Name: Fortune Global 500 Summit: A conversation with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet
Uploaded: 2021-10-18
Duration: 10 min 5 s
Description: Accenture CEO Julie Sweet sits down with Fortune CEO Alan Murray at the Fortune Global 500 Summit.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet sits down with Fortune CEO Alan Murray at the Fortune Global 500 Summit.

Fortune Global 500 Summit: A conversation with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

International

A conversation with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

I'm joined now by julie Sweet who is chair and ceo of accenture the giant global professional services firm and who's been in the top ranks of fortune's most powerful women list for six years now julie thank you so much for joining us. Great thanks. I'm excited to join you. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here. You talk to ceos of the world's top companies all the time. You know how they are wrestling with this revolution of technology that has the potential to transform their business cloud computing. Uh everything connected by 5G masses amounts of data turned into intelligence by machine learning and artificial intelligence. What are you hearing from them about how this is affecting them? Well, you know, it's really been interesting since the pandemic was hit. If we go back to that date I predicted uh in March of 2020 that almost overnight those who pre the pandemic had really invested at scale into technology, naval transformation into digital really had their competitive gap widened Located overnight as the world turns digital and sort of 18 months in. That's exactly what we've seen. In fact the gap between those who really are leaders in technology and the adoption and culture around it sort of the top 10% Are performing five times the bottom 25%. It's a huge gap. And what's interesting is that you've got a category of companies. So uh not the leaders but about about 18% of companies on average by industry. I want to be leap progress who saw that gap widen and really said we have to do something different and pre covid you didn't see this, you have the leaders but we didn't statistically see this group that we call the proverb. So what we're spending a lot of time with right now is on the leader with the leaders who are doubling down on their investments to make that gap even wire with a group of companies that are basically doing what we call compressed transformation where they're saying we need to go faster, we need to do, you know, and those companies are touching two times the amount of processes they are going cloud first and investing in technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning. And the third thing they're doing is they're shifting their I. T. Budget for more you know maintenance to innovation and their leadership teams are doing the same. That's really interesting. I mean you're speaking to an audience of executives, I'm sure some of whom fall into both camps. Some leaders uh some now looking to make up the gap. What's your advice to people who want to be leapfrog others who want to jump ahead in this race, You know, Ellen, it really starts with making a decision to be a leap proverb. Because when you think about the characteristics of going cloud first of touching two times the amount of processes of shifting the budget. This is very different ways of working. I'll give you an example. We have a client who we talked about them that curbside pickup uh since 2016 covid happened, they still hadn't had it and they said we have to have it for the second wave in order for them to do that. They had to completely change the way they thought first they partnered, they use technology that already existed but the way they were organized, they had different business units forecasted differently who had different ways of governing their data and the only way to get to for the customer who didn't care about the different organizations in the company was to really decide they were going to act differently. And so I think that you have to have a vision. You have to be intentional and then you have to be willing to really change how you operate. That's really interesting Juliet. It underscores the fact that this wave of technology transformation can't be driven by the chief technology officer or the technology department. It really has to come from the Ceo does Absolutely. And across the C suite and compressed transformation is about getting all elements all parts of the company really going in a different direction and it means something very different for leaders as well. And one of the things that I will challenge many C suite to come and ask me to talk about what's happening is I'll say as a leader, do you know where you spend your time because if you're not spending more of your time outside at conferences like this, talking to ecosystem partners, being with your customers then most likely your vision in terms of how you leapfrog and where you need to go is not informed enough and we see that where companies say we want to use the technology but then they don't recognize that they don't have the experience of the talent to do so and they need to look at other data and tap into other talents books so that peripheral vision has become more important than ever before. Absolutely uh julie there are two constraints. We're hearing a lot about these days. One of them is talent. The difficulty in getting the talent that you need to accomplish a transformation like this and the other are the supply chain problems. Just the difficulty in getting the equipment on time to make it happen. Well what are you hearing about both of those talent is the top of the list in every conversation uh that I have and maybe to share with this group, I predict. Uh and we're pretty good at predictions. I predict that in three years the leading companies will have completely shifted the way they look at talent from role based talents From generic to actually skills. So we have 624,000 people. We have a database built in the cloud that has automatically populates the skills of everyone of our people. They can then update them and we have algorithms that allow us to know if someone truly proficient that allow us to look at what skills they have and say who could be retrained or up. Yeah and if you look at the talent needs and the skills changing, we believe that the leading companies are going to shift massively the way they develop talent and the way they look at talent. Uh and then on the supply chain side, you know I just spending a lot of time with ceos just yesterday. Uh you know this is going to be a constraint on growth. It needs to work itself out and probably the biggest shift we're seeing with our clients. Is there moving from cost efficiency in the supply chain in order to solve long term to resilience which which you know has a trade off on costs. But given the supply chain tissues everyone's experiencing, they realize they've got to for the long term make that shift. So you're you're speaking now to a group of chinese executives and we are seeing something of a decoupling of the U. S. Or the western economies and the chinese economy, particularly when it comes to these technology issues. What are the implications of that technology for business decoupling? Rather busy? You know, Alan I would say that it's it's much wider than just the U. S. And china. You see the same thing happening in europe for example with different focuses on data sovereignty and whether they should build clouds uh you know you saw the data privacy shield between the US and europe invalidated. And so as we look across the globe, we're seeing these different trends now. There's not a lot that we can personally or as a company control there, but we're very focused on helping clients navigate that. So how do you have the compliance? We're working with our ecosystem partners to build products that allow uh global companies to move more seamlessly while at the same time trying to participate in private and both private and public partnership to influence what we hope will be a different trend going forward. Really interesting. Last question for you Julie, this group in Hangzhou is celebrating the Fortune Global 500 list and really focusing on what does it take to have enduring success to be around for 100 years or more. I wonder if you could share your best advice on how to build an enduring company that can be around for a century or more. Well, alan is as you may know, I've spent a lot of time in china over the years and speak a little bit of chinese and I have one great chinese proverb that I think uh it's something that's sort of that, that we can all aspire to. Its uh ju xiang Chen li dosing. Yeah and that means wisdom is what makes a person successful but integrity is what makes a person great. And so as we look forward and we think about all of the needs to have, you know, re skilling of our people to protect the planet, to have, you know, have every business in a sustainable business to make sure that we're deploying technologies like AI responsibly, making sure that we're not only focusing on the skills and capabilities, but being, you know, really focused on being the most, having the highest integrity and being truly responsible citizens of the world uh, is what I hope all of us in the post pandemic world, where we want to build back better can be focused on. Beautiful. Last thought, julie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. All right, thanks for talking to me.