Posts Tagged ‘History’
Posted on September 30th, 2011 at 12:09 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Accenture, History, Innovation that works, Management Consulting, open leadership, Outsourcing, Technology services
In celebration of Accenture’s 10-year anniversary, I have written about it’s history over the past months. Over this period, I have taken a chronological look at the roots of Accenture by taking a closer look at one specific period which shaped the culture and values of our company: from the Beginnings in the early 1950’s to our transformation which resulted in Becoming Accenture in 2001, to Building High Performance and our Accent on the Future.
As a wrap-up of this series of blog posts, I have highlighted the blog posts which discussed the foundational periods in Accenture’s history below:
- 1953: First commercial application of a computer in the United States: Andersen was hired to program the payroll for General Electric’s Appliance Park manufacturing facility near Louisville, Kentucky. General Electric hired the Administrative Services team to assist in the design and installation of the system.
- 1965: John Higgins’ Charismatic Leadership and Accenture’s Special Sauce: Higgins was the organizational genius of Andersen. “John was probably one of the most brilliant men I have ever met in my life. He was meticulous in everything he did. It was either going to be right or not at all”. The Special Sauce was a mixture of moxie, drive and the willingness to commit the necessary resources. While Higgins didn’t coin the phrase “special sauce,” his strong leadership provided all the key ingredients for the recipe.
- 1970’s: “Bargain of the Century” – St. Charles: Beginning in the early 1970s Andersen made the “bargain of the century” when it purchased St. Dominic College in St. Charles, Illinois for $4 million. Today, the facility continues to play a role in Accenture’s education programs. A trip to the St. Charles campus is still a rite of passage for newly hired consultants.
- Early 1980’s: Competition from IT Outsourcing: The consultants realized that while Administrative Services was growing at roughly 20 percent a year, the industry was growing even faster, and, therefore, the consultants were losing market share. A new breed of non-accounting firms with practices which had it’s roots in IT outsourcing was emerging.
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Posted on September 16th, 2011 at 11:56 am by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Business Transformation, Commitment, Corporate values, customer needs, Emerging markets, History, open leadership, Stewardship
Some speculated at the time of the IPO in 2001 that Accenture’s special culture and values wouldn’t be able to survive the transition to public ownership. The severe economic downturn that followed didn’t help the organization’s odds. But the partnership values and culture have retained a special meaning at Accenture.
The principles of it will never change—that is the emotional attachment, the ownership, the feeling of authority and accountability are the things we have to continue to hone and get right. Green was leading a town hall meeting at the St. Charles campus in the summer of 2004. There were about 800 employees in the auditorium, and one employee in the back of the room said, “I’ve been here three weeks. I think I understand some values, but what is this thing called stewardship?”
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Posted on August 5th, 2011 at 12:16 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Accenture Career Framework, Career Management, Catalyst Award, Compensation program, Diversity, History, Outsourcing, Training courses
The dramatic growth of Accenture’s outsourcing business involved internal cultural issues particularly concerning hiring and training a much more diversified workforce. “We’ve done the right thing by creating separate workforces and trying to engineer each of them differently to recognize and be relevant to the men and women who chose to work here,” Green said. “What’s before us now is how we rationalize that and bring us all together on one common agenda.” Accenture’s leadership focused on making up for ground lost during the recession. “On the one hand we did what we had to do to be good stewards of our business. “But we lost something in the area of skills, by reducing training budgets, and in personal connections and networking.”
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Posted on July 29th, 2011 at 1:19 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Latest Post | Tags: Asia, Competition, Consulting, customer needs, Global firm, Growth, High Performance, History, Outsourcing, Value Creation
The year 2003 was an extremely difficult period for many employees to live through, but the global downturn strengthened Accenture’s competitive position. With many traditional rivals left in a weakened financial state, Accenture remained unmatched in terms of its global breadth and depth. We were leveraging these strengths with scores of new and continuing engagements to drive growth in consulting revenues that was projected to exceed global growth in IT spending going forward. Once again, as it had many times in its history, Accenture showed its ability to quickly respond to changing conditions in the marketplace to best serve its customers’ needs.
Accenture also leveraged its global industry groups to differentiate itself from rival consulting as well as outsourcing firms. That fact hasn’t been lost on clients. Whether we took an insurance system we developed in Spain and installing it for a client in Chicago, or we took a banking system developed in Spain and installed it in the U.K., we got a lot of credit from our clients who say: ‘You can see that there’s “one firm”—and that’s Accenture’. A recent visit to Accenture delivery centers in India left clients with the same impression. We had a couple of clients visiting our sites in India where they said, ‘It’s very clear, you go into an Accenture office in London or you go into an Accenture office in India, and you say, that’s Accenture,’ said Karl-Heinz Floether, former group chief executive-Financial Services.
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Posted on July 22nd, 2011 at 3:36 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture | Tags: Capacity, Consulting, Costs, High Performance IT, History, Human resources, Outsourcing, recession, Supply chain management, Transformation
By 2002 Forehand knew he had to do more than just cut costs and ride out the recession. To do so would leave an opening for a rival to take market share from Accenture or otherwise redefine the business. That wasn’t the Accenture way. He knew it was time for the company to once again embrace change and reflect the new reality in the marketplace for its clients. Accenture continued to stare change in the face every day and continue to challenge ourselves with: ‘What do we have to do to remain relevant to our clients?’. That’s what we’ve done over the last years during the downturn.
“We transformed our business model to blend consulting and systems integration services—areas in which we have had broad experience for decades—with outsourcing services,” Forehand noted in his 2002 letter to Accenture stakeholders. Accenture’s existing outsourcing expertise focused on managing business processes, applications and technology infrastructure. The company also began adding outsourcing capabilities in customer information, billing systems, information technology services, supply chain management and human resources administration.
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Posted on July 15th, 2011 at 11:57 am by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Can-do spirit, High Performance, High Performance IT, History, Outsourcing, Rebranding, Special sauce, Stock listing
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…
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Posted on July 8th, 2011 at 11:55 am by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Accenture, Andersen Consulting, Arbitration, History, Initial Public Offering, IPO, Joe Forehand, Redefine, September 11
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…
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Posted on July 1st, 2011 at 12:16 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Andersen Consulting, Business integration, Economic slowdown, Executive committee, History, Redefinition, Systems integration
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…
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Posted on June 10th, 2011 at 12:05 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Column | Tags: Bonding amendment, Can-do spirit, Gill Rider, Growth, High performance Delivered, History, Special sauce
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…
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Posted on May 20th, 2011 at 12:19 pm by Jort Possel
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Theme: About Accenture, Latest Post | Tags: Business model, Changing landscape, Consultants’ demands, History, Larry Levitan, Strategy consulting, Upheaval
Despite the
competitive pressure and the tremendous amount of income the consulting practice was generating by the mid-1980s, changes in the marketplace weighed heavily on the group’s decision-making process. But the competition was not the only big concern Andersen was facing at the time.
There was more revenue in the services side, and we saw pressures competitively that caused us to think very differently about our own model. The influx of giant technology companies onto the consultants’ systems installation turf drove much of the strategy-related soul searching. With the consultants’ mainline business increasingly technology driven, there was great concern internally that the consulting practice lacked a clear identity in the market. Read more…
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