The Buzz with Katie Burke

Katie — Innovation and Thought Leadership at Accenture Interactive.

I love change. I love causing change.

You need to be provocative to make change happen.

At the beginning of my career, I thought I had to change myself to fit the job I had been given. Today, I’m making sure that any work I do plays to my strengths and aspirations.

Leaders need to look at the horizon, see what’s coming and adjust where they need to.

I question everything. Constantly curious and always pushing the new.

We have to look at innovation intentionally with its relationship to humans, how they respond and what does that signals for clients.

As a leader in the XXI century, you need to support your people and let them shine. The liquid expectations of the employee experience have shifted drastically in the past year. People, stuck at home in various lockdowns, started to use their time and boredom to start playing with the creator economy platforms, and guess what? They started to make money by growing their own brand. This isn’t just a one-off. I believe this shift is changing the relationship between leader/employee because the employees are now challenging hierarchy in a way that we haven’t seen before. I don’t know how organizations handle it, but a modernization of the employee experience for leaders is bubbling. The way we’ve always done it will not work anymore.

There is a gap in the work experience driven by the concept of liquid expectations, where the personal growth people experience outside work and inside work are not aligned.

Innovation is the art, sweat, dedication, and teamwork to improve or invent responsible value for people in the world.

“Defend your light with your life.” The best advice I ever got.

Not all work is fun, amazing, and purposeful. If you find that, you are very lucky.

The ultimate experience for me is to find the space that challenges your mind, keeps you engaged, makes you feel appreciated, and gets you to work with people you enjoy.

To make the world the way you want it, you need to be edgy and provocative underneath. That’s the personality of interactive.

I’m not a gamer, but the gaming world helped us cope with isolation during the pandemic. It gave us community when we were told to be alone.

We created a metaverse for Reimagine because we are in the business of experience and people needed to experience being part of a community again.

Augmented Physical will open new revenue lines across industries like entertainment, sports, or music because it’s fascinating to blend the virtual with the physical world. But we need to anchor it in human use and not on tech’s advancement. Human's need for community, to be entertained, or the need to create, to learn, and so forth are what should ground the AR/VR advancements. The tech should be helping humans to do those things in a better, faster, easier way.

Hugs can change the course of a day, especially from my 5-year-old.

I would make a business delivering tasty dinner hampers for people’s first night of holiday when you first arrive and barely have time to go to the grocery. When people arrive at their vacation spot, their spirits are so high — we’ve finally made it! But inevitably you have to settle in and run errands to get food/drink before you can officially relax.

I would keep my subscription to beautiful.ai above all others. It has reduced how much time I spend making slides.

If you ask yourself one question, ask yourself: Is this how you want it to be?

I was the creative and program lead for Interactive’s Reimagine event, where we built our own Metaverse.

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