Language, collaboration, and leadership training turned competition into cohesion.

The Disruptors

With Liz Farr

When Alan Whitman became Baker Tilly's CEO, he was caught between two warring camps. On one side were the legacy partners who had built the organization and “wanted to continue doing things the way that we’ve always done them because we’ve been so successful.” That side was afraid of “losing what they had built.” In the other camp were the new partners who wanted to change “to what they were promised, what they signed on to by becoming part of Baker Tilly.” The newcomers wanted “to move faster and do it differently.” 

As Whitman describes in his new book, “Break the Mold: How to Achieve Transformational Change Scale and Grow Simultaneously, the conflict was resolved over time, one conversation, one small meeting at a time. “It would be more evolution, not revolution,” Whitman says.  

Whitman’s book, part memoir and part practical guide, describes his time leading one of the largest accounting firms in the US through a fundamental transformation. “We’re a storied profession, the CPA profession, and we are an incremental type of people,” Whitman explains. The transformation Whitman had in mind needed a different approach, as he says in his previous appearance on The Disruptors. “Break the mold is designing new ways of doing things to achieve results that we don’t think can happen, or don’t even think that are possible.”