John Meacock, chief strategy officer Asia Pacific and Australia for Deloitte, has found himself often quoting from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen in his boardroom discussions.

Van Valen’s Red Queen hypothesis argues that in the struggle for survival, no single species pulls ahead for long because when an organism develops an adaptation that gives it an advantage, other organisms adapt to take advantage of that change, or negate it.

“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen tells Alice. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

Meacock points to the business parallels: while companies are pouring resources into process and product improvement, it is not propelling them ahead of the competition, because rivals are doing the same.

“You can’t be satisfied with incremental innovation, because none of your competitors are sitting idle,” explains Meacock, who is also vice chair of Deloitte’s global board. “The customer is benefiting but are you really getting ahead? You need to shift the dial. But when do you make that change? We want to be ahead of the curve – but not too far.”

Binary decisions

Developing new business models while spending less on the existing, but profitable, business is the biggest strategy juggle facing global companies, says Meacock. “All would say they are challenged by this.”

He reckons that Macquarie Bank and Origin Energy’s former chief executive Grant King mastered the art of maintaining optionality better than most.

“Too many people lock themselves into a position too early,” Meacock says. “These organisations clearly go after something but keep their binary decisions to the very last minute.”

Meacock is well placed to observe strategic success and failure in Australia’s big companies. He built an enviable professional network while setting up Deloitte’s influential board and C-suite thought leadership program The Directors’ Cut.

The long distance runner and former hockey player was heavily involved in the firm’s response to the global financial crisis, which helped transform Deloitte Australia from a minnow in the domestic consulting sector to a billion-dollar top-tier service provider.

When everyone else was spouting doom and gloom, the program Managing in Volatile Times, equipped Deloitte partners with 30 different ways their clients could improve their businesses. It was adopted globally, and Deloitte pulled through the 2008-10 economic slowdown with better momentum than its rivals.

Disruption intensifies

While fear of business model disruption has intensified in the past six months, says Meacock, so too has the realisation that it represents both a risk and an opportunity.

“Do we have a sustainable business model? That’s the killer question that we keep getting asked at the moment,” he says. Meacock cut his teeth as a young Perth accountant jetting around the globe, aged 25, flogging assets for the Parry Corporation to settle its debts after the 1987 stockmarket crash. He says the experience blessed him with 18 years worth of experience in 18 months.

He set up risk advisory firm Oakvale Capital and left 12 years later, in 2000, to join PricewaterhouseCoopers. After being lured to Deloitte he focused on skilling up partners and embedding account management processes to service large corporate clients.

When Deloitte Australia’s long-standing chief executive, Giam Sweigers, resigned in 2014, Meacock was one of four candidates tipped to take the reins. He withdrew from the leadership race, which was won by American-born Cindy Hook.

“It was certainly not easy withdrawing, but I felt it was right at the time – life is about fit and timing,” Meacock says.

Asia still the main game

As Deloitte faces its own disruptive demons, Meacock sits at the nexus of the $US36.8 billion ($42 billion) professional services giant’s response and is formulating a game plan central to the future of the organisation in Asia.

“If you try to build a Western business model in Asia, you’re going to get killed,” he says. His goal is to develop a portfolio of global platform-based services that bring buyers and sellers together in interactions that create value for both parties, but which keep delivery local so partners feel engaged.

The first proof points of Deloitte’s Asian strategy will emerge within weeks, with the launch of an Asia-wide economics business to be led by financial services partner Ian Thatcher and modelled on Chris Richardson’s esteemed Deloitte Access Economics business. It will be followed by major funding into the region to drive technology-related innovation.

Rewriting the rule book

Meacock’s promotion to global vice-chairman last year puts him in a governance and strategic oversight role at a time when half of Deloitte’s advisory services – some $US18 billion worth – are expected to be done by machine within 10 years. To ensure its own growth strategy is sound, Deloitte has adopted strategist Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Zoom In, Zoom Out approach, which has been adapted by the firm’s global strategist John Hagel.

“We fell into the trap a few years ago of three-year planning cycles, because the world was so volatile,” Meacock says. “It didn’t work.”

Instead, a six-year planning cycle provides a fixed general direction, complemented by an agile six-month agenda containing two or three short-term goals aligned with the big picture.

Deloitte consultants are now better able to quickly share intellectual property, data and insights, says Meacock, but for some traditionalists it flies in the face of deeply entrenched behaviour.

“We’re trying to retrofit very skilled people into a new offering, which requires different skills,” says Meacock.

Deloitte’s workforce has bought into the intellectual reasoning behind the change, he says, but the changes have yet to win the hearts and minds of staff.

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