When Timothy Walsh walked into KPMG for the first time 33 years ago, he was handed a stack of loan files and sent straight to a copy machine. The new intern spent his first week feeding paper into the copier at a New Jersey bank, the monotonous work that now seems worlds away from the gleaming glass headquarters he leads today.

“It’s funny,” Walsh said in an interview with Fortune . “I stood at that copy machine all week making copies of loan files for audit evidence. When I look at what our people do today — and the kind of skills they bring — it’s completely transformed.”

That transformation is both personal and symbolic. Walsh, who took over as KPMG’s U.S. chair and CEO in July, began as an intern and climbed every rung of the firm’s hierarchy. His path from copy room to corner of

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