Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts in which I’ll be looking at how a company’s approach to innovation can be the difference between success and failure. Or the difference between sustainable growth and declining sales. So what is innovation and why does it matter? And how do businesses that truly understand its importance achieve success? Not just once, but again and again. Accenture research has shown that innovation is about doing the right thing and doing the things right. In other words, what you do is important, but how you do it is even more important. Read more…
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Innovation – What, Why and How
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Accenture’s History – Building High Performance
The sense of accomplishment that came with the rebranding and stock listing was tempered by the sense of loss in the wake of September 11. And from a business perspective, it became clear within a few weeks that the company had been fortunate to go public when it did. With so much uncertainty in the world concerning security and the outlook for the economy, it was unclear how long the company might have had to wait to raise permanent capital, and whether it would have been able to raise anywhere near the amount it did in July 2001.
A sharp falloff in business spending was felt especially in the information technology sector in the final months of 2001. Read more…
Accenture’s History – Becoming Accenture
The late 1990s witnessed a surge of entrepreneurial risk-taking unleashed by the growth of the Internet. Andersen Consulting pursued its entrepreneurial destiny as well by filing, and winning, an arbitration case against Andersen Worldwide. The fully independent firm established its own identity with the adoption of its new name, Accenture, and a successful IPO, despite the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The company adjusted to new realities brought on by economic recession and the war on terror.
Two months later, Accenture and the world were shocked by the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The consultants rallied to fund and construct a Family Assistance Center in downtown Manhattan where families of September 11 victims could seek information about loved ones and emergency aid. Accenture remained true to its roots. Rather than resist change, its employees proved willing to make the kind of bold moves that characterized Accenture’s strategy over the years, and that kept Accenture in the vanguard of the global technical services industry. Read more…
Accenture’s History – The Consulting Firm of the Future
In the early 1990’s the firm needed to create its own operating infrastructure at the same time as the world economy swooned. As the global economy recovered, Andersen Consulting once again led the industry both in terms of operating performance and innovation, its success driven by concepts such as system integration and business process outsourcing. Success gave consultants the confidence they needed to continue their growth—and their need for full independence from Arthur Andersen’s tax and audit partners.
To make the firm less “U.S.-centric“ and embrace leadership from outside the U.S., it was no longer realistic to ask people to move to a world headquarters. Instead, in 1989, a 12-member Executive Committee was named to lead Andersen Consulting. Rather than congregate in one central headquarters, the committee would meet six to eight times a year at locations around the world. The step toward global management was a courageous one, given the sweeping organizational issues with which the consulting group was dealing at the time. This global approach helped the consultants capitalize on the tremendous growth opportunities of the 1990s—for several years revenue growth in the smaller European and Asia Pacific business regions exceeded that of the Americas. Read more…
Accenture’s History – Explosive growth
In my previous post the financial success of the consulting practice in the mid-1980s led to renewed demands from consultants for a bigger slice of the pie. They saw themselves in different businesses with different economics and they certainly didn’t see the audit practice as the “core” of their business.
Economies were booming around much of the world by the mid-1980s. The Andersen consultants leveraged their market-leading position to produce record revenue and profits. The consultants as a result demanded a greater say in running their business as it continued to diverge from the more traditional and regulated audit and tax practices. Partners in the traditional divisions balked, but following a series of wrenching management summits and reorganizations they finally granted the consultants a measure of the self-governance they desired. Read more…
How to win in Innovation Awards 2012
“All companies have to innovate, are desperate to innovate, but they don’t know how to innovate.”
During yesterday’s SIME Amsterdam 2011 event at the Beurs van Berlage, I had the opportunity as the initiator of the Accenture Innovation Awards to take a look on the state of innovation in the Netherlands in my Masterclass “How to win in Innovation Awards 2012″. In this collaborative event, we discussed a few selected concepts from past winners of the Innovation Awards.
During the 45 minute session, the participants -consisting mainly of brand new start ups and eager to learn how to win the Innovation Awards- were actively involved in the discussion on the criteria to win the Innovation Awards, how to create breakthrough innovations and how to measure innovation, success and potential. When asked who is going to enroll for this year’s edition, a large part of the audience raised its hand and we have already received some extra registrations on the website. Read more…
The Business of Jumping S-Curves
Welcome to the first in a series of posts in which I’ll look at what makes companies genuine high-performance businesses, and discuss why so many fail to make the grade. Are enduringly successful companies simply in the right place at the right time? Can it really just be a matter of luck or is there more to it than that? Accenture has explored this topic in detail over the years, and we’ve identified a number of traits that we believe distinguish the winners from the also-rans of the business world.
So how do a select group of companies outperform their peers over a sustained period? And how do they manage to consistently grow both revenues and profitability, even during economic downturns and market disruptions? Is it down to the business ‘excellence’ that was the focus of so much business literature in the latter part of the 20th century, or is it the ‘greatness’ that everybody was talking about in the early part of the last decade? In 2003, Accenture embarked on a major research project to find out what really sets these companies apart. Over the past eight years, we have looked at over 800 companies across dozens of industries and going back decades. What we found is that truly great companies get to the top and stay there by accomplishing the one thing that evades the majority of companies: they jump the S-Curve of business performance.
Accenture’s History: The rise of a new breed
“We wanted to become the leaders in the information industry. And the whole dialogue about the Information Age was emerging. We wanted to ride that horse forward. And that’s what we did, beginning in the early ’80s.” – Vic Millar.
One of the remarkable quotes from the man who played an instrumental role in standardizing the firm’s approach to systems installations and paving the way for significant growth in the 1970s, like I marked in my last post ‘Setting Standards‘.
The global spread of technology by the early 1980s raised the competitive pressure on companies across a wide range of industries. In addition to their success in using computer technology, Arthur Andersen consultants played a leading role in applying new management techniques, such as just-in-time processes to manufacturing clients, serving as a model for truly integrated business solutions. Given the potential of business consulting, new players emerged to challenge Arthur Andersen’s dominance in the field and compete for top talent. Read more…
Accenture’s History: Setting standards
In my last post I started with the early 1960s. When the firm upgraded the system from mechanical punch cards to an electronic computer. And ended with John Higgins’ charismatic leadership that provided all the key ingredients for the “special sauce”, which is a mixture of moxie, drive and the willingness to commit the necessary resources.
By the late 1960s unprecedented changes were buffeting societies and businesses around the world. Arthur Andersen’s entrepreneurial culture helped produce new ways of creating and measuring business success. The consulting division’s rapid growth, coupled with changes in technology and a tumultuous world economy, created new challenges for partners. Innovative consulting leadership enabled Arthur Andersen to emerge as a dominant global consulting firm by the end of the 1970s, and assured that the consulting practice would play an increasingly important role within Arthur Andersen. Read more…
Accenture wins MC50 consultancy.nl
Independent Dutch online platform www.consultancy.nl published an annual ranking named ‘Management Consulting 50′ (MC50), about the online image of management consulting companies in the Netherlands. The MC50 is based on the behavior of website visitors and ranks the 50 most popular management consulting companies in the Netherlands. Visitors are a combination of different target groups, including consultants, students, job seekers and clients of consultancy. Based on the daily traffic and visits of more than 100.000 unique visitors per year, this year’s winner and most popular consultancy is Accenture. Read more…
