When Julie Candy wanted to announce the largest organizational change in Accenture’s historical past to her workforce of greater than 770,000 staff, she broke with many years of company custom. As a substitute of crafting a company-wide memo, the CEO opted for one thing totally different: a direct video message that might attain staff throughout 120 international locations and essentially reshape how huge firms talk throughout instances of upheaval.
“Studying it on a bit of paper wouldn’t have conveyed the why in the identical approach as listening to it—listening to the joy in my voice, understanding the fervour now we have for why we’re altering,” Candy mentioned in a current interview with Alyson Shontell, Fortune‘s editor-in-chief, for the first-ever episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disrupters of Trade vodcast (subscribe right here).
Candy’s communication technique displays the size of problem she faces as head of Accenture, the world’s largest consulting agency by income. The Dublin-based firm generated $64.9 billion in fiscal 2024 and serves greater than 9,000 purchasers, offering providers spanning technique consulting, cloud migration, information analytics, synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity, and extra. With a whole bunch of hundreds staff unfold throughout greater than 120 international locations, Accenture helps organizations reinvent themselves within the digital age, making it each a beneficiary of and participant within the AI-driven transformation sweeping international companies.
Candy herself represents an unconventional path to company management. Since changing into CEO in September 2019, she’s been the primary girl to guide Accenture and the primary CEO within the firm’s historical past who didn’t begin there straight out of school. Her background as a high-powered company lawyer—she spent 17 years on the prestigious agency Cravath, Swaine & Moore, making accomplice inside eight years—gave her an outsider’s perspective when she joined Accenture as normal counsel in 2010. Below her management, the corporate’s income has grown greater than 50%, and he or she’s been acknowledged as one in every of Fortune‘s Most Highly effective Individuals in Enterprise.
The restructuring Candy introduced represents what she describes as reversing “5 many years of how we’re working.” The transfer brings collectively beforehand siloed enterprise items to raised serve purchasers looking for complete digital transformation, aligning Accenture’s organizational construction with its technique to be “the reinvention accomplice of alternative” for companies navigating fast technological change.
On the coronary heart of Candy’s technique was recognition that this transformation needed to be each decisive and deeply human. The restructure wasn’t a cost-cutting train, although Candy acknowledges it inevitably uncovered efficiencies and duplications. As a substitute, the transfer was pushed by consumer wants and Accenture’s ambition to ship built-in options combining business information, technical experience, information, AI, and useful capabilities as a single providing.
“With a purpose to seize the chance with AI, you actually should be prepared to rewire your organization,” Candy mentioned, reflecting broader recommendation she provides to Fortune 500 CEOs. “Many instances, when purchasers are saying, we’re not getting so much out of AI, it’s as a result of they’re making an attempt to use it to how they function immediately.”
Candy’s strategy to managing the change went past simply the medium of communication. She solicited suggestions and critiques from her management staff, refining her message by way of a number of iterations to make sure it resonated at each stage. “I attempt to haven’t any ego on communication, as a result of it’s so necessary that we’re actually clear,” she mentioned, noting all her direct reviews work with speech coaches to hone their communication expertise.
The transformation additionally demanded what Candy calls a stability of “artwork and science”—utilizing metrics and benchmarks from Accenture’s transformation GPS database to supply the analytical basis, whereas making use of empathy and cultural understanding to make sure the human ingredient wasn’t misplaced. In the end, Candy’s management by way of this restructuring has develop into a case examine in navigating sweeping organizational change in an period when conventional company communication strategies could now not suffice.
You possibly can watch the primary episode of Titans, that includes Candy, beneath.
