The Deloitte Houston office had over 200 professionals thirty years ago. Prosperous from the oil boom, its offices were richly appointed. The partners' offices had Louis XVI furniture. The main lobby floor was covered with a large antique Persian rug, a little frayed at one remote corner, but that was okay. It was an antique.
At Christmas in addition to a special bonus, every staff member was given a new personal leather briefcase embossed in gold leaf with his or her initials. Deloitte took great pleasure in reminding all that they were the Auditors' Auditor. The office's premier clients were the Hughes Tool Company and the U.S. subsidiary of ARAMCO, the Arabian American Oil Company. Deloitte hired only the very top accounting graduates. In Houston they mostly came from Rice, the University of Texas and Texas A&M. They worked endless hours and after their first year on the job the ones who couldn't keep up, about half, were gone.
His or her initials. Deloitte, along with the rest of the accounting profession, was transforming itself. It was no longer a man's world. There were plenty of smart female accounting graduates and about half of the junior accountants and many of the managers were women. Still the young women complained that it was a man's world: "As long as Gene Harris is head of Audit, there will never be a woman partner." I had to bite my tongue. For some reason I had insider information above my pay grade and knew who the two women were who were slated for promotion to partner that year. One, Caroline V was Gene Harris's protégé. Caroline was a gorgeous blonde who could get away with wearing a business suit and, for Texas, short hair. The other, Sally M, was all Texas with long black big hair and wore big, light colored, flowery dresses. Gorgeous, too. Ladybird Johnson with softer edges.
Today, Cathy Engelbert is CEO of Deloitte LLP, the largest professional services firm in the US with over 70,000 professionals. She is married and has two children.
Martin X was the only black professional in the Deloitte offices thirty years ago. There were no Mexicans. The closest the office came on that score was one of my colleagues in the consulting group having a Mexican-American wife. Hiring him was considered very enlightened. The head of consulting was from Cornell, not Texas.
Martin had one and only one assignment. He was the manager for the audit of the Aramco Services Company. It was a nice assignment, but it was also pretty much the only client he could be given back in the day in Texas. The Arabs who owned the oil company were more accepting of a black professional than most Texans. This was a nice opening for Deloitte Houston. They could be enlightened, hire Martin, and give him a nice assignment. Nobody, but nobody in Houston was going to do or say anything about it, since nobody, but nobody wanted to risk upsetting the Arabs, who considered themselves the leaders of a diverse Muslim world.
I've often wondered what Martin thought about this. Practically overnight Deloitte had addressed its gender diversity issues, while he remained the Lone Ranger. He soldiered on pleasantly. He had a beautiful wife and the pay was great. He probably ended up teaching at an MBA program for a couple of thou a year.
Today, Deloitte doesn't look much different from Houston in the 1980s. While minority youth languish unemployed in America's inner cities, Deloitte takes the lead in outsourcing America's technology jobs to India.
