CEOs are often asked about their vision and strategy to execute on it. What’s the big idea? Within a few years, they’re asked about legacy. What impact did you have? For Julie Sweet of Accenture, the answer is likely to be the same: creating a learning culture.
Maybe the vision was forged when she quit her job as partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 2010 to become general counsel of Accenture, or when she asked a colleague to help her learn about technology as then-CEO Bill Green said he hadn’t hired her to be a lawyer but a business leader with a legal background.
Maybe it started further back, when she was a high school debate champ from a working-class family in Tustin, Calif., always looking for new places to go and ways to stretch herself. Sweet had a learning mindset before the term was in vogue.
On her first day as CEO of Accenture almost five years ago, she announced a program to train every employee on the key technologies transforming business. Yesterday, as I reported here, Sweet announced Accenture’s acquisition of online learning platform Udacity as part of a new business to build and scale the learning culture she’s nurtured at Accenture, creating a service to help clients train their people on core technologies, too. Called Accenture LearnVantage, the AI-powered platform helps identify skills gaps and deliver personalized learning experiences. And the product will have to keep learning, too, as Accenture plans to invest $1 billion to build it out over the next three years. This adds a new feature to the firm’s managed learning services business where Sweet expects to see significant growth in the coming years.
The goal of basic training is not just upskilling but readiness. “We knew that every company, including Accenture, would reinvent itself using cloud data and AI. And we wanted our people ready,” she says, noting that more than 600,000 employees had basic training to understand AI fundamentals before gen AI came on the scene last year, making it easier to align around the opportunity.
Sweet asks every manager to do a learning activity with their teams during work hours at least once a month. “As a young professional, you set a learning agenda. That’s what I did. Because if you set a learning agenda, you will actually achieve it and you’ll wake up.”
And some skills will never be obsolete. When Sweet showed up at her daughter’s high school for career day this past weekend, she brought 300 copies of a 2013 book that she’s long considered a favorite: Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint.
Diane Brady
@dianebrady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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