Name: How a Cancer Diagnosis Reframed Julie Sweet’s Approach Work and Leadership
Uploaded: 2025-09-09
Duration: 10 min 59 s
Description: In this segment of Fortune 500:Titans and Disruptors of Industry Accenture CEO Julie Sweet opens up about how a breast cancer diagnosis reshaped her perspective and sharpened her resolve. She reflects on saying “yes” to a stretch role that would set her on the path to CEO, and on how decisive leadership has become her trademark in moments of uncertainty.

In this segment of Fortune 500:Titans and Disruptors of Industry Accenture CEO Julie Sweet opens up about how a breast cancer diagnosis reshaped her perspective and sharpened her resolve. She reflects on saying “yes” to a stretch role that would set her on the path to CEO, and on how decisive leadership has become her trademark in moments of uncertainty.

How a Cancer Diagnosis Reframed Julie Sweet’s Approach Work and Leadership

Fortune's Editor and Chief Alyson Shontell sits down with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

Leadership

How a life-changing diagnosis forged Accenture CEO Julie Sweet’s leadership style

For Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, surviving cancer twice brought both clarity and urgency. In this conversation, she shares how those lessons shaped her path to the top.

A huge break that you got and deserved, frankly was the North America CEO job. How did you first know that that was something that you wanted? And how did that come about? That seems like a really big career moment and a really big opportunity that you had. So I'm just curious if there's a backstory there and how you prepared. I went from GC straight to the head of North America. Wow, and I remember the moment this even became a possibility. So I, I worked for an amazing CEO, Pierenter, and I was in Paris. He was French and we were having just a usual meeting. I was his general counsel. It's a very close relationship. We were kind of, you know, just doing the usual meeting. At the end of the meeting, he closes his notebook and he pushes it aside, and he says to me, completely out of the blue, he says, I think you could run this place someday, but you'd have to run something else first. You can't go from general counsel to CEO. Well, so he thought you could be the CEO of the whole thing, like, right, he could see me. He said, you know, do you want that? Now at the time, what ran into my head immediately was something that we had this incredible director Dina Dulon, who had once talked to a group of women, and she'd given us advice. She said, When someone gives you a stretch role, and let's face it, moving from GC to, you know, being the global CEO is a stretch role, it's like, chances are that the person offering you a stretch role is as nervous or more nervous than you are. So don't say anything like, are you sure? You know, right? And it would have been really easy to, because I was very close to Pierre, um, and, you know, it would have been easy to be kind of like, oh, are you sure? da da da. And you know, what's most remarkable about me being global CEO is not that I'm the first woman or that I was a lawyer, but I'm actually the first CEO that didn't start out of college, right? So like, it had never occurred to me that Accenture. would take someone who hadn't grown up here to be CEO and then you add on top of it, I was the general counsel like it wasn't just part of like something I thought I could reasonably aspire to. So I looked at him and I said, with Dena in my head, why yes, I'd be interested. What did you have in mind? Is that like interim step, you know, and it was really funny because he said, Well, you know, products is going to come available. That's one of our business scene, he's like, but that's really big. He's like, Ooh la la, you know, maybe not. And he said, Well, you know, maybe the North America job. So that was just like an incredible moment. And a month later I found out I had breast cancer. Oh my gosh. So I wasn't thinking too much about, you know, running North America at the time, and he was so incredible to me. And then when I came back full time, I had a lot of complications. And when I came back full time, the North America job actually opened up and You know, what an amazing company I work for, because, you know, I battled with all the different things around breast cancer for about 9 months, and I remember I came back in January of 2015 and there wasn't something like, oh, you know, Julie's been out or anything. It was just like, oh, she's back. The job, you know, became available and Um, you know, long story short, on June 1st, 2015, I became the North America CEO, which, you know, was the stepping stone to be able to become the global CEO four years later. Wow. There must be something so clarifying and distilling about getting a diagnosis like that. And I'm curious how, and you've battled it now twice, including recently, and I'm so glad that your treatment has passed, and I hope, I hope you're doing well. I'm doing great, so thank you, and I've had so much support. It's been amazing. So I'm curious how it's changed you as a person. I'm sure you know it brings empathy with it, but also clarity of how do I want to be spending my time? Am I doing the thing that I really want to be doing? Do I want to spend all this time at work? So I'm curious how you've worked through that. When I go back to 2014, I had young kids, they were 6 and 7, and uh which is always scary, um. And you know at the time, I felt good about how I'd been living my life because I said, you know, like, do I have any regrets? And I, and I actually felt like I'd struck the right balance with the given that obviously I'd chosen a career that I was going to work a lot, like so it's not that I was, you know, like that was just a that was a choice, but within that choice I felt good about the choices that I had made in terms of time. And in the intervening years I've used that as kind of a litmus test because I mean, you know, like I know your job is crazy, so I know you, you relate to this, right? You can get sucked into different times being really busy and so I would, I would stop and ask myself like if, you know, if something happened to me tomorrow, would I still feel like I didn't have any regrets? And sometimes I'd be like, no, I would be regretful and I'd have to adjust. And so I think it helped me. Bring more balance over the 10 years and balance, not like somehow some nirvana, but being able to stay focused on what's important, which is my family and, and, you know, being with them. And then this, you know, this latest time is just of course always a reminder. So for me, you know, probably the thing that as a working mom kind of went to the wayside the most was a focus on my health. Then now fortunately the one area I always did was self exams because I actually found Recent cancer through a breast self exam and I always talk about that because I really want to encourage women to make sure that they're getting their mammograms and they're doing their regular self exams and because, you know, ultimately because I caught it early, you know, 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 that, you know, just focusing on my health and, you know, not so much but because of the cancer, but recognizing that I'm probably, I wasn't spending as much time. It wouldn't have affected whether I had cancer or not, but it was kind of like a reflection on I want to live a really long life. Like you get really clear, I want to live a really long life, and I want that to be a quality life and I was reading this book by Peter Atia, I don't know if you know it outlived and And he talks about, you know, having a health quality, not just life, you know, tenure, and what he talks about is like you want to have that last 10 years of your life be very high quality, and that means you've got to do things now. And so I'm super focused on making sure that I'm doing the things that I need to do now that are good for my health now but also put me in a position that You know, I have, you know, an opportunity in the last decade of my life to live it to the fullest. Even as she faced her own health struggles, Sweet was steering Accenture through seismic shifts in geopolitics, the economy, and rapid tech change. In 2022, after navigating the firm through COVID, she made the swift decision to pull Accenture's operations out of Russia just one week after the country's invasion of Ukraine. Russia overnight launched its long anticipated attack on Ukraine, striking military posts across the country. That kind of rapid response reflects a broader leadership style, spotting opportunities and moving fast to act on them. Sweet has also helped drive an aggressive mergers and acquisitions push. In 2024 alone, Accenture completed 46 acquisitions worth $6.6 billion. The company targeted firms in data, analytics, marketing, and AI to strengthen its position in fast growing sectors. Beyond AI, the company is pushing into bold new areas too, from humanoid robots to space tech and even building digital twins. I think one of the defining things that I just heard from your peers, we have a great profile of you out in Fortune. Every everybody should go read it. Jane Frazier, who runs City, said, you know, Julie is a great leader, but she makes decisive quick decisions, and that seems to be just something that's trademark about your to lead is that you are able to take a lot of noise and just be like this is the path going with conviction. How do you make those decisions because from everybody else it seems like it's fast and quick, but I'm sure to you there must be something going on internally. Is it data? Is it gut? Is it talking to peers? How are you coming to these conclusions? Well, first of all, Jane is an amazing leader, so it's so nice of her to say this. Um, it starts with a great team, and what do I mean by that? I have a team that is constantly, like, also, you know, acting with humility, excellence and confidence, right? We are constantly challenging each other and our assumptions. And when you have a team that thinks that way, right, not that they all think the same, in fact, the exact opposite because we put together teams with like diverse experiences and ideas, but when you build a team that thinks that status quo is challenging assumptions embracing change, it means you're constantly questioning, right? You don't need to stop and have a big strategy, sort of like, let's take the next, you know, 12 months to look at it because you're always working on the strategy. And when you have that base, that means that you have like leaders to go to to like to be starting to question and test things and then I have a larger team, a global management committee. That is deeply steeped in our strategy. They own every dollar of revenue and cost who are like also constantly providing input and they're there to bounce ideas off very, very quickly. And this was an innovation when I became the CEO. A back in 2019 because the prior CEO only had his direct reports as the Global Management Committee, and I expanded that to me the direct reports and the people who lead our services, so think of that as our products and our markets and what that Means is I have about 45 people who are deeply steeped in our strategy, not, you know, sort of meeting once a year, you know, like lots of companies have these like kind of groups of leaders that are almost an adjunct. These are the leaders who are running the company and they provide that constant input. And so 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 is also to lead the company and that you can have like 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.