Good morning! A new strategy to end telehealth abortion, Taylor Swift gets engaged, and senior writer Lila MacLellan’s takeaways from Fortune’s latest interview with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.
– Titans and disruptors. Lila MacLellan here, filling in for Emma today. Fortune just launched a new podcast, and readers of MPW Daily will want to smash that subscribe button immediately, as the kids say. Hosted by Alyson Shontell, Fortune’s editor-in-chief, Titans and Disruptors of Industry will feature rich, revealing conversations with the world’s most influential business leaders.
The inaugural episode dropped this morning and features a conversation with Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, someone I spent time getting to know for a profile that appears in this month’s Fortune magazine. Even for me, however, today’s episode offers fresh insights into how Sweet works and who she is. Here are some of the themes that jumped out to me, lightly edited for clarity:
On why CEOs should be excited about AI following years of black swan events:
“[N]ow, the CEOs around the world have a powerful set of tools that they didn’t have before. Now, those tools are hard and they’re complex and they have a lot of different aspects to consider, but as I look forward, it’s very rare, as a CEO, that you’re handed something that is brand new, wasn’t part of the toolkit, and allows you to look at the world and really shape your future.”
On her key strength:
“I think one of my superpowers is asking for help. Maybe that goes back to humility and the idea of building great teams. And so I’ve always been that way… if you focus on how you deliver value, then it becomes very natural that you have to have a team and you have to ask for help, because at the level that we operate, no one delivers value alone.”
On creating a team of leaders:
“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have a body of leaders who know more than just their role, who believe that their role is also to lead the company, and that you can have this constant resource of input, so that as you’re testing ideas, you know you’ve got the right input. And that makes me able to make decisions with a lot of confidence, and to do so with my team.”
On her second experience with cancer:
”As a working mom, one of the things that kind of went to the wayside the most was a focus on my health. Now, fortunately, the one area I always did was self-exams, because I actually found my recent cancer through a breast self-exam. I always talk about that because I want to encourage women to make sure that they’re getting their mammograms…because I caught it early, I’m here, and I was able to get through it pretty quickly. But, you know, this time around, for me, it was a little bit more of a wake-up call about just focusing on my health… it was a reflection on, I want to live a really long life, like you get really clear. And I want that to be a quality life.”
Listen to the full episode here.
And finally, one programming note, MPW Daily will be taking a break for the long weekend. We’ll be back in your inboxes on Tuesday.
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
ON MY RADAR
Anti-abortion groups have a new strategy to end telehealth abortion The 19th*
Riley Gaines finished 5th. Now she believes victory is in her grasp New York Times
The defiant conventionality of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce The Atlantic
PARTING WORDS
“Firing Lisa Cook is a problem, regardless of what you think of Lisa Cook.”
—Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist for the Labor Department under the Obama administration, warned that firing Cook, the Federal Reserve's first Black female governor, without proof of a criminal act risked the independence of the central bank.
