EY's Passion With a Purpose

"It's amazing to think about our growth," Patton says. "We think we have experienced profession-leading growth. We are creating a new job every 39 minutes."

Patton says the firm overall hired 65,000 people this past year and 40,000 of them were from campus. EY now has more than 220,000 professionals globally and 63 percent of the 220,000 people are Generation Y. "We have a median age of 28 and how we leverage and manage a resource pool like that is a pretty exciting opportunity," Patton says.

Advisory, meanwhile, is no slouch. Accounting for nearly a quarter of EY's total revenue, the service line is poised to top $7 billion this year and has some 40,000 employees. Under Patton's leadership, Advisory has ballooned. Just two years ago, it was $2.4 billion and 10,000 employees.

But Patton would rather stay focused on the bigger picture. EY is in the midst of re-branding renaissance. Formerly Ernst & Young, EY rebranded two years ago as EY and added the tagline "building a better working world."

"Our purpose around building a better working world is really exciting," Patton says. "EY is a purpose-driven brand, and that's not just because we just have a purposeful slogan but we are actually leading purpose throughout our company. Every EY employee—whether it's the industry teams, competency teams, regional teams, account teams, engagement teams—is connected to the overall theme about how we're passionate about our purpose of building a better working world."

And the world is taking notice. In Universum's 2015 ranking of the top U.S. employers, EY finished fourth, behind only Google, The Walt Disney Co. and Apple. Not surprisingly, EY was ranked the top brand among accounting students.

"On campus, the energy around the EY brand is amazing," Patton says. "College students, and the younger generation in general, really respond to the passion of EY's purpose."

This summer EY continues with the evolution of its brand with the next phase of activation—The better the question. The better the answer. The better the world works. "Asking better questions leads to better answers—and the better the answers, the better the world works," Patton says.

And, as is often the case, creation at EY was born out of chaos. Well, disruption anyway. "When we looked at the major disruptors that were before us, we said we need to innovate, we need to do things differently. Today it's not even about transformation, but it's about radical restructuring to address the disruptions we're seeing in the marketplace," he says. "Disruption helped get us where we are today. When we talk about our position in the marketplace, we would not be where we are today had we not aggressively acted on those disruptors in front of us."

EY had two trigger events, Patton says. First, Mark Weinberger became the new Chairman and wanted to look at the business through a different lens. So, he formed a global task force that Patton served on that went around the globe and met with clients, partners, business professionals, academia and economists over the course of 18 months.

"It was a phenomenal experience," Patton says. "We talked about a lot of things but we really homed in on three major disruptors: Globalization, the Digital Revolution and Rapid Innovation. This is how we came up with our overall strategy as a firm."

When speaking about those disruptors, Patton can rattle off a series of statistics that are both staggering and sobering—9 out of 10 people under the age of 30 live in emerging markets; 95 percent of consumers live outside the U.S.; there are more middle class people in Asia than there are all Americans; 52 percent of Fortune 500 Companies are put out of business by a digital competitor.

As part of this firm soul-searching, Patton says EY started to think even bigger about the future ahead and building a better working world, and "we saw how purpose was driving sustainable change," he says. "In the past, you'd start with a burning platform, then move to a business case for change, but what you need is burning ambition."

That burning ambition was purpose, Patton says. So, earlier this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, EY upped the ante on purpose, with a little help from Sir Richard Branson, by unveiling its purpose-led transformation offering.

EY worked with Harvard and Oxford on different studies to come up with the science of change. "We came up with some very compelling data about organizations that are truly activating purpose are driving better customer loyalty, better employee engagement, better productivity, better innovation and ultimately better profitability," says Patton. "We created this offering called purpose-led transformation and we launched it at Davos, which had unbelievable energy around it, and from that we launched the Beacon Institute, which is designed to drive the science of purpose."

Patton says the new offering and focus has fueled new type of dialogue in the C-suite. "We've been talking to our clients about addressing the impact of disruption and to drive radical restructuring and you need to do so with a new tool kit, not just a burning platform, not just a case for change but one that has purpose and links to the passions of your people," he says. "It has turned the capabilities conversation—what do you do, how do you do it and what makes you different—into a conversation about the why. Why do you do you do it? What is the purpose of your change?"

Patton says more clients have a purpose statement, but very few clients are acting enough on it. EY is helping change that, he says, and it starts at home. "We knew purpose was powerful but it has completely transformed our firm," Patton says. In a business that's known for being a bunch of technicians and being very analytical and deep in our subject matter, this has given our leaders a chance to be inspirational—having purpose is a way to inspire their clients and inspire their teams."

Meanwhile, he has also seen it have a tremendous impact on a transformational journey that EY is on. "It has accelerated our path to be innovative, it has accelerated our path to be global, it has accelerated our path to being digital," he says. "Which is why I say purpose is the bridge to the new world order."

Purpose, Patton says, is changing the profession. He says he's seen a lot more firms speaking out on the topic of purpose. "I love the fact that we're competing on purpose, and I think it's really healthy, and I think it's going to raise all of our games," he says. "If you look at all the disruption we've talked about, that gives us unprecedented opportunity to do good in the profession."

The old consulting model, Patton says, relied on hiring a bunch of people, working them really hard and then, all too often, watching them leave. "That old model is dying. The new model of being purposeful, of being intentional, and helping industries, business and communities improve is gaining momentum. And it's very positive."

And Patton says no one is positioned like EY. "We have a strategy that's based in purpose. We have an offering that's based in purpose. We have a global network of consultants that have been trained in purpose," he says. "And while I think it's great that a lot of other firms are beginning to realize it, EY is light years ahead of our competitors."

Sidebar: Cybersecurity

EY's Managed Security Operations Center

As we witnessed in recent years with high-profile data breaches at major media and retail companies, the threat of cyberattacks is real and growing. Since hackers are always adapting and evolving, companies, in a sense, are always playing defense. The best software in the world won't be able to detect or stop every breach, but combining technology solutions with human intelligence put the odds considerably more in the company's favor. This is where EY's recently launched Managed Security Operations Center enters the picture, offering round-the-clock protection for clients both offsite and on. Consulting sat down with Ken Allan, EY's Global Information Security Leader, to learn more about the center and the biggest cybersecurity threats facing clients.

Consulting: What was the impetus behind launching the Managed Security Operations Center?

Allan: This is a continually growing problem not going away any time soon, so about two years ago, we started providing that kind of service and the formal launch a couple of weeks ago was simply a consolidation of our capability. We already do a fairly broad range of security services but they tend to be very project-based—improvement projects or transformation projects or the kind that deliver identity or access management. Those are all good and will continue, but we have to be able to provide our clients with a much more sophisticated approach to handling threat intelligence and to understand what's going on around their networks, on their endpoints and then connect it all together. Our managed SOC is our way of being able to provide the whole suite of services.

Consulting: It must be a bit like trying to hit a moving target.

Allan: We have a philosophy that you can get ahead of it. You don't get there necessarily by spending a lot of money, but you do get there by being smart. Being smart means you're collecting all the right intelligence, you're understanding what you have that hackers are interested in, who might want to compromise or steal that from you, then you can build up a picture of what you're trying to protect against. Knowing all of that means you can start to anticipate things. By anticipating you can determine what you have to do in order to deal with the inevitable attacks. We tell our clients they are going to be breached and there's no point in putting all of your effort and resources into trying to prevent the breach when it's going to happen anyway, so you have to have at least some capability in detecting and containing that breach. We will be able to detect when there's anomalistic behavior going on and be able to use threat intelligence that sits alongside that to try and understand where that's coming from and why. That's a way of us trying to position our clients where they can actually start to tackle it rather than just appearing to be victims every time.

Consulting: Do you think this is this a market-wide problem?

Allan: I think some industries are perhaps more mature. Aerospace and Defense comes to mind, Financial Services up to a point, but I think there are sectors or industries that probably up until 2 to 3 years ago believed it wouldn't happen to them, then we saw retailers getting hit, media companies getting hit. There are very few boards we talk to now where there isn't a strong level of awareness. The amount of resources applied to dealing with the cybersecurity problem certainly does vary by sector, some spend an awful lot more than others. But the problem everyone has is if your critical assets are compromised it doesn't matter what sector you're in, that could potentially be fatal.

Consulting: What are the biggest cybersecurity threats your clients are dealing with?

Allan: We see compromises relating to trying to access credit card data or payment systems. You can put capabilities in place to protect that easily, but the thing that's more difficult to protect is intellectual property crucial to an organization. The organization believes it sits somewhere in a Fort Knox-style environment, but the reality is that data will have been replicated dozens of times around the organization, including sitting on people's C: drives. It's that replication that makes it really difficult to protect. There's no panacea certainly. That's what we tend to get more involved in now, breaches where an organization has been breached but isn't entirely sure what's gone missing.