Good to Great

Have you ever heard of, or read, the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins? The author conducted an extensive research project with the goal of identifying what causes a company to go from being merely 'good' to truly 'great'. Based on his research, he puts forth in this book a number of characteristics that define 'great' companies. This morning we had a partner from the Australia practice visiting and he facilitated a session on this book. He took us through a critical evaluation of PwC based on the criteria given in the book. It provoked a lot of interesting discussion among the group.

This week PwC has been conducting an online forum to solicit input about our assurance (i.e. audit) business. It's a 72-hour forum during which people can go online and post comments or respond to questions. It's essentially a big chat room or blog. The Genesis Park participants have been helping the monitors of the forum with some of the more detailed work. Thankfully, with the group in D.C. helping too and the 6-hour time difference, no one has to be up in the middle of the night. Our role is to be continuously reading through the posts and then summarizing the themes and topics periodically to report to the monitors, who then might respond to comments or post additional questions to encourage debate. There's been a health level of participation in the forum (I think we were pleasantly surprised). I took my turn at monitoring yesterday, and found many of the comments to be very interesting. For example, one person suggested we change the name of an "audit" because of the negative perception associated with the word. Another person thought we should broaden the knowledge base of our employees by hiring 1 analyst for every 10 clients. Our next challenge will be to create an overall summary of the forum and strategic suggestions.


On a different note, I finally visited the Berlin Zoo this past weekend. Going to the zoo in the winter is a great way to avoid the crowds! I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was quite impressed with the layout and the variety of animals. Practically all the animals were out and about too, despite the cold weather. Tragically, I forgot my camera. If the admission wasn't so steep (12 euro!), I'd go back again. Surprisingly, there were a ton of babies - baby giraffe, panda, polar bear, zebra, hippo, monkeys, lions, and of course my favorite, the cutest baby elephant! The cubs were probably about 1-2 months old, but the rest of the babies were probably closer to a year.


While I didn't get any pictures of the cute babies, I do have pictures from my day trip to Dresden to share. One of my favorite parts was seeing this Raphael painting Sistine Madonna which has the famous little cherubs at the bottom. It's funny to me how they are a relatively minor part of the original painting, but now the most well known. The other exciting part of the trip was renting a car and hitting the autobahn to get there. The road trip was a great chance to see more of the German countryside... and listen to "All I Want for Christmas" about 13 times!