs.edu), is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 200 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 40 Executive Education programs. For almost a century, HBS faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching to educate leaders who have shaped the practice of business around the globe.