The Top 25 Most Influential Consultants 2004 - Paul Robinson, Global Managing Partner Deloitte Consulting

Robinson recalls: "I was one year away from making partner and I had to make a choice between a safe path (to partner) in audit or the more risky path of consulting."  At the time, Robinson remembers discussing his choices with a Deloitte partner whom he describes as a mentor. "He told me the question I needed to ask myself was not whether I wanted to be a partner, but instead what it was that I wanted to do for the next ten years," the consultant recalls. For Robinson, a seasoned accountant who had at one time prepared for a career in law, consulting work appeared to be the next stop on a career journey that eerily parallels the consulting profession's lifeline in miniature.
Only a year later he would become a partner within Deloitte's consulting unit. The story is in some ways intriguing because of what it omits. At no time does Robinson mention the notion that consultants within a Big Four (or Big Six) accounting house were at risk of being perceived as pursuing a secondary discipline, rather than the firm's primary business. But Robinson has historically never viewed his work at Deloitte in such terms, a fact that, along with his disarming style of leadership, has made him one of the most effective purveyors of Deloitte's maturing vision of an integrated multidisciplinary firm.

It's a vision where the competencies involved in problem solving are determined not by accountants or consultants, but by the client challenges themselves. "We will have a business that will have a set of competencies in it that we will mix and match as appropriate to deal with specific client situations," says the consulting leader, as he repeats some of the carefully coined wordage that has convinced professionals of multiple competencies to join his journey.