Documented@Davos: Robert Moritz, PwC from Michelle Laird on Vimeo.
Transcript: Bob Moritz, Chairman & Senior Partner at PwC
PETE CASHMORE: I'm Pete Cashmore, the founder and CEO at Mashable. And welcome back to Documenting Davos with Scribd and Mashable. #DavosDocs. And so we're talking to technology leaders and business leaders at Davos, the World Economic Forum, trying to figure out how technology is changing the economy, changing the world. So I'm very, very pleased to be here with Bob Moritz. You are the chairman and senior partner at PwC. So it's a privilege to speak with you today.
ROBERT MORITZ: Great. Happy to be here.
PETE CASHMORE: I think we could kick off and speak about this CEO survey. It's your 15th annual CEO survey, trying to get the temperature on what CEOs are thinking. What are they thinking about technology?
ROBERT MORITZ: Well, when you look at the CEO survey we've done in the last 15 years, we interviewed about 1,200 CEOs around the world, 60 different countries.
Most of the CEOs are actually thinking about the future in terms of how to actually enhance their own business proposition. How do they do that? They've got to reach out to their customer base. And it's through innovation locally. It's not going to be through M&A activity.
One of the survey findings was, in fact, M&A activity was going to go down this year because their confidence to do that isn't there. As a result, they are going to actually focus on their local customer base, leverage technology to do that.
How do you action leverage technology to engage your consumer base? How do you engage your workforce? And how do you think about innovation, so you can move things around the world as quickly as possible? So that's one piece.
The second piece is they've got to be cost efficient. And the only way they do that is invest. Have some R&D around technology, technology enablement, to actually pass information across the organization to better manage, make decisions day-to-day. Those two findings are key as successful CEOs think about the future and [INAUDIBLE] capture the opportunity.
PETE CASHMORE: How optimistic are they about the future?
ROBERT MORITZ: It's mixed. It depends very much on where you sit and what country you may be in. And there's a dichotomy. We talk about decoupling around emerging markets and developed markets. I would say that's nonsense. The economy actually has come together as one. The decoupling is around people's confidence for performance in a company versus their confidence in the overall economy. So what does that mean?
48% of the CEOs today believe the economy is going to decrease over the next year, compared to 15% thinks it's going to increase. However, the number of CEOs that actually believe they will have confidence, relative confidence that they can grow in the next 12 months is a high percentage. It's more like 85% that either have strong or neutral confidence.
PETE CASHMORE: Is it possible for those two things to be true?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. But you've got one leading the other. You've got a lagging indicator here. And the question becomes, how do you actually then bring together, I'll call business priorities, versus more macro policy discussions? And at some point in time, these two things catch up. It very much depends which country you're in, which sector. The technology sector is a great example.
They had the highest confidence overall in terms of what they think the future is. No surprise to this audience.
When you think about technology organizations around the world, they are thinking more so around, am I going to go hire more people? The answer from the survey was absolutely yes.
Are we going to actually have bigger impact in the social community? The answer was yes.
And now the question is, how do you get the leadership team's attention to work with policy makers to actually bring that gap together?
PETE CASHMORE: What's your level of optimism about technology's role in turning around the economy and creating jobs? I mean, I was reading a report in the Times last week about how Apple is obviously making of all its products in China. Is technology going to create more jobs, or is it going to great jobs elsewhere?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, I think it's going to help create jobs. And maybe better said, it will help in a number of different ways. One of them is actually matching or developing skill sets.
When I think about technology-- and I'll use us as an example right now-- the amount of training that we do virtually, leveraging technology, social media, ideas, et cetera, has just gone exponential for us. So what we're trying to do is get people the skill sets, just in time skill sets to do just in time training, and leveraging technology to deliver that. So this way, people are better equipped to do their job. And that allows them to be more relevant day in to day out. So they do the job they're assigned. But more importantly, give them an opportunity to do another job that's totally different. And why is that important? Because technology will give them more insight on what life may be in the US. And if they are thinking about going to India or China, they'll have a better perspective of what's that all about.
So to me, technology is a huge enabler for everything we do. We've got major stakeholders, our employees, our consumer, our clients, our investors, the social environment in terms of politicians and regulators. I've got to leverage technology to better connect with them, talk to them, and listen to them to say, how do I become more relevant?
PETE CASHMORE: Well, let's talk a little bit more specifically, I guess, about social media, as you were hinting. What do you see as the role of social media in corporations, and at PwC in particular?
ROBERT MORITZ: At PwC, it's a huge enablement to help with the conversation and the engagement of our people. I came into this role about 2 and 1/2 years ago. And I had a theory that was, I need to turn the place upside down in terms of, how are we making decisions? And in order to do that, I had to make sure I was listening carefully to what our employee base was saying.
We've got 35,000 people in the US. We've got about 165,000 people around the world. And what we wanted to do is, how do we engage them in our strategy? First, explain it to them. And then get their reaction to that. Should I tweak it? Should I change it? And then, ultimately, if I've got a couple of key points to be made or executed on, how do I engage them? Because if I can get all 35,000 people engaged, we'll be better, faster than my competition out there.
PETE CASHMORE: Is that the new leadership? Because that's almost a crowd source leadership where you're saying, let's listen to what all the employees are saying and then almost synthesize. Is that the new leadership style to say, rather than it's coming from the top down, we're going to say exactly what's right? Is that something you're seeing?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. And I would say that leadership has a responsibility to listen carefully to all of the stakeholders that make decisions. Then leadership has to make the decisions. Not necessarily that the leader has to do the consensus view. Because some of these decisions are hard. But I think you've got to be able to do that first piece before you ever get to the second piece. If you don't do that, you're never going to have a chance to actually accomplish what you want to accomplish. So engaging in terms of not only what you want to do, but why you want to do it is really important. And I think the crowd sourcing, I think the social media aspects helps enable that.
I talk to our people quite regularly. I respond to every email I get. We have webcasts that we do virtually to the entire firms, three, four times a year where my leadership's right in front of everybody. And I don't actually just talk. I actually have our second year people interview me. No holds barred. Ask any question you want.
PETE CASHMORE: Are you out there tweeting and facebooking?
ROBERT MORITZ: I'm actually doing that inside the firm, not outside the firm. But it is something we're actually thinking about outside the firm. I've got people on my leadership team that are doing that outside the firm right now as well.
PETE CASHMORE: Great. What about any kind of risk or perceived risk of having-- if your employees are out in the social media. Is there some kind of limit to the freedoms that people can have? Because we see in the corporate world sometimes there's certain information you don't want out there. Is there any kind of policy around that that you guys have?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, our policy comes back to some of our value chain in terms of what we do. So we do audit services, tax services, consulting services. The one major policy is we don't talk about client-specific information. We've got to protect that. There's a greater privacy that's necessarily that we have to adhere to.
Second is we want to make sure that there's not personal information. So again, respect the privacy issues. But I work under the assumption that everything I send out or communicate is going to go virtual anyway. So let's just operate that. Rather than fight it, accept it. And in fact, I'm happy to have my competition see what my strategy is. That's the reason we sent it out. Everybody was worried about, OK, what's the competition going to do? It's not around whose strategy is best. It's who can execute best. The only way I execute best is to have all of the people engaged, which comes back to this transparency point.
So my mindset is, get the word out there. This way you're better understood, not only what you're doing and why you're doing it.
PETE CASHMORE: Well, everything you post online is going to get out there, eventually. That's a good motto to live by.
ROBERT MORITZ: Absolutely.
PETE CASHMORE: It was great talking to you. It's time to wrap. Thanks so much, Bob Moritz at PwC. And thanks everyone for joining us. We're at Documented@Davos. We've got more interviews coming up. Hashtag is #DavosDocs on Twitter.
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