Edward Carey, vice chairman, national managing partner, U.S. industries, Deloitte & Touche, recently spoke to Consulting Magazine about his firm's growing industry ambitions and the strategy he's deploying to realize them.
CM: When it comes to industry expertise inside Deloitte, are you charged with rebuilding? How would you characterize Deloitte's efforts?
Carey: We've always had a very strong tradition of industry practices, and it focused on bringing industry expertise to market. But what's happening here is that our clients continue to ask for more and more industry insights and knowledge about their businesses. So we continue to focus as a firm on improving and strengthening our industry expertise. We think that by doing this, by combining our functional expertise and this industry expertise, that we'll create more valuable services for our clients and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.
CM: We know that Tommy Thompson, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, is one of your Game Changers, and so is retired general Harry Raduege . . .
Carey: Yes, these are well-known individuals, people who are recognized in their industry sectors. Some of the individuals from government are maybe a bit more widely known because you may have seen them in the press. But each of these individuals in their own individual sector is notable. For example, we just hired Joe Stanislaw, who co-founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA); he is now helping us up our game in oil and gas.
CM: Different firms have from time to time sought to deploy high-profile gurus to better expose their credentials in one area or another. How do Deloitte's new efforts differ?
Carey: In a couple of ways. The people whom we are bringing on board here are people who are recognized experts in their specific industries. And the idea for us now is to combine our functional expertise with world-class industry expertise, and if we combine those two things, we'll create the most valuable services for our clients, because they'll be industry-oriented. And we think that this will be a differentiator for us as a firm in the marketplace.
CM: Can you give us an example?
Carey: Well, let's look at healthcare today. One of the major issues in healthcare is simply how to provide better healthcare at a lower cost. Well, the way in which we're trying to attack this problem is by bringing together healthcare providers, healthcare plans, large employers, auto unions, labor unions, state governments, the federal government. By bringing all of those individual constituencies together, which span multiple industry sectors, we, in fact, can develop breakthrough solutions and solutions that are new and different for our clients that we've not necessarily seen in the past.
CM: What role should we expect Deloitte's Centers of Inno-vation to play in all of this?
Carey: We've decided that there are certain industry sectors that are undergoing significant change, and these are also sectors where we believe we can provide leadership around the debate of where a particular industry sector is going.
In some cases, we've decided that it makes sense to develop, essentially, a Center of Innovation, and the idea here is to provide a forum where our Game Changers, our senior partners, our clients, and other individuals who have something to say about the industry can get together and investigate both sides of a particular debate.
And so, for example, in the last year, we've created the Center for Health Solutions, which again is focused on the number-one issue in America today, which is the healthcare delivery system. By implementing these centers, we're bringing together the people who can have a debate around a particular industry, and out of this will come ideas about the direction where this industry ought to go, and probably more importantly, solutions that we can provide to our clients.
CM: How do we know there's more to these Game Changers than just a press release?
Carey: They're helping to advance the Innovation Centers. They're out meeting with clients. They are already involved in many of our eminence activities. Our Energy Conference would be an example, or some of the healthcare conferences that we have been involved with. The Game Changers generally spend a third of their time doing research, a third of their time out speaking, and a third of their time providing services to clients. You know, this is all about bringing insights to our clients, and if we bring insights to our clients, we will be better able to serve them. We'll build better relationships, and this supports our overall strategy. So it wouldn't really serve any purpose, in my view, to bring somebody on board and then keep them in their office or a back room.
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