PricewaterhouseCoopers chief executive Luke Sayers is easy in his surroundings. A man frequently out of his comfort zone, the 46-year-old has learnt to wear uncertainty with a degree of nonchalance.
"I certainly stuffed up because I was outside my natural environment a lot of the time," says Sayers.
At 42, Sayers became the youngest CEO in the history of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). In the four years since, he has led the $1.9 billion firm on a solid growth trajectory and overseen the integration of strategy house Booz & Co, which PwC acquired in 2014 in one of the biggest global deals in the professional services sector in the past decade.
Sayers has driven performance hard. He has repositioned the firm, pontificating that technology and globalisation will continue to disrupt PwC's services and workforce.
Supporters say he has been instrumental in flattening the deeply hierarchical culture governing PwC's 6000-odd staff. Under Sayers, PwC staff are encouraged to explore other interests. He actively encourages them to undertake social enterprises and get involved with not-for-profit organisations to increase their relevance to the market and society more broadly.
He is a great orator, oozing authenticity, although quite a private person. "The greatest skill he has is the common touch," says Commonwealth Bank director and Sayers' close friend Launa Inman.
Critics say that Sayers has created a "get ahead at any cost" culture within PwC. However, this could be a reaction to large-scale transformation. Sayers had to clear the decks when he came into the role, shedding more than 200 staff and moving on about 10 per cent of the partner group. The normal jockeying for position followed.
"There are CEOs who don't inspire anyone but never piss anyone off either," says PwC's chief strategist and Sayers' right‑hand, Sammy Kumar. "Luke's never been that person and never will be."
Sayers says the goodwill lost in this initial cull is one of his greatest regrets. "The 'why' was right. The 'how' was horrible," he says. It took a long time to win trust back.
Sticking his neck out
Not one to shy away from controversy, he believes captains of industry should lend their voices to debates of national significance. "Leaders should lead," he says.
Sayers' most recent public showdown was with KPMG chairman Peter Nash over board diversity and competency. In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, Sayers criticised boards as "incestuous" and said their "total ring of conservatism" was impeding growth. Nash disagreed, saying directors with experience were still valuable.
This came just months after Sayers became embroiled in a media storm for his opinions about a national referendum on gay marriage. He argued a plebiscite was too expensive for an issue of limited national significance compared with stagnant economic growth and terrorism. Some see his high-profile interventions as a sign of hubris. Others feel it is the type of frank feedback missing from public debate.
PwC is the country's largest professional partnership with just shy of 500 equity partners. In essence, this means 500 people see themselves as business owners with a say in how strategy should be set and executed. From a leadership perspective, in some ways this makes it less like a corporation and more like a political party.
"It's a confidence game," says former PwC boss Tony Harrington, who mentored Sayers as he rose through PwC's ranks. "You've got a whole bunch of people who will challenge every directive. You need spleen."
To get elected CEO, candidates tour PwC's offices advocating the merits of the policies on which they intend to govern. Sayers has just been elected for a second four-year term unopposed. So while his style might have its opponents – those who would say in the balancing act between leading-with-confidence and leading-with-fear, he errs too far to the latter – Sayers is clearly doing something right.
There are those who believe Sayers won't stick it out for the full four-year term. They speculate he'll complete two years then perhaps retire to a global role within PwC. Others believe he has political aspirations, something Sayers flatly denies.
No silver spoon
Sayers grew up in country Victoria, the middle son in a family of three children in which education was a top priority.
His father Graham, a school principal, was dux of Scotch College in Hawthorn, while his mother Coral was dux of Kilbreda College in Mentone. She completed her leaving certificate at the age of 15 and became a teacher.
The family moved to Calgary, Canada, when Luke was nine, where he fell in love with ice hockey. They reluctantly returned to Melbourne after three years abroad.
Luke was enrolled in Coomoora High, a state school in Melbourne's south-east. The school was so desperately under-resourced that when the science teacher tragically died it took three months to find a replacement and Luke was elected to lead the class.
As a teenager, Luke had little interest in joining the upper-class set. When his parents suggested he transfer to Melbourne High, a selective state school, Luke resisted. His parents acquiesced and in the year he graduated, Coomoora High ranked among the worst-performing schools in the state.
As a graduation present, Luke's parents presented him with a round-the-world airline ticket on the proviso he first complete one year of a combined commerce-computer science degree at Monash University. "They were big on travel, but I'm pretty sure they wanted us kids out of the house," says Sayers.
He spent a year doing "the backpacker thing" around Europe and north and south America, and was so enamoured of the global perspective it gave him that he moved his whole family to Italy for a year in 2015. He's chuffed that his eldest of four daughters wants to attend university in the United States.
Partnering up
Sayers had never heard of PwC (then called Price Waterhouse) when he joined its technology audit team as a summer vacation intern in 1991. But his leadership qualities attracted attention. Sammy Kumar, being a couple of years his senior, was appointed Sayers' "buddy" in the cadet program.
Kumar recalls a big client project, in which senior staffers had spent weeks trying to establish a rapport with the client. Junior staff are typically considered inconsequential in these projects – referred to as "grinders".
"We'd been trying for weeks to break down barriers," says Kumar. "Luke had been there a couple of days, and somehow that Friday night we had a dozen people from the client side out having drinks. He draws people in."
Sayers has worked in pretty much every part of the professional services giant over the years, including in Washington DC, where he was made the second-youngest partner in PwC's US practice at the age of 29.
Achieving partner status requires something remarkable. In Sayers' case, he built a global telecoms advisory business from scratch into a division worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual billings. When he returned to the Australian practice in 2001, Sayers was put in charge of the Telstra account – one of PwC's biggest – when Ziggy Switkowski was Telstra CEO. Is wasn't long before Sayers was asked onto the leadership team to take carriage of PwC's 20 highest priority accounts.
Doubt and diversity
Sayers believes he is "naturally wired to the super positive". But when PwC's then chief executive Tony Harrington approached him to run the firm's stalled tax and legal business, he baulked.
It was part of a broader leadership overhaul, and a visionary move from Harrington, to bring more diverse thinking to the firm.
From Sayers' perspective it was risky. In addition to being a sideways career move, it was unprecedented in PwC's organisation to have a tax-illiterate person run such a deeply technical domain. "This was the one decision in my entire career that I was super unsure about," he says.
Mentors warned him off it. "'They're going to kill you' was the overwhelming advice," says Sayers. He took the job, deciding ultimately he could live with having a crack and failing, but not with wimping out.
The experience profoundly altered Sayers' view on leadership and engagement.
"I went in with perceptions and biases – that tax professionals don't form relationships as well as they need to, about their unwillingness and inability to change, and their qualities as leaders because they are so highly specialised, so technical – that were totally wrong," he says.
"It taught me to hold no judgment, don't have firm answers straight away, to listen, empathise and co-create. You've got to have a direction of travel, but you can't have it all buttoned down."
Sayers attributes his rapid career trajectory to great mentors, the courage to try different roles, the resilience to dust himself off when he'd come a gutser, and a tonne of luck on timing.
At the age of 32, in the midst of a golden run, it all came to a horrible grinding halt when his two-day-old daughter Alle (his second of four girls) was diagnosed with Down syndrome.
Sayers refers to it as the biggest personal jolt of his life, plummeting him into an abyss of self‑doubt. "When you have a child, in many ways, that's your purpose coming to life. When that purpose is disrupted for whatever reason, your world starts to unravel."
With characteristic determination, Sayers shaped this adversity into an asset.
He recalls a turning point at 2am one day. His wife Cate had finished breastfeeding, something she had to do every two hours to improve the muscle tone in Alle's tongue. Both Sayers and Cate were in tears.
"We decided right then and there, we can feel like victims or accept it's a beautiful gift, lean into this and learn from it," Sayers says. "We've never looked back. Alle has taught us so much about life and context."
As a leader, he says the experience reinforced the beauty of difference – a lesson begun when running PwC's tax practice. "The magic comes from how we collaborate together."
Challenge of globalisation
PwC is in the middle of refining its 2020 strategy. But already Sayers has indicated an increasingly customised approach and further investment in technology to allow the firm to service parts of the market it couldn't address before in a low-cost, sustainable way.
The big consulting firms believe machine learning will allow revenue growth to occur without the need to hire more people. "The next four years are going to be transformational, not just for us but the professional services industry and our clients more broadly," says Sayers. "Client needs are changing. Clients expect collaboration, that when they're talking to a PwC person they're getting access to the expertise of the entire firm."
This expectation applies globally. The Big Four accountancy and advisory firms – PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG – have been adopting new organisational structures to foster global collaboration and bring the best talent to bear on significant clients or projects. PwC's new partnership with Google exemplifies the industry view that external link-ups will be crucial.
Of the four, Ernst & Young is considered the front-runner with regards to regional integration. It has identified its 280 biggest global clients – close to 30 of which reside in the Asia-Pacific region – and developed a system of continual reviews to ensure the right people are attending those accounts, bringing the right ideas, and that the global firm is investing to plug any gaps from a service line or geographic perspective.
"[Advisory firms] have got to be able to tap great people in a centralised manner," says Ernst & Young Oceania chief executive Tony Johnson. "If you're the auditor of BHP Billiton, your biggest issue is the smallest market that BHP is in and your ability to service BHP in that country."
As the Asian century looms, Sayers is regretting his decision – motivated by short-term yield – to sell the Australian firm's equity stake in the Indonesian practice while a member of PwC's leadership team in 2010. Re‑establishing the brand in the region will cost more time and money.
Macro economic headwinds
Engagement with Asia is among the macro-economic issues driving PwC's 2020 growth strategy. "There are some massive macro-economic and social trends coming down the pipes that will require anticipation and response from business," says Sayers.
He believes the health of Australia's cities amid increased urbanisation will be crucial to national prosperity and applauds Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's appointment of a Minister for Cities last year.
PwC is also concerned about the huge intergenerational transfer of wealth in the private and family business space, as Baby Boomers hand over the reins.
"This is an enormously important sector in our economy and the degree to which this transition is handled well will determine its health in the future," says Sayers.
Sayers' recipe for success: What you need to become the youngest CEO of a billion-dollar company
- Great mentors
- The courage to try different roles
- Resilience to dust yourself off when you've come a gutser
