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0, PEOPLE IN DH&S: j0 Phil Sandmaier When the page is turned to the firm's new fiscal year this coming June and a fresh class of partners and managers take on the new responsibilities that their promotion implies, the record will show one retirement of more than passing interest to hundreds of people in Deloitte Haskins & Sells. Phil Sandmaier, now the partner who supervises the U.S. operations of the firm, will be taking early retirement at age 60 and saying farewell to the daily routine. It is not simply his present supervisory position that has made him so widely known from one end of the firm to the other. Nor is it just the fact that he has served in seven offices of the firm (Executive Office twice) that has brought him into contact with so many of us, although his travels have certainly helped. Nor is it even the fact that he is one of the most interesting, most natural public speakers among the firm partners, with a rare gift for mimicry as he acts out his anecdotes with humor that often brings down the house with laughter. It is more the kind of person he is that makes him memorable. Phil has always gone more than halfway with everyone to make friends, to inspire confidence and to motivate others to their best professional performance. Through the years, many younger people in the firm have come away from a meeting or discussion with Phil determined to work their heads off because they like the man. Some might say that it's a neat trick if you can do it. Those who know Phil realize it is no trick. It's just the way he is. In a large organization of professionals with similar basic training, there is the tendency at times to assume that any of a number of candidates can carry out a given job (or "fill a slot") with equal chances of success. Under this assumption, the emphasis is on working hard and applying one's intelligence to a situation in an impersonal, systematic way. But what this view leaves out of consideration is that human beings are as different in their makeup as snowflakes are in design, and the executive who ignores individuality cannot be a successful manager of people. He may crack his whip louder than a Simon Legree or roar commands like a Captain Bligh. But he will be oblivious to Phil Sandmaier's basic rule: "I always try to look at things from the other fellow's viewpoint." It is as a humanist, a person who cares about the motivations of other people, that Phil has made his special mark in our firm. His expert touch as a manager and a leader who gets things done was developed over a good many years. A look at his record may be instructive to those with the desire to follow, if they can, in his footsteps. Philip J. Sandmaier, Jr. was born in Buffalo, New York in 1919. His early childhood and youth were spent there and in Youngstown, Ohio, where his father worked for Republic Steel Corporation. Some of Phil's early memories, as he looks back on those days, bring back his father's thoughtful counsel to him in looking ahead toward a working career. The senior Sandmaier had started out in a steel mill at age 13 as a helper tending an open-hearth furnace. By applying himself to learning more about the job of steelmaking than most others around him cared to know, he worked his way up through the supervisory ranks and into the front office. Phil recalls his father's discussing various occupations, including that of metallurgist, which occurred naturally to a young man growing up in a steel town. But in the bleak 1930s as the time for college approached, Phil was particularly impressed by his father's saying that although he knew of a good many engineers and metallurgists out of work during the Great Depression, he had never known of an unemployed accountant. So Phil decided on accounting and entered the College of Commerce of the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1936. Four years later, in June 1940, he graduated with a number of distinctions. He had the leading academic record in the College of Commerce, and was only the third student with an overall average of 95 or above since the college was founded in 1920. He was valedictorian of his class. And what was more fortunate for him and for the firm, he was one of two Notre Dame students recruited by Haskins & Sells that year. In those days campus recruiting was just barely starting, and our firm, General Electric and Burroughs were the only employers who visited the campus the spring that Phil graduated. The scene shifts to the report department of the New York practice office, where Phil was introduced to the fine art of comparing and proving in the fall of 1940. By this time the Selective Service Act had become law, and a few weeks later Phil found himself holding "a very low number" in the draft lottery. So it was a race with time to see how much he could learn, how much experience he could absorb, before he was called. "We all had a chance to see how a good audit report should be written, and we learned to work under pressure," Phil says, looking back on those report-department training days. "And I'll never forget the impression it made on me when a partner or a manager extended himself to thank one of us beginners for our work, or to pay a compliment for a job well done. I especially remember William Bell's coming around from one desk to another one evening to thank each of us when we were working under great 26