Chairman and CEO-elect’s letter: Mark A. Weinberger

Today, nearly six years since the words ‘credit crunch’ entered the vocabulary of business, people struggle to find things to celebrate in the working world. While it’s true that in some ways the working world isn’t working as well as it should, the picture is by no means as bleak as some would paint it.

The increased globalization we have seen over the past generation has meant painful changes for some, yet it has brought great opportunity to many more. In China alone, nearly half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in that time – probably the fastest improvement in living standards, for the greatest number of people, that the world has ever seen.

We think of technological change as benefiting the rich, with their increasingly wired lives. But the truth is more subtle and more interesting. Mobile phones allow migrant workers to send money to their families and fishermen to call different ports to see who will give them the best price for their catch.

It’s easy to take a dim view of the lack of political consensus in Washington and the European Union. But we must not forget that when the stakes were highest, the G20 was able to come together and take coordinated global action in a way that couldn’t be imagined a decade or two before.

Yet, it’s still hard to escape the sense that things could be better. Today trust in business and governance is low; millions of people are unemployed or underemployed around the world; and gridlocked political systems seem unable to address long-term fiscal issues or climate change.

Combined, these lead to uncertainty. People and organizations are withdrawing instead of engaging with the world. While there are no simple answers, the solution lies in working together, in people and organizations making changes in their areas of knowledge and expertise.

At Ernst & Young, we understand these challenges, but we also see the opportunity – the opportunity to build a better working world. That is precisely the purpose that the people of Ernst & Young are committed to, and have long been committed to.

Over the past few months, we have been looking keenly at the world around us and speaking with leading thinkers, inside and outside our organization. We have taken our purpose of building a better working world and placed it at the heart of our plans for the future. We call these plans Vision 2020 because they look clearly at how we will fulfill our purpose over the next seven years and beyond.

As part of Vision 2020, we are improving every aspect of Ernst & Young, from how we recruit our people to how we manage our knowledge. We are setting ourselves apart by creating the highest-performing teams, to deliver exceptional service to our clients around the world. These improvements will transform our organization as we build a better working world every day. In the pages that follow, you can read more about how we are accomplishing this for our clients, our people and our communities.

In closing, I want to acknowledge and to thank Jim Turley for his leadership of Ernst & Young through turbulent times over the past dozen years. He has always led by example and his legacy – the global integration efforts of Ernst & Young – is the strong foundation for our future success.

Mark Weinberger
Chairman and CEO-elect