More than just numbers; for William Kanaga, accounting is high adventure

Nation's Business, April, 1985 by Mary-Margaret Wantuck

Print ads are appearing in major consumer and business publications, each carrying this tag line: "We take business personally.'

Another ploy to give Arthur Young a stronger identity has been publication of a consumer tax manual, written in simple, understandable language and sold in bookstores. Kanaga touts it as "the most comprehensive and finest book available for individuals.'

It has been a rewarding 31 years at Arthur Young for Kanaga--especially considering that accounting was only a career afterthought.

He always had a good head for figures, and at the University of Kansas his fancy was caught by metallurgical engineering. Although his education was interrupted by active service as a Navy ensign in 1945 and 1946, he graduated with an engineering degree in 1947. But the job possibilities in metallurgical engineering seemed limited and rather dull.

His career choice up in the air, he took a bachelor's degree in business administration at Babson College, a small school in Massachusetts. Then, jobless, he went back to Kansas--and was turned on to public accounting by family friends, one of whom was a partner in Arthur Young's Kansas City office.

"Public accounting sounded intriguing,' Kanaga recalls. "I was told that as long as I didn't know what I wanted to do, this would expose me to a lot of different industries, so I could pick one I liked. But I never thought it would end up being my career.'

Kanaga went to work for Arthur Young in 1949. His first assignment was a three-year training stint in New York City, to be followed by a return to Kansas City. He has yet to make that return trip.

Other work in New York for Arthur Young followed. Then Kanaga took a job with an insurance brokerage, spending four years in its New York office.

HE CREDITS his years in insurance with tempering his youthful brashness and cockiness. "Public accounting in those days consisted of going in and telling clients what they had done wrong--period,' he says. Insurance, Kanaga says, trained him to be "sensitive to people,' to see the pressures that companies are under and how they can make honest mistakes. He learned how to deal with such mistakes tactfully, he says. "It's training that I've used ever since.'

But the narrower world of insurance did not have the spice, the excitement, the challenges of public accounting, with its broad spectrum of financial problems. So, Kanaga returned to Arthur Young in 1958 and in rapid succession became a manager, a principal and in 1960, at the age of 35, a partner.

For 11 years, from the time he rejoined the firm until he became the managing partner in the New York headquarters in 1969, Kanaga traveled between 125,000 and 150,000 miles a year, because many of his clients had a major part of their operations outside the United States. Once he became the firm's managing partner in 1972, he cut down on his travel. But as chairman, he travels frequently and tirelessly, visiting the firm's many offices and keeping up to date on the international scene. And there are the inevitable crises.