Company: EY
Date: 2015-06-05
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

5,000 Little Kingdoms
Pros: Aggressively targeting growth in business services, driving opportunity throughout the organization. This plays out in terms of role/responsibility, promotions, salary and elsewhere. The firm is also very accommodating to those that want a more work/life balance.
Cons: It is a partnership, and as such there is wild variation in how any specific issue might be treated by an account team. Partners/Principals/Executive Directors (PPEDs) are incented to not collaborate across business units due to the way credit is "shared" for new revenue. Some get over this and collaborate any, some don't. 

The firm is at its core an accounting firm, so PPEDs are typically very risk averse. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it drives a culture of "fear of the unknown." For instance, I have been told on more than one occasion that a training (!) presentation could not be shared for fear that the underlying material would be misappropriated. And this was from the executive in charge of training. 

Combining the above two facts (accounting backbone and partner model) reveals that most work gets done through "Channel 1" (audit) relationships. These men (and by and large they are white men) have almost nothing to gain by thinking creatively and everything to lose if they make a misstep. The scales are heavily weighted toward very, very slow change.

The crazy thing is this: everyone knows this. Everyone understands that the cards are stacked against aggressive growth, and yet the strategy remains.

Approach to learning and technology is about 5 years behind the curve of other professional services firms like Accenture or IBM, and Deloitte. This is a key limitation to growth and productivity. Examples include: ability to collaborate with the client via screensharing technology (not intra-company, inter-company), knowledge management and sharing tools, rigorous training curricula that is relevant to building the skills of its workforce, use of mobile business applications (CRM, travel booking, room reservations, time and expense, collaboration, etc), and access to technology platforms or resources that enhance and extend work (data visualization, analysis suites like SAS, technical resources that can help tailor approaches to difficult problems). 

Of course there are limitations with respect to data privacy and compliance with PCAOB and FRC regulations. And of course there are clear examples of firms in this industry that have gone down due to a too cavalier approach to risk. But the idea of "risk management" seems in many cases absent from EY's vernacular. Instead the operative goal is to eliminate risk.