Transformation Requires Changing the Hard Stuff — Julie Sweet, CEO Accenture North America
The Industrialist’s Dilemma — February 14, 2019
Julie Sweet joined Accenture as General Counsel in 2010. That was the beginning of quite the ride for the company. As an organization that advised large organizations on back-office transformation, Andersen Consulting (later rebranded to Accenture) had been poised to ride the wave of automation that characterized the 90’s and early 2000’s.
But ten years into the new millennia, the world of IT started to shift. Digital leaders were obsessing over the transformation of their businesses in completely novel ways. It wasn’t about adopting industry best practices. It was about adapting technologies to the specific situations of their customers. Digital was becoming a tool to deliver unique — not standard — experiences.
While this was still a challenge related to IT, Accenture knew it was time was to make an intentional and deliberate shift.
So, in 2012 the company shared its new business strategy towards “the new”: Cloud, Digital, and Security. While Accenture still needed to help its customers deliver back-office transformation, the foundation for innovation, it needed entirely different skill sets, business models, and technical capabilities to service its customers’ need for front office transformation.
Nearly a decade into the journey, the organization has pivoted strongly into the new. More than 60% of Accenture’s business now comes from those three categories; Cloud, Digital, and Security. More than redefining their business, Accenture’s journey taught some critical lessons about the act of digital transformation itself.
A few of those lessons were particularly notable to us.
Transformation Requires Changing the Hard Stuff
A year into the transformation the company was making significant progress to rotate its senior most leaders to the new or to a new post to help accelerate the transformation. Why? The leadership team at Accenture recognized they couldn’t simply come up with a temporary solution to such a systemic challenge. One single member of the leadership team couldn’t do the job, everyone driving the company had to be bought in.
Metrics, compensation, reporting — it all had to change to turn into a company focused on the new. That meant being willing to change the hard stuff.
Consider the ultimate of these examples. Accenture was an organization which, for years, compensated people the same at every level — regardless of the skills and capabilities they possessed. But if one is trying to hire the best data engineers out of leading companies to advise clients on building their data lakes, should a company compensate those engineers the same way that they are compensating business process consultants with expertise that’s far more common? Clearly not. But getting to that point requires leadership that’s committed, open about the things that need to change, and willing to go through what is a very difficult process.
Accenture did it. It wasn’t easy. But the Accenture leadership team knew they needed to move, and they had to get there faster than their peers. Whether it was compensation, reporting, corporate structure, personnel, or leadership… there were no sacred cows in Accenture’s journey. And what’s more, there was a recognition that transformation required changing the hard stuff. Not just the brand.
You Should Put Your Internal Systems to Work to Change
With 469,000 people, Accenture considers training core to its business model. As the leadership team evaluated the impact that these new IT businesses would have on Accenture’s business, they realized that its employees’ skills needed to evolve.
Instead of simply focusing on hiring new employees to fill these profiles, Accenture decided to put their existing processes to work to drive transformation. Specifically, they started giving employees the challenge of automating their own jobs. Accenture created training materials and programs that helped employees upskill on the tools required to drive this transformation. Once the employees mastered those skills, they could prove it by automating away their jobs. When they had accomplished this, they’d be promoted into new roles.
This is a fairly unique approach. Gamifying one’s internal transformation to train the innovators needed in the future. Most leaders are frozen by their existing processes. The first question for those being disrupted is what’s holding them back. It’s not what can propel me forward. Putting systems to work to drive change can be a valuable approach to propel an organization into the future.
Your Business Model Has to Evolve with Your Partners in Mind
As IT leaders ourselves, Aaron and I were keenly interested when the subject of shipping standard software came up in conversation. Cloud makes it easier to deliver standard software to one’s customers. Digital makes it that much more valuable to deliver such transformative innovation. So why not become a software company?
The ecosystem.
In our first year teaching this class we spent a great deal of time talking about channel conflicts. The subject hasn’t come up as regularly in recent years. But with Julie, it was clear that Accenture was transforming with appreciation for the roles of its ecosystem partners. The cloud was making it easier for Accenture to deliver software, but it was also providing an enormous tailwind for Accenture’s most critical partners.
As a company, Accenture believes the best way to serve their clients is to bring the best technology to them. They focus on being at the center of the technology ecosystem — including established players like SAP and Microsoft to smaller players like Clinithink which uses AI for clinical trial recruitment. These relationships are crucial, so they can bring the right technologies and specialized skills to transform their clients businesses.
