Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture

please welcome david rubinstein president of the economic club of washington d.c good morning i am david rubenstein president of economic club of washington i'd like to welcome you to our 11th virtual signature event of our 35th season today i will interview our featured guest julie sweet who is the chief executive officer of accenture and will discuss her leadership in innovation technology's impact on business and inclusion and diversity i should point out that julie was recently named number one on fortune's list of most powerful women in business uh this will mark her fifth consecutive year on the list now let me introduce our guest julie sweet welcome julie thanks good to see you david so just briefly we'll cover her background a little bit in the course of the discussion but just for people who may not know accenture is an extraordinarily large company is a company now with a market value of billion dollars 44 billion dollars in revenue and believe it or not 506 000 employees around the world julie is a person who is trained as a lawyer after she completed her uh law school she ultimately joined a very famous firm that i worked as a summer associate at crevasse wayne moore she became the ninth partner in that firm first ninth female partner in that firm and left to join accenture a number of years ago i think 2010 as the uh general counsel she subsequently became the head of north america and in 2019 became the ceo of the entire company so welcome julie thank you very much for giving us time today thanks i'm looking forward to it by the way who came up with the name accenture i looked up the word in the rogers thesaurus in the dictionary i didn't see any accenture word so where is that word coming from you know it is such a great question uh when we were splitting off from anderson consulting and needed a new name i wasn't here at the time but i've heard the story we spent a lot of money with uh you know sort of the marketing folks on wall street and we also ran a contest among our employees and in the end there was a young man named kim in norway and he came up with a name except it means accent on the future and the vote was overwhelmingly for kim's name so we're internally grateful to that and we have a very valuable brand today explain this to me private equity has grown pretty nicely over the last 20 years or 30 years or so enormous growth uh which of course deserve uh no doubt but why is it that consulting has grown even more rapidly what is it that people need consultants for what do consultants actually do you know that is such a great question you know it's hard to imagine a higher calling than private equity uh but uh if there is one it is definitely consulting and uh and in fact uh many private equity firms use us uh and that is it's all about uh solving problems and you know in today's world uh if you want to move with speed you have to be willing to partner with others you know i talk about at accenture that one of the most important leadership qualities is humility and humility is around being a learner and being collaborative and knowing that you know what you don't know and what we do is we partner with the world's greatest companies uh and we try to help them move faster and bring in different viewpoints uh and that's sort of the essential role of what we do and then actually we execute so we're not just a consultant uh we we also execute okay let's suppose uh accenture with 506 thousand employees says we have a problem we need to hire a consultant do you hire mckinsey or bcg or who do you hire well i'll tell you who we hired uh so when i became ceo september 1st of last year uh one of our my biggest uh challenges was that we needed to put in what we call a new growth model we need to evolve our services and how we operate and that was because we were coming to the end of a strategy we had started for the first professional services company that uh had a digital unit we started that back in 2014 and uh then we were less than 20 digital cloud and security and when we started in 2019 we were going to achieve our goal of 70 so we had to do a major operating model and growth model change and we needed to do it quickly so i looked around and in talking to our own people uh who were totally tapped out at our clients i said well if i can't use my own people who else can i use and they recommended a great company called kate's kessler now you can imagine it's a small company and three principals calling up and saying accenture you know one of the world's greatest consultants would like to hire you and uh and so they came in and i would tell you my own team was a little uh suspicious like why we have great people i said yeah but they're all serving clients uh so they came in and two weeks after they started helping us because we needed to move really quickly i went to them and i said we love you so much that we want you to join the accenture family and we bought them uh because they're phenomenal so uh so that's what uh consultants do we you know we find the best and uh and then because we're the best we ask them to join us so uh it wasn't because their fee was so high you didn't want to pay it you just figured you just buy them it'd be easier that way you didn't think that right well they were smart they said we're gonna let you buy us after you pay us so we finished the work and then we bought them i got it so let's talk about running the company remotely 506 000 employees uh you are based in washington dc is that the headquarters of accenture by the way we do not have a headquarters we have not had a headquarters since we went public uh we're a virtual company the headquarters is wherever the ceo is and in fact this is the first time in three decades that the ceo and the cfo are in the same office i'm really fortunate that my cfo casey mcclure is actually also based in dc wow okay so you are running the company remotely from dc how have you adapted to running the company remotely um how has that worked well first of all for us it was running the company was actually pretty easy because we don't have headquarters i have a global leadership team so that was seamless and we have people all around the world who already work remotely uh now it is very different though we have lots of people who go to clients and so and our clients actually aren't as an adept so the first part of the crisis was a lot about you know helping our clients get on teams and uh you know and actually get connected but i will tell you that while it was an easier transition for us having everything all innovation all interaction always be remote is also a challenge and it was one of the reasons i was really proud in october we launched our new purpose a strategy and the biggest brand campaign in a decade for accenture called let there be change and that was entirely done all the creative work was that that was done uh remotely and it's a huge investment it's a 90 million dollar investment for us in terms of what we're going to spend it was enabled by our tools uh teams the collaboration and the mindset and it's one of those things where i absolutely don't believe uh and in fact i counsel against that people should be working remotely but innovation can absolutely happen we do it every day in our work pre-coveted but even for us this was you know really quite remarkable uh achievement hey when covet is behind us hopefully sooner rather than later people are vaccinated and so forth do you expect that you will operate your company differently than you did before uh or will you go back to the the old situation you had and related to that do you need all the office space that you presumably have all over the world because a lot of people work at home maybe you can shrink your office space how do you look at those issues uh in some places we are shrinking our office space because for example um uh we have where we have big technology centers people always used to come in to be um to the centers and we are finding that some of them will come in less but i think it's important as you think about remote working is don't think about roles or like i'm going to be in three days or not two days but think about tasks what tasks don't you need to be in the office and interacting with other people and so we're continuing to do that we have less of a change simply because we have been working in remote teams and i remember when i was a general counsel and i came in and i was surprised that if i wanted my lawyers in 100 of the time we didn't have the office space i will caution uh all of you listening uh who are thinking about downsizing in accenture in the 90s when we first started saying we need less real estate not because of remote working but because our people were at clients we cut in the u.s dramatically in fact in 2015 when i became the north america ceo we had more people than europe but we had um a third less office space and uh the issue with that is that uh culturally people need to collaborate and actually the young people who are most digitally savvy want to be in now they want different kind of space they want a space that allows them to actually collaborate and be together hope it's been a little bit challenging of course for that uh and it's a lot harder to build back uh and and so you know if you actually think that your people never need to come in then ask yourself three questions is the job they're doing something that should be automated because they don't actually need to integrate and come in and be part of your culture if it shouldn't be automated uh the second question is is could some other company do it better right so can you outsource it can you you know turn to other uh companies because again it doesn't need to be integrated and those people don't need to be you know living part of your culture they can be entirely remotely or third should it be done in a lower cost location and when you start to ask those questions you really begin to think about you know what does it mean to have people remotely my last point you can tell i'm passionate about this because we've learned a lot of lessons do not allow yourself to say well there are some functions that are not important today you know like a lot of times i'll hear corporate functions don't need to be in the office well if your corporate functions are not part of your teams then you're not going to have business leaders driving the corporate functions and for us finance uh um hr those are all core to our business strategy and uh again we made some mistakes back in the 90s and and then we had we were wondering well you know why isn't our legal department is tied to our business so uh we've been doing this for a long time and so i just wanted to share a few of the things that we've learned and that we're sharing with others by the way you think travel will come back at the pace that it existed before a covid which is to say consultants are always flying all over the world and you think that your consultants will continue to travel at their previous pace business travel will not come back the way it is uh absolutely not uh and that's partially because uh you know what we've learned is again there's certain tasks that can be done remotely and uh than others i think there's an efficiency i know we're doing a lot more i do a lot more today than i did when i was traveling uh and uh so there's both a necessity it's a little bit after a 9 11 and you know after 9 11 when we all stopped traveling it came back differently it took a few years to come back i think here this will be more permanent uh in terms of just new ways of working and also sourcing talent differently it can be a huge opportunity for you know places to also who have great talent that aren't in major markets to um you know to work more remotely okay let me ask you two things about the consulting world as i've observed it i'm not the expert on consulting but i've observed that a lot of best people graduate from business schools they like to go and their consulting firms like to hire them and so they you hire a lot of young people very smart and then they come to the client and then they're telling the client ideas but these people are just a couple years out of business school did they really have the qualifications to come to a client and say this is what you should do after my you know six months in doing consulting or one year in consulting david when was the last time you actually hired a consultant because they don't do that right that's certainly not what we do right look you know consulting we look at consulting um very different today uh so let's just start with what do our clients need they need to move fast uh many of our clients uh know that they need different ideas right so they need to learn from other industries if you're um right now you take companies uh who are b2b and industrials right what was their problem well they had a supply chain issue when the pandemic hit but you know what their other big problem was their entire sales model was in person nothing was digitized and so we got the calls that said my people are up and running but they don't have a catalog that's been digitized they can't sell anything and so what are we doing now we're taking all the learnings from b to c and helping b to b right and so consultants today have to come in with you know benchmarking they have to come in with solutions to actually help you achieve that's that's how we'll help because you will always know your business better than us right but you won't know what are all the other businesses doing how do you get the the you know the solutions what's already pre-built there's a lot of companies today who are behind who are now having the humility to say i don't have to invent it myself tell me julie how we get to curbside pickup quickly right how have others done it and let's implement it that's really um why you know we think of ourselves as partners and our focus is on the value we deliver uh and you know i try not to talk about are we doing strategy and consulting or technology or operations because those things don't matter what matters is are we bringing you an outcome that you cannot get on your own uh and that's the conversation and and that's the only reason to use us or any other partner okay so um in the uh consulting world um sometimes uh it happens to be the case that uh you have clients who have you do projects for and they're very confidential but i don't know is there like in the legal world that you and i used to be in there's a lawyer client privilege and in the medical world there's kind of a client privilege as well patient privilege but can you is there a consultant client privilege so you can't tell other clients what somebody else you did for somebody else is that how do you keep secrecy or you're not required to it depends right so uh for example uh when you're building a solution that we've built right then you can take it to different clients right um absolutely you have confidentiality you can't say to one client here's this now a lot of clients will allow you to use their references in fact we put out press releases now and you're seeing that more and more actually as companies want to demonstrate to investors but even more importantly to talent that they're digital and therefore once it's out you can talk about it like you know for example um you know some work we're super proud of that we're doing with best buy and we put out a press release together where it talks about how they're investing in technology they're gonna create a thousand new jobs they're committing to a third of those jobs uh being diverse people and they're gonna use our learning platform to upskill their people right now i can talk about that uh as an inspiration to other clients uh because we've uh jointly decided to share it with the world okay let's talk about digital transformation um everybody wants to be digitally transformed these days because that seems to be the future so when somebody comes to you and says i want to digitally transform my company do you roll their your eyes because everybody wants to do that what is it that you're doing when you're helping somebody digitally transform their company that they couldn't otherwise do well a great example is a curbside pickup the one i just gave you so um the if you can imagine during the pandemic if you didn't have the ability for people to order online to be able to source the supply chain and um and therefore and then be able to deliver it right that required behind it all the things the buzzwords you hear cloud data artificial intelligence automation in order to do what is you know really became a critical service you know when you look at the enterprise every part of the enterprise is now you know being digitally transformed we said that pre-covid things are now accelerating because of the need to be contactless you know in the digital space uh there's um in the digital manufacturing space you not only you have safety issues right we saw what has happened with you know some of the plants and so right now digital manufacturing which we thought would take five to ten years is going much faster and it's driven by the fact of cost pressures that come with uh they get relieved but also the need to um have a higher safety uh you know less contactless uh work and so there's a lot of different reasons that are why we're why we're actually um accelerating uh but you know there's basically two truths today the first is every business is a technology business there is no more debate we don't have a debate about value the entire world saw technology is the lifeline during the pandemic and the second truth is that exponential technology change is going to continue it was happening before which was why this crisis is so unique and it's going to continue and so the real question for companies right is you know pre-covered were you a digital or were you were you a leader or a laggard and coming out of this what will you be in 24 months okay so let's talk about digital transformation in your own company a moment how do you digitally transform accenture what have you done and what do you do for technology do you have five cell phones and three computers and how do you keep up with everything a great question so uh over the last uh six years as we were transforming our own company to go from less than 20 digital cloud and security in terms of our services to now 70 we had to actually digitize accenture and so we are now 96 in the cloud uh we have salesforce workday sap s 4hana finance so all of our enterprise functions uh are now have been re-platformed and so i've talked about right now we are in the midst of um a once-in-a-digital era global re-platforming of business on the cloud uh using software as a service applications and accenture is there uh today and you'd expect us to be a leader and you know what does that mean you know why is that relevant well it's allowing us to pivot very fast uh whether it is uh when we spot a new opportunity like remote collaboration to be able to drive campaigns you know using the features of like a sales force whether i talked about the marketing um uh the new brands that was completely enabled by office 365 uh the other uh suite that we are um that we're on which has been part of our digital transformation uh and so it allows us to be much more agile in driving our business and continuing to change despite the fact that we've been in a pandemic for the last nine months so describe how the ceo of accenture uh manages her day you've got 506 000 employees i don't think there are that many companies united states that are privately owned and private uh sector companies that have more employees maybe walmart maybe amazon but i'm not sure who has more than those two other than you so how do you manage 500 6 000 employees around the world um you know how do you keep up with everything and how do you have a board of directors you have to meet with and how do you manage it and tell us your typical day uh so uh we are a public company so we have a board uh well i will tell you that my typical day has changed in the pandemic because it used to be i traveled all the time i'm now incredibly uh efficient and uh and i start early so when i was growing up my my mom grew up in a farm so she was an early riser so can you imagine being in high school and sunday uh going to church we had 6 30 a.m mass as a high schooler okay i was really popular when my parents used to call me in college about 7 00 am so that was a lot of fun so i start most days actually with calls at 5 30 a.m so that i can catch uh apac or europe but i finish uh most days by 6 30 so i can make sure to have have dinner with my daughters and my husband he matters too but mostly my daughters okay let's talk about for a moment your background you mentioned uh you're growing up so where did you grow up i grew up in tustin california and when you drive into tustin that's in orange county there's a little sign that says work where you must but live and shop in tustin so that's where i grew up i think it's changed it says julie sweet grew up here that's probably what it says now but okay so you grew up there and what did you want to be when you were younger i hesitate to tell you because it'll take you into a whole thing but i did think that i wanted to be president when i was younger but then i got religion i did not see the higher calling of private equity right but i was clear that being a lawyer was the place to be did you what made you think that somebody who had been in the business world could actually be president of the united states how did you come up with that idea remember that was before i decided to go into this okay i went to law first all right so you went to college at claremont right yes and then at college what did you major in so i majored in international relations which was the only degree that allowed me to spend a year abroad and i studied chinese in taiwan and in beijing in 87 and 88. and you are now a reasonably fluent mandarin speaker i'm a decent uh mandarin speaker when i was in china in november i i you know i studied up and i gave i shocked my 17 000 people and gave a 15-minute memorized speech in chinese but uh it's hard to keep up it's hard to keep up and i you know i'm sure i sound like a kindergartner but uh you know i can i would fool you david so when you graduated did you immediately decide you want to go to law school then i did i um i did it i'll tell you a funny story i was a senior in uh college and my um my professor called me and uh he was doing a recommendation i think and he sat me down and he said have you ever met a lawyer and i said no and he's like before i let you go to law school and incur a lot of debt because you have to meet a lawyer so he introduced me to uh one of his friends who was in one of the big orange county firms and of course you know i was young and i absolutely was going to go to law school regardless but um but i remember that and i was ex very fortunate because i loved law school i went straight through i'd spent a year abroad so i didn't feel the need to you know have kind of a gap year i went straight through and then i went to crevath okay she went to columbia law school in new york and how did you like living in new york different than orange county i guess right it was uh it was fantastic right i mean i had at the time by that time i had lived um in asia never been to europe which was kind of funny but uh i absolutely uh loved new york now for those who are not lawyers they may not know that crevasse swinging war was among maybe the one or two top law firms in new york some would say karate was the top for sure a very famous law firm a long history i was a summer associate there and um it may have gone downhill after i was there i don't know but uh in any event why did you go to kravath which was i would say maybe not viewed by some as being quite as progressive as some others well that's putting it mildly um i remember i interviewed at crevath and they had this amazing thing where you got an you got an offer at the end and everybody knew that and so people you know in law school they know who you're interviewing and i came back and i hadn't i got an offer and it spread like wildfire because it was a big deal back then and i remember i walked into this one of my big classes and all the men in my class were coming up and patting me on my shoulder and all the women were literally saying how could you go there i literally had to say to my friends um like stop like you will be supportive i mean at the time so i started in 92 and there were three women partners uh and the the saying was one a decade and not a single more they made one in the 70s one in the 80s and one in 1991 uh and so uh now so why did i do that because i didn't even ask you know i mean look i grew up with a very modest background you know my dad painted cars for a living my mom graduated from college when i was a freshman in college i was not focused on diversity at that point right i was focused on going to the best firm and by the way i had no intention of staying i had a plan i was gonna go for two years then i was gonna move to asia and conquer asia and uh you know and then you know go from there and so life changes i fell in love with corbath it gave me an amazing opportunities and i will uh say that the managing partner today uh uh fisa is a friend of mine she was the second woman corporate partner and the eighth woman partner at um at crevath so things have changed you were the ninth female right the year before me okay so um all of a sudden you're you're a big shot lawyer at crevath um you're um you know at the top of the legal world why did you want to leave a very prestigious and profitable firm to go to accenture in-house where as you know many times partners at large firms think that going in-house is not as good as being a partner a major firm why did you do that you know it's a great question i was uh i spent 10 years as a partner so i was a cravath for 17 years and uh you know i look back uh and at that time people now have left cravath but that time is very rare and and i still remember i was sitting at my desk it was in november and i got a call and it was from a headhunter and normally i wouldn't have picked up my phone it's a very old school firm like you know you have somebody who picks up your phone for you and i happen to pick it up and uh and she was taught and to rapidly have this great firm it's called accenture and i'd actually done um the spin-off for pwc of the business at ibm abod and accenture was one of the competitors so i knew so long story short i decided to take a call but when i look back as to why you know i was 42 i had two small children um uh three and two but my father had died that summer and he died young he was 68. and you know i really believe that had something to do with my sort of willingness to say i was like 42 years old i was a successful partner i could see my future i talked about this right i could i could see where i was going and i was like you know i don't want to see my future uh and not in a bad way kravath is an amazing place but i wanted to challenge myself and do something else and so i took a meeting and um and there was a we had an amazing ceo at the time bill greene and and he said to me use this line if you're ever trying to recruit a lawyer he said i'm not looking for a lawyer it's kind of funny because he was hiring a general counsel he said i'm looking for a business leader with legal experience and it it made me feel challenged and you know when i joined accenture it wasn't that i was joining to become ceo um but i didn't think of myself as a lawyer but as a business leader and and one thing which i haven't shared often is the night he gave me the formal offer to be general counsel he did say to me my mental model was someone who could be ceo and that always stuck with me not because i was trying to be ceo but i was like you know and so your words as a leader can really matter right and when i joined accenture i joined with that mindset and um and mindset can be everything and here i am today so i imagine it's like uh you know a child uh goes to his or her parents and says i'm gonna marry somebody you probably don't like but i'm gonna go do this so you went back to the cravath partners and said guess what i'm to get married to um accenture what did they say well you know i have to say um the leadership was great it was a you know it's a very prestigious company i was uh going to take over um a law department that was as big as cravath but the the person that was hard to go tell uh was christine our first woman partner who christine bashar an amazing leader she's passed away and i went in to tell her and she's like i am so disappointed how could you let the women of cravath down and it was it was devastating it was the hardest conversation i'm good friends with her son who i just saw recently and he's like mom would you know mom should have eaten her words because look what you've become right but uh that was hard because i was you know there still weren't that many of us we were on the path um uh but that that was a hard a hard conversation well i was a summer associate the year she became a partner the first woman partner and i remember the big controversy was this in those days the men who were partners had separate bathrooms from the associates who were uh there and then they didn't know whether they were gonna have a separate uh uh bathroom for the one female partner i don't know how that ever got resolved but uh in any event um all right so you decided to go to uh accenture where you're going to new york or how did you get to washington uh so i i got married but i'm going to tell you one quick private equity story in 2006 not for the carl group i was working for a private equity firm that uh doing some amazing work and on the first floor their main floor they had a bathroom for men but you had to get the key and go down the hall to the communal bathroom if you were a woman now that has changed but anyway things took uh things took a while but um so how did i get to washington i got to washington because uh my husband uh chad was had co-founded the chertoff group that was here and when i left kravath which was in new york we had been a six-year commuter marriage two little babies during the time he had served in the bush administration and then he and michael chertoff co-founded the chertoff group and they were here and we were commuting back and forth in fact we never lived together until i moved here so we met when i was living in asia and he was in texas we courted joined the bush administration i was in new york uh and then after i joined accenture it was flexible where i could live and so i moved here to bethesda maryland which is a great place to be isn't that a risk if you have a very successful marriage and you're living in two different cities why potentially ruin it have you thought about that problem i can tell you a few stories uh so yes it was it was a little bit of an adjustment so when we got back together and we actually i i remember um he was watching football on a sunday and i said you watch football and he said i'm a texan i said but you never watched football he was well that's because when i was only seeing you twice a week i wasn't going to watch football but he's like football's in my blood like it's just like funny stories uh but uh it's much better to live together okay so you join us general counsel um and then uh you did that for five years and then somebody said to you how about being the head of north america is that what happened uh actually it's pretty close um i was in paris where our ceo appeared in town who's amazing um he's passed away he's an incredible leader and he became ceo a year after i joined uh accenture in fact the first week i joined the ceo who hired me you know the really charismatic guy said hey by the way your first job is to help pick my successor so that was an interesting first week on the job so pierre became ceo uh he didn't know that much uh like the value of lawyers the first time i sat down with him he said why do we pay you so much um uh but he became a fan and uh and so we were an incredible partnership but he really invested in me and i share that because it's important for all of us you know there wouldn't be a woman at the helm at accenture if he hadn't chosen to begin to invest in me and teach me the business and uh and literally in uh in 2014 i was meeting with him regularly into the meeting and he said i think you could run this place someday you could have my job but you have to run something else first do you want to do that he also said it's a one-way ticket meaning you don't get to go try it and then go back to be the general counsel and uh and so i said yes uh in in my ear i was like that's the only thing you say you don't say are you sure because it really you know it's not it's not that i had that ambition i knew i wouldn't be general counsel forever because i was gonna get bored but it didn't occur to me that i could you know run and i'm the first ceo at accenture that did not grow up here out of college right so for lots of dimensions it didn't it wasn't really something i thought i would achieve or frankly even at the time was thinking of and so we talked about it and i promptly got breast cancer so that was a little bit of a detour and when i came back then the opening for north america came up and he called me and um i took it okay so you did north america what did you do running north america that made people say you know she could run the whole company i mean you must have done something but you very profitable what did you do well i had a great team so the first thing i did was uh make sure i had a great team and then we ran the business well and uh here we are okay so today um explain to people how accenture grew this big because when i remembered the predecessor of accenture it was the consulting arm of something called arthur anderson at one point right and um how did it spin off and how what did it do that made it become so big i mean i assume a lot of consulting firms are good but you're much bigger than anybody else by far so what did you do that may enable you to grow so big you know i think at the core of accenture is uh that we do everything from strategy and consulting to technology and then we run things and we're digital and if you look at our success today i really go back to 2013 but from 2013 you could go back another decade every wave of technology and every new uh way of doing business we've been a leader in and in 2013 we declared that every business would be a digital business and people uh argued with us they didn't believe us you know no one debates that today and it wasn't that long ago now at the same time when we looked at our own business we were facing a commoditizing business right we were less than 20 digital cloud and security and that we said this is where they were going uh and so we uh put in a new strategy we started um our first digital but we also did something else and i know we're going to talk about it today is we said we had to change our culture and we needed to be innovation-led when i joined accenture in 2010 the ceo at the time literally said to me we are fast followers that that was who we were we were not going to transform our company right and and lead in digital unless we were innovators and we said at the time the core to that would we we had to change the face of accenture we had to become more diverse and so at the same time that we were putting this new strategy in we said we were going to double down on diversity and that was all in the context that 2013 even as we were declaring that was only the second time we missed earnings and knocked a little off our market cap so it was a very it was a real inflection point for us you fast forward to 2020 nine percent kager we were 36 women in 2013 with 225 000 people today were 45 women with 506 000 people what are you in terms of minorities african-american a latino so a great question in uh in the u.s we are nine percent african-american that's up from seven percent in 2015 when we first declared uh we we were the first um and until recently the only professional services company that put out all of our demographics in 2015 for blacks latinx and hispanics uh veterans persons with disabilities and women and we did so not because our numbers were great i am proud of the progress we made and we had 31 uh black managing directors in 2015 and we had 81 last year and we just made several more and we have committed that we will double that again by 2025 uh just as we committed a few years ago that will be 50 50 um gender equal um uh by 2025. and and we we've been setting these goals internally because we do believe that diversity and inclusion is a business priority so we set goals we have accountable leaders execution plans data we change we're not we're not successful but uh transparency has been really core as well so transparent externally holding ourselves accountable is that the leaf blowers behind you or it is the leaf blowers behind it they start it up again now for those who don't know um there are some leaf blowers who um are behind julie i've written an article about how leaf blowers are taking over the world you might look at it um i'm convinced that the sun never sets on leaf blowers at least in my own neighborhood in any event many of the consulting firms that i have dealt with over the years tell me it's so wonderful that they're private because they don't have to worry about quarterly earnings they can be long-term focused they can serve their clients better but you're public so what's the advantage of being public if you're in the consulting business well you know first of all uh we're able to demonstrate uh just how much we're growing ahead of our competitors right when i um did our our our fiscal year ends on um august 31st so i just did my annual earnings uh in september and uh you know i could i can show that in the crisis i said look there are five things five goals we set when the crisis hit everybody always says we're going to emerge stronger and i said we're going to we're going to measure ourselves we had five goals and i shared those with our investors one of them was to grow faster in the pandemic than pre not in absolute terms for relative to our competitors so we took share four times faster in the second six months that the entire time of the pandemic than the first six months when we were growing our market share um at twice uh that we're growing twice the market uh and and uh today when you think about companies and what's at stake they want to know that they've got trusted partners and some of that a great deal of that trust comes from being able to know that you're with a client you're with a partner that has the liquidity that has the talent that measures itself and holds itself accountable um and and uh and you know very importantly is a very responsible business both in how we serve our clients and how we operate and you know people can say a lot of things about quarterly and and how that drives but we always run our company for the long term but the transparency of being a public company builds confidence so as i mentioned earlier you've been voted the number one most powerful woman in the world of business and i think men and women together you're in the top 15 or something like that so does that mean that your children listen to you more your husband listen to you more because you're the most powerful woman in the world in terms of business or what's the impact of that absolutely no impact at home that's uh that's uh pretty clear in fact i remember one time i was in the uh the new york times you know the corner office david gillis this thing huge picture i normally don't show my children anything and i thought oh this is a nice picture i'll show them i lay it out the kids come in i came up from downstairs they had pushed the paper to the side because it was in the way of making slime and i said um hey what'd you think of mom's picture they're like what picture i'm like okay that's the last time i'll share that so so they're not impressed okay so um i assume your high school classmates must be impressed or did they you got calls from them telling you that they knew that you were going to be successful all the time by the way they have their resume they send to you you get a lot of that uh you know i'm very grounded and my friends keep me grounded let's say that what about your mother does she call you and give you advice about how to run the accenture no but my mom is amazing you know just think about um where i am today so imagine my mom right who had three kids she worked part-time uh she went to community college then she transferred to cal state fullerton and she graduated uh if you think about you know my father who uh you know worked during that time supported his wife in school learned how to cook with great stories about how that bad that was at the beginning um they're incredible role models right and i wouldn't be here without their work ethic and their belief they always taught me i can be anything right now they were tough right because uh they said you can't have it as an excuse that you didn't come from money or anything um but they they spent time with us uh they you know taught me to believe in myself and um and they were great role models well let's suppose the president-elect who many people think is joe biden um if he called you up and said um you know i read about you i've watched your interviews and you should be a cabinet officer i'd like you to come in what would you say well i would be incredibly honored if president-elect biden i am one of those uh if president-elect biden called me up i think it would be great for him to add some great business leaders uh i hope that he calls you first because you would be fantastic david biden administration i am too young to serve i'm only 71. i think you got to be a little bit older more experienced but okay so let me ask you this if the president called you and said okay i can't recruit you but can you give me one or two words of advice based on your accenture experience about how i can make the government work more efficiently what would you tell them well first of all i would say that we should stop having the government funded yearly uh so you know why can't you get efficiencies well because you have yearly appropriations it's almost impossible to say hey we're going to do a three-year program and you're going to be funded uh and and so that would be my first change uh to uh to to change the way we fund government okay and suppose the congress called you up and said okay we got your idea about uh annual appropriations you have any other ideas how we can make the congress functional what would accenture recommend there well i'd rather um deflect and say here's a few things that i think you should do and achieve that will make the country more competitive and there would be three things at the top of my list uh beyond the obvious which i hope will happen is this a new fiscal stimulus and the first thing is we absolutely must come together to eliminate the digital divide it was uh it was a problem before the pandemic both in urban areas and rural areas the pandemic is exacerbated but it's not going to end and we've got to get broadband access and devices uh and we will not be competitive as a country because our people will not be competitive uh and technology is the not just the future it is the now so we have to do that second is we need data privacy legislation uh we are behind the rest of the world uh we are creating a problem and we have to keep that for um for for for innovation so i'll leave you with those too okay so um all work and no play makes people boring sometimes people have said so you must have some outside interest obviously you have two daughters and raising two daughters who are 12 and 14 must take some time and so forth and obviously you have a husband but you have any outside interest that would be uh interesting to people to hear about well i don't think it's necessarily interesting but i'm quite proud that during the lockdown at the age of 52 i'm now 53 i took up tennis which i had not actually picked up a racket since i think i was in eighth grade uh maybe tried once once or twice and my daughters were playing and so my husband and i have started and it's been really it's been really a fun thing to do uh to both connect with my girls and have a little exercise and it's a lot better than the gym okay well my advice is if you learn how to play doubles get someone like john mcenroe as your partner i think it's very helpful when you're trying to play doubles get a really good partner that's what i've tried to do over the years it usually works so um i think we pretty much covered the things i wanted to cover and i would hope you will say you'll stay involved with the economic club of washington because it was the key to your success i think you would admit right absolutely i'm very committed to staying involved and i hope that we'll get more people involved in all seriousness you know the club does a lot of great work including investing um and next generation leaders we're really proud to help fund that and uh so i do hope that that people continue to support the club and participate in the activities uh virtual or not because it does really important work and i want to thank you for your leadership david thank you and finally if somebody is watching and says this is a very impressive person i'm sure they would say that and i'd like to be a client of this person's company how do they contact somebody that uh can tell them how they can be a client of accenture julie.suite accenture.com okay all right i'm sure you'll be getting a lot of emails today julie i want to thank you very much for a very interesting conversation and congratulations on all your success thank you david it's been great to catch up again thank you

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

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Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020