Face to Face: Thomas Pippos. Inheriting the mantle of leadership

Thomas Pippos, Deloitte NZ’s new CEO, says there’s running joke that the transition from former CEO Murray Jack to himself took about 45 minutes. “So it was little bit on the brief side,” he quips. “But you’ve got to remember that Murray and I go back very long time. When I was graduate, Murray was senior manager.”
The reality is that by the time Pippos took over as CEO, he’d been partner in the firm – one of New Zealand’s iconic big four professional services firms – for over 17 years, and on the management group for good 15 or so of them. He knows how the firm ticks, and the individuals within it, incredibly well.
Apart from couple of years on secondment to the offices of the Ministers of Revenue and Finance as private sector tax policy advisor – time which he includes in his list of career highlights – Pippos has been with Deloitte ever since he rather unscientifically picked it for summer clerk’s job way back in his days as student. As he puts it, he’s “lived and breathed” the firm ever since.
So, as he says, “if I was ever trained for this role, it’s simply that I’ve been with the firm since the beginning”. Along the way, he’s worked alongside former CEO and current chairman Murray Jack, former CEO and chairman Nick Main, and former managing partner Daphne Rawstorne.
Yet, when Pippos had first entered the workforce as young man armed with double degree in commerce and law from Victoria University of Wellington, his only general plan was to “be successful”.
“From professional point of view, I didn’t want to go through life thinking ‘what if’,” he says. “And, as consequence, I would always strive to achieve more on yearly basis.”
Such drive, and fair dollop of talent, saw Pippos achieve partnership just seven years after joining the firm as part of its 1989 graduate intake, and continually push himself to take on senior roles and grow as professional. By 1998, he’d become lead partner Wellington tax and two years later took on the role of national tax service line leader within Deloitte’s management group.
He maintains that an underlying enjoyment of the role is fundamental to success in his type of business.
“I remember early on in my career someone making an observation that it’s best you find part of the business that you really enjoy and then it’s not really job. It’s more that you get pleasure from it.”
Even as CEO, he still works with number of clients: fact, he says, that surprises some people.
“I think there’s perception that as you move up in firms you lose client connectivity.”
Pippos says it is “dangerous” in his type of business to lose connectivity either to partners or to clients. He’s also mindful that his work with clients provides him with greater mandate to expect the same from other partners.
At its core, Pippos believes, Deloitte is in the business of providing solutions to complicated problems, and commerce and legal background forms “quite disciplined way of thinking” in which to do just that. No surprises then that he’s enjoying his new role.
He likens it to how other people enjoy doing crossword puzzles or jigsaws: “both of which I dislike immensely … probably because whatever part of the brain that can solve such puzzles has already been consumed by other things”.
He solves the problem of managing firm with 900 or so people through “leadership cascade” in which he spends most of his time with the firm’s more than 80 partners, who in turn connect through to others in the organisation.
More specifically, he works up close and personal with the firm’s executive – small core group of partners and chief operating officer – which cascades ideas and initiatives down to wider management group, which, in turn, links through to the larger L25 team. This, when at full strength, is 25-member-strong group of the firm’s business leaders.
“If everything works appropriately at partner level then everything works appropriately for the remaining team as well,” says Pippos.
He sees it as part of his role to instil greater sense of ownership and leadership amongst all the partners, and emphasises the bond of trust that must exist for any partnership to flourish.
“We’ve grown up together in number of instances so these relationships are like professional friendships,” he says.
Pippos is more than mindful of the legacy that has now been put into his hands and says, modestly, that the role can be “a bit daunting when you think about it because there’s lot of responsibility.
“When I joined the firm, there were eight leading [global] firms and Deloitte ranked seventh out of the eight. I think we had revenues of around US$2 billion. Now we’re in the top two with PwC and our revenues are coming up to US$30 billion. So within my lifetime, this firm has somersaulted ahead relative to some of our competitors.”
He jokes that couple of times when he was quite new in his role as CEO he caught himself wondering who would have to make certain decisions.
“And it dawned on me that the decision is mine. You have to recognise that the buck does ultimately stop with you on all sorts of different fronts.”
As he sees it, “the reality is that people need to step up and be their own man or woman, as the case may be, in their own roles”. In any case, he says the “bullshit and bravado” of his children and their friends in the car as he drops them off to school in the morning can lighten up even the most challenging day ahead.
Pippos prefers to steer away from concrete examples but says all of the important decisions he’s made as chief executive have been influenced by the fact that he’s been able to feed off the experiences of other partners with different perspectives. It’s his role to pull the best of those different viewpoints together.
“It’s all about incremental changes. If you enter meeting thinking ‘black’ and exit thinking ‘white’ it’s not very good idea that you’re the leader. The whole point of being leader is that you have gumption in terms of what, directionally, the right answer should be.”
Certainly direction, rather than destination, is key to Pippos’ thinking. There’s always danger with destination, he says, of arriving and not knowing what to achieve next. Such drive for forward momentum underpins his view that “as CEO, you’ve got to have self-belief and be satisfied that you will never be satisfied”.
“The curse with all of these firms is that there’s no destination. You have to have your guiding principles in terms of where you want to take the firm and what’s important, and then you shouldn’t deviate too far from them. I’m quite clear about where I want to take the firm: which is not where it currently is.
“That’s, in some respects, how these firms are. They’re never satisfied with where they currently are so it’s always about continuing to improve.” Stages along the way may be measured by top- and bottom-line dollars and market share, he says. “But, ultimately, we want to become larger and more successful than what we currently are. That’s our destiny, I suppose, to continue this growth trajectory, not only from New Zealand, but also from global point of view: to become an even more iconic brand from professional services perspective.”
Pippos says one of the things that he stands for is the need for the firm to do things differently. “Why? Because you just need to. Different means change, means innovation.”
In his business-as-sailing analogy, earlier marketplaces may have been characterised by more favourable economic times in which firm just needed to hoist its sails and catch the prevailing winds.
“Now, it’s about what type of sails you put up, how you trim them, and how you face off to the marketplace that determines whether you will be successful or not,” he says. “But is it easier or harder to be CEO now? I really don’t know. It is whatever it is