I saw a news article recently about two relatively new accounting firms embroiled in a battle over rights to the name Arthur Andersen. Both pale in comparison to the original firm, who’s unfortunate demise changed many things about doing business in this millennium.
Personally, I owe my plunge into entrepreneurship nearly 20 years ago to them.
Arthur Andersen is to this day, in my estimation, the greatest Public Accounting Firm that ever existed. When I was a partner at Grant Thornton, I admired our competitor Arthur Andersen. They had a model organizational culture and resources we could only dream about. We very infrequently beat them in head to head competition for clients. They had many times the revenue and personnel we had and the dollars they allocated to training and national office personnel and publications was on par with our entire firm’s operating budget. Yet 30 years later, Grant Thornton flourishes and Andersen was sold in pieces and has vanished.
Later in my career, I hired Arthur Andersen at two companies where I served as executive and director after I left Grant. In both cases, Andersen was an instrumental component of our growth and helped us meet our objectives. Just being associated with them lent us credibility in business dealings with bankers and target acquisitions. None of that matters now. They were a great partner with bad partners.
A friend and Andersen partner invited me to attend a multi-day seminar on Entrepreneurship that they hosted in the late 1990’s. Among the more notable speakers at the seminar were Jeffrey Bleustien, the CEO of Harley Davidson and Franco Harris, the Hall of Fame Running Back for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Q&A sessions for both of the keynotes were memorable.
A participant asked Mr. Bleustien when Harley Davidson would introduce a model that ran more quietly like Suzuki or Kawasaki. He responded in a matter of fact manner, as if he had been asked that question before.
“Our customers like them loud” he chimed. Laughter ensued.
Poor Franco had the misfortune of speaking to our audience in St. Charles, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. One person after another mercilessly tried to get him to acknowledge the superiority of the 1985 Bears to his championship Steeler teams. Without making a definitive determination or saying anything derogatory about that dominating Bear’s season, Franco was able to point to the Steelers’ four World Championships as a decisive factor in their favor.
It was an entertaining few days, but the most impactful concept I took away from that conference was a statement by a speaker who’s name I cannot recall. The speaker noted that, at that time, the average tenure of a CEO of a Fortune 500 Company was just under 24 months. His point was that if the top executives in America were so short-lived in their positions, then we are all free agents.
My personal journey into Entrepreneurship was influenced by that speaker’s thinking. Since that time, millions more have tested the waters as the factors like multinationalism, corporate consolidation, technological replacement, regulatory restriction, benefit costs, employment litigation, and outsourcing have impacted the labor force.
Entrepreneurship has been a solution for many of these displaced workers. Successful entrepreneurs learn that undertaking their own enterprise requires much more than just their own skills. We live in communities and take advantage of each other’s skills for a reason. We need each other. Our expectation is that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Communities and large organizations can normally absorb an unsynchronized member or two without much distortion to the group as a whole. These occurrences in a small entrepreneurship can have a more profound, sometimes devastating impact. Occasionally, a few very dysfunctional members can bring down even a large, superbly run organization, which is what happened to Arthur Andersen.
The firm had over 20,000 people, of which I knew a few dozen. All that I knew were bright, diligent, hard-working and ethical. Each of them ended up losing their positions because a few people with authority in a far-away town made some very poor high profile decisions on their Enron engagement. I would be willing to bet the people I knew never met the people who changed their lives.
Soon after the Conference, I was given a mason sized jar of jelly beans as a gift by one of Arthur Andersen’s partners. On the jar was printed the words “Arthur Andersen- More Than Bean Counters”. I am not a fan of jelly beans, so I gave them to my kids, but I kept the jar. I used the jar to hold my loose change. Who would have guessed that that jar would one day contain more wealth than that of what I consider to be the greatest accounting firm in history?
