Interview with William Green, Accenture

William D. Green is Chairman & CEO of Accenture, a Strategic Partner of the World Economic Forum

In which new ways are people and organizations collaborating and how important is this for effective competition in your industry?

Looking at our own business, connecting and collaborating are at the heart of Accenture’s competitiveness. By better connecting our people around the world, we harness the full power of our specialized skills, and we are able to deliver seamless service, where and when our clients need it. 

Messaging and collaboration tools, such as e-mail, calendar exchanges, document sharing, extranets, discussion boards and instant messaging, have become mission-critical tools for the journey to high performance.

To help companies deliver messaging and collaboration capabilities with less risk and cost, Accenture has teamed with Microsoft to offer Accenture Managed Messaging and Collaboration Services. These innovative services cover the full range of today’s business communications including VoIP and wireless.  This solution also supports enhanced availability and security with higher service levels—equally important, it can yield as much as a 20 percent reduction in overall costs. 

Within our company, we have launched Connecting Accenture, which provides better, more effective tools to help our executives connect, collaborate and deliver the innovation our clients demand.  TelePresence videoconferencing, a unified communications system, softphones and improved knowledge sharing applications are just some of the tools we are distributing companywide. We believe the better connected our people are, the more collaborative they will be.

Concerns about a lack of talent and a widening skills gap continue across many industries and regions, how are you responding to these challenges within your organization?

This issue is more complex than ever, especially with the shift to what we call a multi-polar world—where economic power is distributed among multiple centers of economic and business activity and where talent is not only at a premium but can also be sourced from virtually anywhere around the globe. 

At Accenture, we compete on the skills and capabilities of our people. We also know from our work with clients and our own High Performance Business research that a highly skilled and talented workforce is the foundation for success.

An important response to this challenge is around education.  Education is a key driver of high performance in an increasingly global economy, and that is why we believe that businesses need to work together with governments, school systems and other organizations to help improve the access, affordability and accountability of education for the people in their communities. Accenture and its employees donate time and money to higher education through scholarship programs; by teaming with educational institutions to create training curricula; and by “creating” talent through business ventures that train people in technology-related fields.  

We also invest in the ongoing professional development of our employees.  Last year we invested $776 million in training and professional development to ensure we have the extensive and differentiated skills that our clients need to solve their toughest business challenges.

What projects and initiatives are you engaged in with the World Economic Forum, and what drove your choice to partner with the Forum on those projects? In what way can business contribute to tackling challenges on the global agenda?

Accenture is a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum and is committed to helping the Forum achieve its mission of engaging business and society in partnership to improve the state of the world.

Accenture has been a member of the Forum for the past 11 years, and has provided strategic and technical expertise to support the Forum's valuable work. In fact, Mark Foster, Accenture’s group chief executive—Management Consulting & Integrated Markets, is the Chairman of the Non Exec Board of the Global Health Initiative (GHI), and I sit on the Forum’s International Business Council that brings together 100 CEOs from leading companies across all industry sectors.

Accenture participates in other Forum initiatives, as well, most notably in support of the GHI. Through the GHI, Accenture has worked in conjunction with the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. We also have played a leading role in the Forum’s Global Corporate Citizen Initiative and projects related to the Global Digital Divide Initiative.

How do you see the world economy evolving in the next 12 to 18 months and how confident are you that the current market volatility will begin to stabilize soon?

The economy has been top-of-mind at most of the recent executive gatherings I’ve attended.  In the US, the executives I speak with say that unless their industry was directly affected by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, they have not seen a significant impact on their business.  In fact, the general sentiment seems to be that we have a good US economy and a great global economy, and that it is important not to confuse Wall Street and Main Street.  For example, if you look at the large industrial companies, their business may be off a bit in the US, but they are making up for any shortfalls through exports or an upswing in their operations outside the US. These companies intend to execute and make their plans at the end of this calendar year, and they are all still optimistic about fiscal 2008. 

Not surprisingly, I have spent time in the past few months answering questions from investors and our employees about the economy.  Accenture is a global company that operates in 49 countries and has a presence in about 100 countries.  From our perspective, the fact that we serve such a diverse set of clients across nearly every industry allows us to stay nimble and flexible in navigating the challenges of different economic cycles. 

That really is the key to what’s ahead:  stay nimble and flexible to react quickly to what may be on the horizon in your industry or in the economies where you operate.

Beyond the rapid growth seen in India and China, which other markets are you watching closely and why?

Accenture is helping our clients understand and navigate the changing economic dynamics of an increasingly global world.  As a result, we are closely watching many markets in addition to China and India.

In 2025, it is anticipated that consumer spending in the six largest emerging economies—China, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and South Korea—will be greater than in the G6, comprising the United States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Italy.

The explosive economic growth already occurring in many of these countries is attracting attention from organizations across all industries. Whether organizations today look to these new markets for customers or talent—or as a competitive challenge—it is clear that globalization is here to stay. Shareholders no longer expect you to be best company in your local market, but the best in your industry worldwide.

When it comes to innovation and technology, organizations doing business in emerging markets have the opportunity to become “game changers.”  We believe that companies in emerging markets will adapt new technologies faster than those in mature economies, giving them an edge. For example, technology has driven China's productivity rate three times higher than the US and other developed countries. With globalization, companies also have an opportunity to leverage high-quality, lower-cost expertise.

Emerging economies are pushing global competition to a new level, and it is imperative that leaders understand the implications to compete on the global stage.

In what ways is your company using new communications channels – blogging, social networking websites etc. – to reach an external or internal audience? Have they forced a rethink of your communications strategy?

Accenture has 170,000 employees in 49 countries so we are continually looking for new and improved ways to reach them. We have begun to adopt new communications tools to enrich collaboration across our organization and better innovate and share knowledge.

For example, we have launched a personalized internal portal which allows our people to customize the information they receive from around the company based on a variety of preferences.  We also created Accenture People, which allows our employees to create a personal webpage to share contact information, biographical details and information about their professional expertise with colleagues around the world. We also have enhanced our discussion boards to include corporate blogs, wikis and videos, enabling people to reach experts faster or raise hot topics for wider discussion. 

We believe these online tools will help our people to strengthen their connections and harness the power of our global network in serving clients around the world.