We were thrilled last week to get a letter from James H Quigley, the global CEO of Deloitte, after an Age hack suggested that the Big Four are pretty indistinguishable. 'What differentiates Deloitte cannot be found on a website or in branded materials. In one word, it is people,' Quigley wrote. Difficult, um, for the rest of us to get much sense of that, though, isn't it? After all, E&Y is always telling us that it is putting 'People First' (TM). In fact, it's hard to chat to any senior Big Four figure without being wittered on to about how important the 'people' are. While TS is being curmudgeonly, can we also ask: isn't the term 'people' just another word for 'staff'? The word 'staff' might imply of course that the individuals are just grunts, employed by an uncaring capitalist behemoth. It might imply a subservient relationship.