Deloitte Managing Partner Blaine Nelson Passes Along Leadership Wisdom

Blaine Nelson, managing partner of Deloitte’s North Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas practice headquartered in Dallas, may be the only person who chose public accounting because of air conditioning.

VIEW FROM THE TOP: As managing partner of Deloitte’s DFW offices, Blaine Nelson knows the value of hard work and good leadership. photography by Elizabeth Lavin

“I grew up on a wheat farm,” he says. “We had 2,000 acres and I worked for my father. In 1969, the summer I graduated from high school, we had a big harvest, but it was a lot of work. I was the only one working for my father, so we worked from early in the morning until late at night, getting the crops into the combines, into the bins, and my father invited me to come into town. He said he needed to ask his accountant how much wheat he needed to sell to pay his income tax. We went into this wonderful, air-conditioned office, and the man had a beautiful desk and a comfortable-looking leather chair. When the accountant left to get a file, my father said, ‘Do you know how much I pay him? Thirty dollars an hour.’ When we were in the parking lot, I said to my father, ‘I have no idea what that fellow does for a living, but that’s what I’m going to do.’”

As the managing partner of the largest of the Big Four firms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Nelson currently has an office with plenty of air conditioning. He’s learned a lot since his days on the wheat farm, and he’s quick to share the advice he’s been giving CEOs for several decades.

“Leadership has and hasn’t changed,” he says. “It’s being responsive, knowing the business, making sure you have the right team. That hasn’t changed. The big issue is still trust. But there are big changes from 10 or 15 years ago. The team of a global company has to be diverse. All large companies embrace diversity, but very few are where they need to be in terms of real diversity, including geographic diversity. Next, because of technology, the demands for responsiveness have increased while regulatory restrictions have increased.”

As to the debate about whether the CEO should care more about shareholders or customers? “I hear that debate all the time, but it’s a false debate. One doesn’t exist without the others.”

Nelson agrees that one of the changes is that the day of the imperial CEO is over or waning. “As organizations get more complex, they are a compilation of silos, and sometimes you want that. But leadership is getting the different elements together. You put together a team,” he says. He calls the new style “leading through influence,” and he says that a partnership like Deloitte is a good model even for public companies. Today, whatever your title at the top, leadership is “motivating people to be as interested in their colleagues’ success as they are in their own.”

Larry Zine, CFO of Blockbuster, a company which has had more than its share of challenges over the past few years, agrees and says Nelson provides “value to our company that we didn’t know we needed,” from high-tech solutions to looking at their medical benefits “in a holistic way.” He says that Nelson is a patient leader who works by building consensus and is exceptionally adept at understanding what each sector of Blockbuster needs.

Nelson worked his way through college at a local Safeway in Salt Lake City, and it was on the job that he learned a valuable lesson about perspective. “I wasn’t smart enough to get a scholarship, and the farm had taught me the value of hard work. At a grocery store, you see everyone. Every socio-economic segment buys groceries. I saw that different people are motivated by different things, and today, that helps me put myself in other people’s positions.”

Another lesson Nelson preaches to his colleagues, both those coming up the ranks at Deloitte and his clients, is focus. “People dilute their success by blurring their focus,” he says. “Take one task or job and give it your unrelenting commitment.”

“Unrelenting” is one of Nelson’s favorite words. He uses it to describe how he approaches client work, challenges at Deloitte, and his role as chairman of the executive board of governors of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the only major metropolitan orchestra with a balanced budget for four consecutive years. This year, the DSO faced a budget deficit, and it took, as Nelson says, “unrelenting reminders of our commitment to a balanced budget.”

Nelson deflects the credit for this year’s successful, last-minute dash to solvency to DSO CEO Fred Bronstein and the board. “They rose to the occasion,” he says. What did Bronstein do? He was “unrelenting in reminding people that long-term, artistic excellence depends on a balanced budget.”

R.L. Thornton famously said of the symphony, “I’ll give money. Just don’t make me go.” Nelson is not R.L. Thornton. Bronstein says that Nelson “not only appreciates music but also those who make it. He’s taking time to get to know our musicians, and that’s very helpful.”

In fact, Nelson is a secret musician. “My mother made me take piano as a young child, and as a rebellious teenager, I played guitar,” he says. “But I always wanted to play drums.” Twenty years ago, when he married his wife, Patti, he bought a set of Yamaha custom maple drums. “The same ones David Letterman’s drummer, Anton Fig, has,” he says with pride. “I put on a CD and play.”

While Nelson is all business when he’s talking about or to Deloitte clients, he is visibly moved when talking about music. “I love the art form,” he says. “I have a hard time imagining more beautiful things than classical music. I love the works of many composers, but if I had to listen to one composer for 12 hours on an international flight, it would be Mozart.”

Zine adds that although music may be Nelson’s passion, he doesn’t talk about it over at Blockbuster. “He always focuses on what I’m interested in. I’m an avid golfer so we talk about golf. We play golf. He always plays worse than I do, so I always win. But I happen to know that’s he’s a very good golfer.”

Nelson is unperturbed and refocuses the topic back to business. “Leadership is as much about followership. People forget that. You have to make a business case for those who work for you.”

One of the challenges facing American CEOs is that younger workers’ idea of what they want is quite different from that of the baby boomer generation. The trick is to meld the two. “Let’s take work/life balance,” Nelson says. “I tell our people who are struggling to balance work and personal life and commitments and obligations, ‘It’s your responsibility. Not Deloitte’s.’ We’re committed to helping our people and supporting them, but they have to tell us what they need.” He’s proud that the Dallas office of Deloitte just won the Alfred P. Sloan award for flexibility in the workplace, and he says programs like Deloitte’s commitment to flexibility build a stronger workforce. But they do more than that: “They help us connect on a person-to-person basis. While technology is great, and it has helped us accommodate new demands, you cannot substitute ‘high-tech’ for ‘high-touch.’”

With his level of involvement, one would think Nelson is a lifelong Dallasite, but he has actually only been here about a decade. Thirty years ago, that would not have qualified him as a Dallas stakeholder, let alone a member of the city’s leadership, but he’s as gung-ho about Dallas as R.L. Thornton ever was.

“Dallas is very important to Deloitte, and Deloitte is equally important to Dallas,” he says, pointing out that Deloitte currently has approximately 1,400 people in DFW and plans to hire another 275 this year, in addition to 100 student interns. “We recruit aggressively at the area schools, and we have something unique to offer because none of the other Big Four firms are organized like Deloitte.”

Deloitte is also unusual in its commitment to the arts, a focus obviously driven by Nelson with a statement that also sums up his philosophy of life and leadership: “Other business leaders ask, Why, with limited resources, aren’t we putting more into health and human services? We contribute there, but I want to tell you about my mother. My mother has cancer—incurable cancer. She lives in Dallas now. I’d like to cure cancer, but if I call my mother and tell her I have an extra ticket to the symphony, she’s sitting in the car with her coat on. It makes no sense to sustain life if we don’t make life worth sustaining.”

Merrie Spaeth is one of the pre-eminent crisis management strategists in the world. After serving as President Reagan’s director of media relations, she founded Dallas-based Spaeth Communications in 1987. She is also a lecturer at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business.