While Sir Ronald Leach was a senior partner in KPMG’s predecessor firm, Peat Marwick Mitchell (Chartered Accountants), he was an unrepentant champion of the sacred duties of chartered accountants and the sanctity of our role as ‘the conscience of the nation’ in exchange for modest rewards. When I joined the firm in London in 1970, accountants were forbidden to advertise their services – except for entries in the ‘Yellow Pages’ of the telephone directory. Sir Ronald was a champion of the common good. When I retired thirty-four years later at the age of sixty with no bonus or pension as Chairman and Chief Executive of KPMG Nigeria and Chairman of KPMG Africa, it was nonetheless with an amazing sense of gratitude and incredible humility. It was a great privilege to work in an environment where meritocracy and the common good were not in deadly conflict.
However, Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel, in his book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, has sparked a vigorous debate about whether or not meritocracy is actually desirable, and more broadly about it how it can be achieved. According to him, “the ideal itself is flawed. Meritocracy has a dark side. And the dark side is that meritocracy corrodes the common good. It encourages the successful to believe that their success is their own making and that they therefore deserve the bounty the market throws at them. It makes us forget the happiness and happiness that helped us along the way. It causes us to forget any sense of guilt towards those who make our achievements possible, from parents and teachers to the community and the country. So it breeds hubris among the winners. They believe that their success is their own making, and they also believe, at least implicitly, that those who fight must also earn their fate.” Fortunately, Gautama Buddha (5th-4th centuries BC) gave us one ancient compass: “Man should accept his past without regret, face his present with confidence, and face the future with hope and greater confidence in the faithfulness of God.” This is precisely the problem in a nation where the rulers and the governed are locked in a deadly conflict. It is clearly a violent and abusive relationship.
Michael Proust (1871-1922) came to our rescue by reminding us: “The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” We also have a vignette by George Orwell (1903-1950 ): “In times of universal deception, speaking the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” However, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) insists that we must not despair. His admonition is as follows (It’s about “lies”!!): “What lies behind us and what lies ahead are trifles compared to what lies within us.”
Around the same time as Sir Ronald Leach (of Peat’s) was a fervent advocate for the common good. Sir Arthur Lewis of the London School of Economics provided his seminal work on the “dual economy” – the paradigm that still shapes the way most social scientists think about the economic problems of “less developed countries”. His main conclusion is that many less developed or underdeveloped economies/ecosystems have a dual structure and are divided into a modern sector that corresponds to the more developed part of the economy associated with urban life, modern industry and the use of advanced technologies . The traditional sector is linked to rural life, agriculture and “backward” institutions and technologies. When Colin Sharman (later Sir Colin Sharman/The Lord Sharman) was Senior Partner/Chairman of KPMG (1997), he firmly pressed the reset button and presented a new focus – that chartered accountants (particularly KPMG) should strive to aligning their services directly with their customers’ expectations with a robust focus on value-add. His first conclusion was that our clients seem to be more concerned with the future (risk assessment/risk management related to the safety of investments and the safety of life and property). He then posited that KPMG clients would shift their focus from what has already been done – income statements and balance sheets – to sustainability. The majority of KPMG partners seemed to support this. Whatever opposition was brewing, it was somewhat muted.
Colin, as Chair of KPMG International, went a step further by convincing the KPMG International Council (of which I was a member) to fund his project – a team to travel the world and anticipate the future of the emerging global village/ should predict. His logic seemed reasonable – if you know the future, you can offer great value by making your customers aware of future challenges and opportunities. I must confess that my role in this laudable endeavor and exciting undertaking was rather peripheral. I have read the extensive reports and any observations/comments I have made have been relegated to the footnotes.
To the best of my knowledge, the report did not predict any of the following “game changers”: climate change, the rise of China to challenge the United States of America, the Covid-19 pandemic, the emergence and dominance of Amazon in online shopping, the emergence of the internet; High-tech; Mobile phones; Artificial intelligence; Blockchain and cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), data supremacy, the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, the rise of Elon Musk, now the richest man in the world thanks to his electric cars (Tesla), the collapse of the Soviet Union, the war in Ukraine, space tourism/private shuttle, Arab Spring, oil theft (mainly from Nigeria), advance payment fraud (“419”) mainly from Nigeria and the sinking of fax machines. Regardless, Colin Sharman deserves credit for his vision and the energy with which he pursued it for the greater good, without compromising the creed of the accounting profession – accountants are the avatars of public trust. There was no way Colin could have predicted the unification of West Germany with East Germany or the demise of Kodak, the Fortune 500 star stock. Suddenly the fabric of society was invaded by “LGTB” and social media. We need to add ZOOM and virtual learning and working from home (remote) to the list.
When Michael Rake emerged as chairman of KPMG in 2002 after serving as Colin’s deputy, the new mantra was “Eat what you kill and kill what you eat”. It was a big cultural shift.
Bashorun JK Randle is a former President of the Institute of the Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).
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