Success is no longer about changing strategies more often, but having the agility to execute multiple strategies concurrently. And success requires CEOs to develop the right leadership capabilities, workforce skills, and corporate cultures to support digital transformation.
Pierre Nanterme
The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating. It's all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.
Businesses that make consumer privacy a point of competitive differentiation will enjoy greater customer loyalty.
As a professional services company, our people ultimately make the difference in delivering high-quality services to clients. This is why we are so focused on attracting the best people and investing to further develop their skills.
Our approach to continuously investing in the scales and capabilities of our people helps us meet the needs of our clients and enhances our ability to attract the very best talent in our industry.
Increasingly, the work we do is enabled more and more by new IT, including automation, robotics, and intelligent platforms.
When I think about strong innovations in term of automation, robotics, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence, they are coming a lot from the Philippines and from India as well.
Increasingly, we are embedding artificial intelligence into the core of our clients' businesses across every function and process.
CEOs must go beyond working with policy-makers on new regulatory frameworks. They must also commit to the principle that success cannot be measured by profitability and growth alone.
More and more, our clients expect not only relevant advice, not only setting a road map or helping them plan, but being committed to business results.
Without question, intelligent technologies will continue to disrupt the world as we know it. There will be profound implications, both positive and negative.
Gender equality is one of the principles we will never compromise at Accenture.
Accenture has long been a champion of inclusion and diversity and, specifically, gender balance at every level of our organization, including our board of directors.
Cities could open up their property and assets to sharing economy apps that make it easier to find parking spaces or homes for rent. By aligning private-sector incentives with the public good, cities will create confidence among taxpayers.
I truly believe Accenture is a magnet for top talent in the new, not only because of the work we do for clients but because our culture supports employees who want to make a difference in the community where we live and work.
As CEO of Accenture, I am not French anymore. When I'm in India, I am Indian. We are a company with no physical headquarters. We operate on a virtual level. Our leadership meetings are teleconferences, which is why the Board asked me to stay on in France. And I tell others to stay in their own countries.
I am very proud that Accenture is among corporate champions to be honored by the Women's Forum of New York for our mutual commitment to making a difference.
While the digital transformation of industries will be profound, we must keep in mind that it will have wider economic and social impact, too, as with previous revolutions driven by steam and coal, electricity and computers.
I could spend all my time on a plane visiting multiple countries, and I would never visit enough.
Even in mature economies, digital's benefits to society are substantial.
I feel very good about our performance and the momentum we have in our business, which clearly reflect the value of the services we provide to our clients each and every day.
We have to continue to build on our strengths and remain successful.
I feel I'm probably the luckiest guy on the planet to lead Accenture.
We've truly transformed Accenture capabilities to help our clients embrace the new, applying innovation and intelligence at the heart of their organizations.
Digital companies can reach new customers immediately and at virtually zero marginal cost. They can compete in new sectors by collaborating with peers and competitors. They can massively improve quality and productivity by converging technologies and sources of data.
Now, given the increasing importance of artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, and other innovative technologies, we are evolving Accenture Digital to be even more relevant to our clients and drive even greater differentiation in the marketplace.
We have the largest digital design studio in the world.
All this terminology of rankings - forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever - we're done with that.
If I had to probably define and characterize my job, and maybe the job of a CEO today in this global world, highly volatile, uncertain, and when you need to transform is to be the catalyst for change. That's probably the definition I would give to my job. I'm the catalyst.
Do you feel good in your role? If yes, that's the perfect time for you to experiment with something new, to get out of your comfort zone. This willingness to learn is probably the most important thing for leaders of today and tomorrow.
Leveraging cloud, mobility, you process things in a different way. For example, in insurance, you can access more claims through cloud, which makes a big difference in emerging markets, where the populations are large.
We decided to significantly change the nature of the services we are providing to our clients by creating, really, a digital-first company, and digital first in two main directions: first, being the leader in providing digital services to our clients and second, making Accenture the most digitalized organization.
An important part of my job is listening to diverse points of view at all levels - from Millennials starting their careers... to women at the highest levels of leadership... to my own wife and daughter.
The Accenture hybrid class solution for Microsoft Azure will provide a new wave for our clients to transform to a truly enterprise wide hybrid cloud environment.
I am surrounded by exceptional women on Accenture's board of directors as well as my own leadership team.
We are always looking ahead to anticipate what next, and our unique innovation architecture enables us to take an innovation-led approach to help our clients invent the future.
FusionX's elite team of cyber security experts works at the C-Suite level to help clients test security and see their vulnerabilities through actual replica attacks. This acquisition brings to Accenture the critical ability to help our clients assess and respond to sophisticated cyber-attacks.
The breadth and scale of the capabilities we provide end-to-end across strategy, consulting, digital, technology, and operations are absolutely unique in the marketplace. And this is why Accenture remains the partner of choice for the world's leading companies in executing large-scale transformation programs.
The need to go digital remains a top priority for clients, and we are investing aggressively to drive innovation and deliver digital transformation.
The broad range of services we provide across our five businesses, together with our deep industry expertise, continues to differentiate Accenture, and we remain the partner of choice for the world's leading companies.
I want our future leaders to know what's possible and to be part of a world where diversity and gender equality aren't special programs but the natural way of operating.
We will continue to invest in high-growth areas... with a particular focus on digital, cloud, and security services.
People who are digital native, they want to have real-time performance feedback. They want to understand where they are, what might happen, what their future is. And they want to understand that quickly in a very direct conversation.
I am a passionate advocate for developing the future workforce, addressing complex social problems, and shaping a regulatory framework. These three subjects all revolve around greater innovation and growth.
Responsible employers who pursue bold growth agendas must embrace intelligent technologies.
As traditional job descriptions become obsolete, people will need to collaborate in new ways with increasingly intelligent machines.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution demands that CEOs take responsibility for the massive transformation of their businesses and for the extraordinary impact that this transformation will have on wider society.
We know from our business with clients around the world that when companies bring together people of different genders, races, cultures, and perspectives, we are smarter, more creative, more innovative, and more relevant.
Being surrounded by diverse points of view pushes us beyond our comfort zones. And when people and teams bring multiple perspectives and experiences to the table, the discussions are deeper, the decision-making process is better, and the solutions are stronger.
Frankly, it can be lonely at the top when it comes to driving diversity.
