Punit Renjen: Discovering the thinking behind Deloitte chief's demotivating new year email

Punit Renjen appears to know a lot about life. His father’s businesses failed when he was a teenage boy, growing up in India. He was forced to spend long hours working in the family factories after school. He didn’t wear a suit for his interview at Deloitte in 1989, because he didn’t own one.

It’s possible that this extended and admirable dip into the real world that preceded his 28 years climbing the ladder at one of the world’s great corporate behemoths made him particularly useless at motivational messages.

Or it may be sheer competitive spirit that compelled him to the space he now occupies as the undisputed king of meaningless corporate speak.

January is a bleak enough time, particularly for any of the 219,999 of Deloitte Global’s 220,000 employees who are less well remunerated than Mr Renjen, so it may be that the company-wide email the new CEO sent out last week, entitled, “Let’s Swap Resolutions: Living Our Purpose,” was not well received.

Deloitte’s purpose, you may be aware, is to advise companies and do their accounts. In order for employees to “live Deloitte’s purpose”, you might think they would merely need to spend as much of their waking lives as possible advising companies and doing their accounts.

But evidently it is more complicated than that. Staff must sign the “Deloitte Journey Declaration”. Why? “Because it will take all of us to achieve our global aspiration!” And what is that aspiration? That is not entirely clear. “To deliver an exceptional, and consistent, global talent experience across the Deloitte network” might be it. But given that something cannot be both exceptional and consistent, and delivering a global talent experience is impossible on the grounds that it doesn’t mean anything, that might not be it.

The journey, we learn, is in fact a promise. And a promise that is articulated through pillars, one of which will “accelerate your ambition”. It’s possible this sequence of events has been lifted directly from ancient Greek myths, where articulate pillars of promise that speed up your desires are more plausible, but their relevance to the life of a management consultant is not immediately certain.

Very occasionally, such nonsense can inadvertently contain meaning. The footballer-turned-pundit Michael Owen once observed that “Liverpool have a problem with their defence going forward,” and he was right, in a sense, just not in the way he meant.

We can only hope Mr Renjen sees the error of his ways going forward, or indeed going backward. The Deloitte Journey, being a journey, will almost certainly have to go forward. Journeys going backward are not impossible, but many find they make them feel queasy.

In the notorious book Rip-Off!, former management consultant Neil Glass admitted: “We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along.... It’s like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7,000 per week.”

It consisted, he says, of “lies, lies and even more lies.”

In such rarefied spheres of bullshit, it is unsurprising that a little corporate speak must be used to lubricate the wheels. If it’s your job to convince a business that a 21-year-old straight out of university knows how to run it better than you, you are going to need big words. As the Bee Gees and latterly Boyzone observed, words might very well be all you have. But the perspicacity of applying such techniques to one’s own employees, who are almost as well versed in the stuff as you are, is questionable.

Writing such mumbo jumbo can surely be barely any more enjoyable than reading it. And if it is meant to motivate staff to work harder – staff who, it is safe to assume, are not afforded the time to compose such absurdly empty platitudes – it can only possibly have the opposite effect. At the end of his note, he promises to “achieve a bit more work-life balance.” If something’s got to give, make it the emails.

We have said “Hello, 2016!” and now it is time for resolutions. One of my resolutions is to deliver an exceptional, and consistent, global talent experience.

This promise is articulated through four key pillars: 1) to help you make an impact, 2) inspire you as professionals, 3) accelerate your ambitions, and 4) connect and celebrate your unique strengths.

To deliver this promise, Deloitte will invest to set expectations and help develop consistent capabilities within each role level. So no matter where you practice, you have the same exceptional skills as your peers. In return, I ask that you resolve to live Deloitte’s purpose and join our journey to undisputed leadership.

At the World Meeting this past June, participants signed the Deloitte Journey Declaration attesting we would take this journey – together. Since then, I have travelled the world and asked partners and directors to join the journey (over 7,400 of them have signed). Now it is time for all Deloitte professionals (you) to declare the same commitment...

These resolutions spring from the foundation of what it means to be Deloitte. We will take this journey so we can proudly declare we have kept our promises to ourselves, to each other, and to all those we serve.

My best, Punit