A CRAZY! 25 year career in the world's largest professional services firm

Wow, how powerful it can be to reflect on the CRAZY things you have done in your career.

I was fortunate to spend the last two days facilitating a group of Deloitte senior managers and newer partners about relationship mastery. I have a facilitating approach highly dependent on storytelling - raw, transparent, vulnerable, self-deprecating, animated - that results in me being extremely candid about my successes and failures on the journey of my 25 year career. It was great to "roll the reel" on those adventures.

At Deloitte, we released our Talent Value Proposition that is focused on:

1. Leadership at every level: We grow the world's best leaders so you can achieve the impact you seek, faster.
2. Your work, your way: We give you the means to work how you want, and we have innovative spaces and the mindset to help you be wildly successful.
3. Unite to include: We create a deep sense of belonging where you can bring your great ideas and your whole self to work.

As I facilitated over the last two days and thinking back to this video, I had a stream of consciousness scan of my career and all the CRAZY things that I have done through accepting challenges, through being afforded opportunities that stretched me way out of my comfort zone, through people having confidence in me and frankly accepting and embracing me despite the fact that I have never "fit the mold" that one would expect to exist within a professional services firm of the scale of Deloitte.

Career trajectory: a long and winding road

Ah, Paris for two years!

Oh, how can I sum it all up?

• Representing the global firm with the executive team of BIC in Sweden as part of our global audit proposal whilst only being an audit manager.
• Fraud investigation in Eastern Europe mostly focused on my until then non-existent Hungarian and actually uncovering the fraud using this limited new language skill.
• Pan-European acquisition due diligence where I was responsible, remarkably, for documents that were neither English nor French but instead Dutch and Italian (someone had to take those!).
• Undercover commercial and political due diligence in Kazakhstan and then subsequent US IPO of the related entities. Beating Uber to the punch by thumbing a paid ride around Almaty with anyone who would pick me up and take me where I wanted to go.
• Six months working exclusively on a "full court press" "final mile" on a global audit proposal that was the largest audit win globally for Deloitte in 1999.
• Facilitating a full week internal course in French.

Shoppers Drug Mart IPO

Leading the Shoppers Drug Mart IPO amidst all the pain and confusion of 9-11.

Nearly left

After the Deloitte/Andersen transaction, I had decided to leave Deloitte given my perception that there were limited near-term opportunities for partnership in Toronto. My trust that two partners would advise me well led me to confide in them that I was leaving Deloitte. Serendipitously, one of these two partners was approached soon after by a Calgary partner lamenting that his senior manager had just resigned. I was on a plane to check out Calgary 5 days later and we never turned back. What were the odds that the Calgary partner would speak with one of the two partners in whom I had confided?

First LARGE Calgary deal with the Chinese

Led Deloitte's team in a $2 billion deal to sell international oil and gas assets to the Chinese - the largest deal of its kind at that time. The deal started a month into my partnership (no honeymoon!) and there was this little problem of a $400 million tax impact if the deal did not close by December 31, 2006. Pressure? Yeah, a little. There was nothing to do other than to find my voice and lead a team of seemingly a dozen law firms and investment banking houses and the client as to what we felt we needed to do to get to the finish line in time.

Undercover fraud investigation

I got a call from a friend who is a partner at a competitor asking me to meet him at a Tim Horton's the next morning at 7am. When I asked what was going on, I received a "you just have to trust me on this one". I was then asked to mobilize undercover using a fake premise to work for independent directors of a board concerned that there were shenanigans happening in this public company. I have to admit that nightly calls to the independent directors from my car and trying to figure out the computer infrastructure with help on the phone from the IT forensics team made me feel a little like James Bond.

IPO, IPO, IPO

2008 to 2010 were monopolized by leading our teams advising management teams and their boards on some of the largest IPOs in Canada during that period.

Coaching CFOs

I have had the fortune to coach the CFOs of some of the country's largest companies. Never would I have thought in my training that I was prepared for this - what wisdom could I provide? I have been astonished by the impact that I have had on these individuals.

In the press

I was the main Deloitte representative in the national press - Globe and Mail, National Post, and CBC - for an oilsands point of view document we released. I experienced a real life "naked in the classroom" living nightmare whilst on a 20 minute live radio interview. I bombed the interview in technicolor as President Obama had just declared the previous night that the US would soon be energy self-sufficient. I had nowhere near the energy industry or geopolitical depth to square off against the interviewer. Yes, it was a humbling experience!

I recovered in 2014 by translating into French overnight (unexpectedly urgently required) a 15 page English summary of a report we had prepared for a press conference we were doing with one of Canada's largest companies. Google Translate did a great first cut and then iterations of reading out loud and tweaking the wording well into the wee hours of the morning did the trick. I then delivered the report at a press conference and did live French radio interviews.

Being accepted despite being different

People who meet me are still shocked that I am part of our audit practice. In Deloitte Business Chemistry speak, I am a Pioneer/Integrator whereas one would expect auditors to be Guardians. My Business Chemistry scores are just not what you would expect from an audit professional. While I have always felt different from my peers, I have never perceived that be a problem. This diversity is something that has in fact propelled my career. To be clear, in other organizations, there would have been tissue rejection to my Business Chemistry in the audit practice.

What a ride!

Almost everything I have mentioned above pushed me well out of my comfort zone. The faith of the Deloitte people around me put wind in my sails and gave me the confidence that I could do whatever crazy thing I was doing. I have had many careers in my 25 years at Deloitte and in each one I have reinvented myself, embarked on fascinating adventures, pushed my limits, learned new skills I never imagined I would have and all along been surrounded by people who believed that I could do the impossible and accepted me for who I was no matter how different I am.

I believe that my Deloitte career is our new Talent Value Proposition in live action.