Name: A conversation with Julie Sweet
Uploaded: 2020-03-15
Duration: 14 min 59 s
Description: The Accenture CEO sits down with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Clifton Leaf to talk about company growth, the business impact of coronavirus, and unconscious bias.

I want to talk actually about the business first because it's rare that you get to talk to a CEO, who is just, who is moving from a huge part of the business. I mean you were the CEO of the North American Accentures, accenture North America which is about a half of the revenue of nearly half the revenue of Accenture Group. And now you've got the whole, you've got the keys to the whole kingdom. That's right. So as of September, right. Yeah, so it's been, I just came up on my Six months, actually. Six months, how's it going so far? Great. I mean, as you as you as you pointed out, it's been an interesting time in sort of the last a month, but it's been great. I've spent really the last six months traveling the globe. Right. I've met with over 70 CEOs and 100 other C suite leaders at our clients. In Europe, Asia, and of course North America. So it's been an incredibly intense time, but exciting because when you do that in such a compressed time period you see themes, you see what's different, what's the same. And the three really big themes that are the same around the globe and across industry. The first is that we are at an inflection point. Right, for large companies, they are looking at 2020 as the beginning of the decade of the delivery on the promise of digital and technology. We spent the last five years, five, six years experimenting, doing business cases and that, and now it's about Going quickly from vision, to execution, to material value, and it's a very different mindset. We talk about digital disruption all the time. We throw that term around. How do you define it? When someone says, what does it really mean, digital disruption? I'll first talke about what does digital mean, because A lot of people equate digital with technology and digital is really two things. It refers to a set of technologies. Everything from artificial intelligence to the use of the e- commerce, right? Lots of different types of technologies. But digital is really about a different way of working, of making decisions. Of partnering and reaching your clients. And so it's about how you do things, as well as technology. And the most successful companies really understand that going digital means changing how they work, how they engage, and how they make decisions. When people hear the word digital disruption If you're a CEO, you're thinking God, I need to do this. If you're a average worker in a factory somewhere, it scared the hell out of you. In many cases, it means I'm gonna be out of a job in ten years. How do you have that conversation with your clients to have them have that conversation with their workers? And how are you having that with your own company? One of the things we're anchoring on now in that when we think about the next decade. How do we wanna define ourselves? And we talk about shared success. And this is resonating with our clients. And we're saying that what we do with our clients, what we do internally, and what we should all be doing with our communities is thinking about shared success. So when we have the conversation with the CEO that says, here's how you need to use technology. It's gonna take away jobs We're advising to say up front, we can think together about how many of those people could be skilled and can we help you because that's a core competency of ours that we wanna bring to our clients because most of them want to do it but it's really hard right, If it's not their competency And then we say, and for those who can't be reskilled, where that's not gonna fit what the company needs. How do we think about helping them to get their new job, right, and what to do. And we believe that part of our responsibility is to have that conversation From day one, right? I can think of probably five clients I've been at in the last two weeks talking about big transformations. And in the first couple of conversations, that is on the agenda. Accenture is the poster child for a company that itself you You have disrupted yourself digitally. Now 70 % of your businesses are in these digital and cloud computing businesses, is that right? Well over 65 %, digital cloud and security. Ok. And so this transition you went through yourself obviously people must ask, well how's the going? What do you tell them? What are the take aways you that you set from your own renaissance? Well, I think first of all our our Renaissance, as you call it is really two things. It's shifting our services to clients to now being over 65 % Digital cloud and security, but it's also how we operate ourselves so well 99 % in the cloud, right? The way we do forecasting, you know, we have a center of excellence. It's using machine learning and analytics. It's unbelievable. You know how we're doing it. We have, we're using our own platforms that we're implementing at clients. And so, we digitized accenture while we shifted to provide these services. And so as you think about how it's going, the numbers are clear, right. We started in 2014, we've added over 80 billion dollars to market cap. We've had a 9 % CAGR, we're at 43 billion dollars in revenue. But what I think as important is how we did it, right? So we digitized ourselves. We became the most inclusive and diverse company in the world at least by riffinative is ranking two years in a row. One other way you've done this is by doing a fair amount of acquisitions. How much more can you acquire? And how do you balance that between organic growth? So we will always focus most on organic growth and we've been very consistent in terms of our capital allocation. And if you look back over the last few years, around 2 % of our growth every year Is from acquisition so. Just 2 %? Right so we have a very focused and disciplined strategy. Let me just interrupt for a sec. When you say 2 %, you mean 2 % of your revenue growth comes from newly acquired companies. Yes yes. Okay, I understand. Right, so if we are growing 9 % to 7 is organic, 2 % is inorganic, right? Right, yeah. We acquire companies for one of three reasons. The first is To scale hot areas of the market. So we just bought a company a couple of months ago in the US based in Chicago, in data science and analytics. And that company was scaling a very hot area of the market. The second reason And is to build our deep industry and functional skills so that acquisition we made was very focused on financial services and healthcare. Okay. And then the third area is around acquiring complementary skills, so last year we bought Drogo5. Yeah. It was just named the ad agency of the decade. Yeah. And that's something we can grow together but absolutely critical for our strategy Around building customer experiences. You and other consulting firms, professional firms, have been buying lots of these design firms and advertising firms and marketing firms. And kind of getting into the space in a way that ten years ago, none of you were involved in. What Why ?>> Well, actually 10 years ago, we were already building the capability that's behind accenture interactive. We've been doing it for 10 years, we were building a platform that was focused on at that time E- commerce. But if you take a step back, what is our interactive business two, it's about creating customer experiences which require deep technology skills. They require design skills, they require consulting and industry skills related to how do you actually reach the customers, how do you segment them, data science skills and creativity skills in terms of how to do that in a holistic manner. And we were just tired of recently by Kimberly Clerk to change the relationship they have with moms around their baby care products. And it was great there was an interview that was done by their C- M- O who said, I wouldn't have hired Droga5 on their own or Extension on their own but the combination of that, is why they hired us. But the hard part of it Is not just having creativity, right, but having the scale behind it in terms of technology to serve major enterprises. You have about 460, 000 nearly employees. 505, 000. Do you expect that you'll be the same size, bigger, smaller ten years from now as you Add some of these new digital capabilities to your own workforce. It's a great question, and we get it all the time. So one of the things I focus on are what are people doing. So we actually have a constant change in our work, because we've built automation into everything we're doing and we constantly do it. So we're growing Because we're serving more clients doing higher value things. Right. So it isn't like wait a minute, now we need to automate. If you look at the last five years we're constantly automating and always adjusting. So I don't focus so much on how many people I have, I focus on What are those people doing? And we do what we tell our clients to do is we are relentless focus on making sure that we're using the most advanced technologies. And then we rescale, so when we automated 40, 000 jobs in our business process outsourcing business, we rescale them we reinvested 60 % of the upfront savings to upskill them invest a billion dollars a year. And that make a difference when you're having to have the courage to change through these ways. You invest $ 1 billion in what, specifically? $ 1 billion a year in training and leadership development. In training and rescaling and leadership development. And leadership development. Yeah, wow, $ 1 billion. We trained over 300, 000 people in the last three years along. And of course, we have a growing business, and that's what we were able to do. If you are transparent You tell your people, look, we have this opportunity, we need to do it, help us do it. And we're gonna reinvest in you to upskill you. That's a great message. So in this case, what we said to our people was help us automate what you're doing now and then we're gonna invest to upskill. You and so that's why we know and we had no change in our, you know, average tenure and our attrition. Then you came to this business not as a technologist, but as a lawyer. You'd spent ten years at crevasse winning or a great white shoe firm. You have made it a point to help other women navigate through these very subjective, Byzantine corporate cultures. It's been a personal passion of yours. You've made a commitment to it. There is a moment when you were just about to become partner at Crevath. One of the very few women partners. I think they've had nine in history or something, maybe more. At the time I was the ninth, yep. At the time ninth in history. And you were talking about unconscious bias affecting women in the company. And what happened? So I remember [ UNKNOWN ] was really trying to break new ground cuz in 1999, unconscious bias training was new. So we brought it to the firm. And I'll never forget cuz I can still see myself walking up to our big conference room floor. We had a old fashioned conference room, big table. I'm taking my seat, I know exactly where I sat. And to go to this training, and I didn't think that much of it. It was literally two weeks before they were gonna make the partnership decision. Everything was fine. I go in, I sit down, and they have this facilitator and they're doing all these different things. And she turns to me at one point and says, Julia, the most senior woman in the world Have you ever experienced any of these things unconscious bias, and I still remember sitting there I opened my mouth to speak. And I started sobbing, like, like pig out sobs and I could not get myself under control. I got up, I left went back to my office and shut the door. And a few minutes later, maybe probably a half an hour later, the first woman corporate partner who's a good friend of mine came in. And she said okay the men have met. They've asked me. Gonna come- [ LAUGH ] See if you're okay. And she looked at me, and she knew. She knew there wasn't some big scandal, right? Right. Cuz at that very moment, when that woman asked me that, it was like everything kinda came crushing down, all the things that I had endured at that time to get to where I was. And And that is I did talk about a beat. It was a turning point for me because I said, I knew I was about to be a partner. Right. And, and [ UNKNOWN ] has been an amazing company and law firm to me and they were making me partner and I said, now that I'm going to be a partner, I have to make it so it's not the same. Right? And it was something that Susan. That first corporate woman partner and I worked hard on as partners, and it's shaped who I am today. And as I've grown and learned, it became not just around gender, but across all kinds of diversity and it is a personal passion. It was something I experienced, but even more importantly, I learned like. Once you have the ability to make it different, you have the responsibility to make it different .>> I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the corona virus that's that's spanning the globe. Now, you have been affected by the market corrections that have happened globally, whether it's through your clients or your partners or your or your own stock Is this a new reality that we all need to deal with? And how do you even begin to talk about some of these issues with your clients? It highlights the integration of the supply chain around the world and the dependencies. And so we're spending a lot of time with clients thinking abut their supply chain strategy. Because regardless if there's a long term disruption now, right? It's clear that we need to be able to help clients be resilient during, cuz there could be another incident. And one of the big aha moments, which is interesting for us cuz we're so virtual and digital. Is how many large companies still don't use collaboration tools, aren't using digital technologies- Right. Internally. They're engaging with their customers but they haven't invested in the infrastructure that allows their employees to telecommute To not have to travel. And I think that's gonna be a big area of opportunity to help clients. Yeah, truly sweet. Thank you very much. Great, thank you very much, Greg, for having me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

A conversation with Julie Sweet

Features

Sweet talks company growth, and her personal journey to CEO.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet on Coronavirus and More

The Accenture CEO sits down with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Clifton Leaf to talk about company growth, the business impact of coronavirus, and unconscious bias.