This year the Conference on Global Rising Risk Level is being held in Zimboda. The first session was on Thanksgiving Day (27 November, 2014) and the second session is scheduled to hold on Christmas Day (25 December, 2014). It is a measure of the importance and centrality of SECURITY to our lives and livelihood that leading businessmen and women along with security experts, academics, statesmen (no politicians!), clerics, diplomats, professionals, writers, scientists and bankers as well as captains of industry and commerce sacrifice valuable time on these special days to assess the rising global risk level and the consequences of failure to invest in mitigation.
I owe my introduction to the group of think tankers to Sir Colin Sharman (now Lord Sharman OBE) who, when he was chairman of KPMG UK and KPMG International, committed the firm to making a significant (some dissenting partners considered it colossal) investment in global risk assessment and management. It was a very bold and original initiative. He was not left in any doubt that he was swimming against the tide. Anyway, he was able to bulldoze his way through sheer force of personality and doggedness. It was a wake-up call anchored on his conviction that KPMG as a leading firm of chartered accountants (we were briefly number one globally at the time) could not afford to wait for risks to crystalize. It owed a duty to its clients to be ahead of the curve and ensure that it would be in a vantage position to anticipate the evolving dangers – be they imminent, (immediate) short-term, medium-term or long-term. The UK partners did not appear to be wildly enthusiastic about what they snidely referred to as “Colin’s new baby”. Ironically, it was the US partners who readily bought into the vision and reinforced it by “Balancing The Score Card” by expanding the template to focus and accommodate not only risks but also corresponding opportunities. The logic was anchored on the symbolic relationship between the firm and its clients. We would swim or sink together!!
Perhaps it would be helpful to mention that KPMG actually had three (even four) different and distinct cultures following the merger of Klynveld Peat Marwick & Goedeler. Time and space have conspired to deprive us of the opportunity to delve extensively into the history of KPMG and the components of its international/global tentacles. For now, let us confine ourselves to recognizing that the UK firm had its own culture and structure as “Peat”. So also did the US firm as “Mitchel” and Klynveld was Dutch while Goedeler was German.
Far-flung Australia was affiliated with Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore as “Asia Pacific”. This was before China emerged. To further complicate matters, even within the UK there were regional offices along with the national office. In the US some of the regional offices were as powerful (if not more powerful) than the national office depending on the personality of the partners-in-charge.
Suffice it to say that the US firm was more readily disposed to support Colin Sharman in his innovation and focus on risk as opposed to the UK partners who were somewhat lukewarm about it all. The European practice – France, Netherlands, Germany – did not appear to be too keen but neither would they oppose Colin frontally. They seemed reconciled to giving him the benefit of the doubt.
As the representative of Africa on the International Board of KPMG, I must admit that Africa was a rather late convert. We had other priorities and pre-occupations. In any case, even then Africa was in perpetual turmoil. In essence, there was no need to look for future danger, it was already here! Indeed, Nigeria where I was the chairman was embroiled in a never-ending series of coup d’états and counter-coups. Besides, we had to contend with massive devaluation of the Nigerian currency as well as horrendous infrastructure challenges, particularly power and electricity.
Colin Sharman was nothing if not dogged and fiercely determined. With the chairman of the US firm as an ally, it was only a matter of time before the others fell into line. What must not be overlooked or understated is that the US and UK firms were independent of each other. Indeed, they were elected by and accountable to the partners in their respective domains.
Lurking in the background was a somewhat aggressive concern amongst the US partners that their remuneration/share of profit was falling behind what the consultants were earning. They even benchmarked themselves against their counterparts – partners of Arthur Andersen whose US partners even before the Enron scandal erupted, had a reputation for being over-daring and not too keen on walking the tight rope between what was strictly forbidden and what they could get away with. They preferred to grab the chance. They were early apostles of “creative accounting”!
Also, at about the same time as Colin Sharman was pushing his global risk project, KPMG International was grappling with the temptation to attempt to frustrate the imminent merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand and directly challenge for the number one spot by merging with Ernst & Young.
There were frenzied negotiations between KPMG International and Ernst & Young International over several months but they fizzled out eventually. Nigeria was part of the negotiation but there were some unresolved sensitive issues regarding allegation of duplicity by an aggrieved client against one of the Ernst & Young partners. I believe the matter was eventually settled out of court and the partner was obliged to resign over the “monkey business”. The firm stoutly defended its professional integrity and rightly insisted on a thorough clean up – both at the national and international level.
Anyway, Colin Sharman (regardless of considerable scepticism within the ranks) was able to kick off the project with a relatively small team. The US firm volunteered the services of a lady whose name I think was Mrs Charles. In spite of her petite stature, she was a human dynamo – bursting with ideas and energy.
Within a relatively short time, the project became a “Big Idea”. Indeed, it became mandatory for it to feature at all International Board Meetings – in order to monitor its progress and ensure that it was not starved of resources.
The “Task Force” was chaired by Colin Sharman while Mrs Charles was the “de facto” chief operating officer. They then proceeded to recruit more and more young men and women who would be in the vanguard of garnering information and data about what to expect in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. It turned out to be a pretty tall order. It is one thing to gather information (and data); it is something else entirely to make sense of it all and craft it into meaningful postulations and projections. Subsequently, they produced huge volumes of reports followed by “reports on reports”!
Alas, in spite of the excellent work done by Colin and his team, I am not aware that they predicted any of the following events which have fundamentally redefined the global village to which we all cling desperately: iPad, smartphones/mobile phones, Google glasses, Osama bin Laden and the bombing of the World Trade Centre, the emergence of China as a dominant player in the global economy, the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Arab Spring, students shooting students on campus, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, racial riots in Fergusson, Missouri, USA, suicide bombers, the disappearance of flight KL 270, and ISIS and Boko Haram.
J.K Randle
