Apparently! From Fortune:
As the stereotype goes, accountants are a species of professional often seen as spiritless human calculators—and not as indispensable visionaries. “‘Taxes must be boring.’ I get that all the time,” says Kirt Bocox, senior tax manager at KPMG, one of the firm’s many employees who dispute—indeed refute—that pre-conception. “People get the stereotype of accountants completely wrong. It’s actually exciting and fun.”Bocox is not the only impassioned one. To hear Bruce Pfau, vice chairman of human resources and communications, tell it, the company, based in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, gushes with enthusiasm. So he devised a plan to harness that energy: Instead of dictating what employees should consider their motivating force, the company asked each to think up his or her own and frame it on a poster. HR provided a template on the organization’s internal website, KPMG Today.“I’ve always believed that culture is the most important dimension of any CEO’s responsibility to an organization,” says John Veihmeyer, global chairman and CEO of KPMG in the U.S., who kicked off the program in June with a video in which he stood on the Top of the Rock in New York City to announce a goal: the “10,000 stories challenge.” If the company received that many posters by Thanksgiving, everyone would earn two extra days of paid vacation.
Klynveldians sent in more than 40,000 of these stories. Things like "I advance science" and "I promote peace" and Phil Mickelson's "I win titles." Although Phil's should really be this:
Kirt Bocox says all these stories have sorta been KPMG's version of the ALS ice-bucket challenge. Which, I guess, means that it's been a battle royale between an important cause — two extra days of PTO — and people's raging narcissim.
But let's not get bogged down in all that — What are your KPMG stories? Please share them below — in meme form, preferably — and with us.
[Fortune]
